HL7 Europe Discharge Report, published by HL7 Europe. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 1.0.0-ci-build built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/hl7-eu/discharge-report/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions

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Acknowledgment
The development of this Implementation Guide version has been supported by the Xt-EHR Joint Action. Xt-EHR provided expertise, alignment with European health policy priorities, and validation of specifications to enable consistency with EHDS requirements.

Scope

This Implementation Guide specifies a set of rules to be applied to HL7 FHIR to define how to represent a Discharge Report in the European context, as defined by EHDS logical model for the discharge report (EHDSDischargeReport); in accordance with the 'discharge reports' priority category of personal electronic health data listed in by Article 14 of the European Health Data Space Regulation (EHDS).

A Discharge Report summarises the care provided to a patient during a healthcare encounter and the information needed to ensure continuity of care after discharge. The EHDS treats 'discharge reports' as a single priority category, covering any kind of encounter that ends with a discharge, for example a hospital stay, an emergency department visit, a day-care episode, a rehabilitation stay or an ambulatory specialist episode.

Its main goal is to fulfil the requirements of the EHDS logical model by defining the content components and preferred structure by using HL7 FHIR. It is a common framework, intentionally generic, and should be read as the shared baseline for this category rather than a complete specification for every kind of discharge report.

The information needed to report a hospital stay, an emergency department visit or a rehabilitation stay differs in its level of detail, in its sections and in the clinical vocabulary it uses. Real-world implementations are therefore expected to build on this guide through specialisations for the specific kinds of discharge report and care settings, defined at European, national or domain level, rather than to use it as-is for all of them.

This includes both jurisdictional and cross-border scenarios.

This guide doesn't describe how this report is exchanged.

Purpose

The goal of this Implementation Guide is to define a common European specification for the Discharge Report, facilitating harmonisation across national initiatives and laying the groundwork for the European EHR eXchange Format (EEHRxF), by specifying how to exchange personal electronic health data in the priority category of 'discharge reports' listed in Article 14 of the EHDS Regulation.

This project is promoted by HL7 Europe and developed in collaboration with several other European and national organisations and projects.

The aspiration is for this guide to be used as a basis for European and national guides, including those dedicated to specific kinds of discharge report, the European EEHRxF and, consequently, by MyHealth@EU for EU cross-border services.

Background

This guide is part of the group of HL7 FHIR Implementation Guides published by HL7 Europe to support the priority categories identified by the European Health Data Space Regulation (EHDS).

More details about the project background can be found in the background page.