The GCS e-Santé Bretagne, a grouping that deploys e-health services and support to Breton healthcare professionals, and Kereval, an expert in software testing, are collaborating on a regional project to improve the interoperability of healthcare software and contribute to the national Ma Santé 2022* plan and the digital component of the Ségur de la santé. The ultimate goal: to improve patient care and monitoring through better cooperation between healthcare professionals in the service of patients. They will work on optimizing the management of the patient’s circle of care by the various stakeholders, an innovative aspect not yet covered in the Health Information Systems Interoperability Framework (CI-SIS) piloted by the French Digital Health Agency (ANS). For the first time, the ANS has delegated the development of this type of work to the regional level and has designated the GCS e-Santé Bretagne, which relies on Kereval. The GCS e-Santé Bretagne brings its business contacts and its field experience and Kereval its expertise in the field of interoperability and its mastery of e-health documentation.

This project has attracted the interest of the Brittany Region, which is providing financial support.

This initiative responds to a request from the actors of the health territories of Brittany who expressed the need to define and share the circle of care of a person.
This circle brings together a group of people, professionals and structures involved in the care of the person in the health, medico-administrative, medico-social and social fields.

The GCS e-Santé Bretagne and Kereval have worked together to develop functional and technical documentation for this use case. These documentations are available on the ANS website in the CI-SIS publication area and will be updated soon after a public consultation. The Kereval team is developing the conformity and interoperability test tools to test the relevance of the documentations and their correct implementation in the systems. Editors will have the opportunity to validate this new circle of care management functionality during a projectathon, an event dedicated to testing the interoperability of e-health software editors.

In 2022, the NHA is planning a national projectathon on several use cases, including Circle of Care Management, to allow software vendors and publishers to conduct their interoperability tests. These full-scale tests will verify that the systems are developed according to the published specifications. This is a unique opportunity that will allow them to accelerate the development and integration of their solutions. Professional users will benefit from software applications that interact in an optimal way.

“This regional initiative is, I hope, the first of many that will contribute to the acceleration of the digital shift in health and medico-social in Brittany, and will allow Kereval to boost its development”, enthuses Abdelmoula Tamoudi, CEO of Kereval.

This project also contributes to strengthening the mastery and increased use of the new international standard FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) by Kereval, which is developing the international interoperability testing platform, Gazelle, in partnership with the international federation IHE-Europe. Since September 2020, this platform has been used and made available to health information system publishers by the ANS to enable them to verify the compliance of their solutions with the CI-SIS interoperability repositories.

The interoperability of IT software is now a requirement, as set out in the latest Social Security financing law published in the Official Journal on December 15, 2020. It is now a major challenge for the digital transformation of healthcare in France.

• Ma Santé 2022
  Announced in September 2018 by the President of the Republic, the Ma santé 2022 strategy proposes an overall vision and comprehensive responses to the challenges facing the French healthcare system

MaSanté2022: the main measures of the digital component | esante.gouv.fr

Interoperability in e-health and its benefits

In e-health, interoperability is essential for the exchange and sharing of data between different applications, and it promotes and facilitates coordination between healthcare professionals. It saves time and avoids data entry errors. It therefore contributes to improving the quality of care.