July 2, 2024
One of the world’s largest digital health vendors, Epic®, today announced support for the International Patient Summary (IPS) scheduled for release in May of 2025. Epic joins a growing group of large multi-national providers of digital health solutions in recognizing the increasing demand for IPS implementations.
The Epic announcement was preceded by a soft launch at the April 25th meeting of the Global Digital Health Partnership (GDHP), an organization that currently represents 39 national digital health agencies, Ministries of Health, and key international organizations in actively encouraging and supporting IPS adoption around the globe.
Epic’s initial plans include support for the HL7/FHIR IPS Implementation Guide within their CareEverywhere® health information exchange platform, which is extensively in use across North America as well as within Europe and Asia-Pacific regions. It is expected that this new capability will dramatically increase the availability of patient summary information at many points of care around the globe. Epic has also announced that FHIR will become a primary means of information exchange in the coming years, and that IPS is a first step in that journey.
Initially Epic plans to support several core elements of the IPS specification (ISO 27269), including problems, allergies, medications and immunizations, with other IPS data to be added over time. They plan to use the “summary” operation (as defined in the IPS FHIR Implementation Guide) to produce IPS documents through an application programming interface (API). In addition, Epic has agreed to work closely with HL7 and the other standards development organizations (SDO’s) that are actively collaborating to produce a suite of standards artefacts to support IPS. We look forward to hearing more details about their work and planned IPS implementation in the coming months, and will share additional information when available. For further information, contact John D’Amore or Mike Nusbaum.