HL7 Europe Foundation

The European Office of HL7

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HL7 International established HL7 Europe, its European Office, as a private foundation in Brussels in June 2010 to support its mission in creating HL7 standards and frameworks that are widely and easily used enabling interoperability in healthcare, also serving the specific needs of the European community and its national HL7 affiliates.

Specifically, HL7 Europe supports the mission of HL7 international through activities focused in cross-border eHealth interoperability in the wider European region by:

• promoting the use of the HL7 framework and protocol specifications
• encouraging the use of the HL7 framework and protocol specifications by health systems and service providers
• Seeking formal accreditation for these HL7 protocol specifications where necessary
• generally, promoting high quality, cost-effective use of information systems in the widest variety of health and healthcare related environments.

Moreover, HL7 Europe may notably contribute directly or indirectly, in collaboration with HL7 affiliates and other stakeholders to the development and adoption of HL7 standards and frameworks:

• Work with International and European Organizations and establish partnerships
• Mobilize resources from the public, private, and philanthropic sectors
• Participate in EU funded programs
• Run campaigns, organize conferences, seminars and fora
• Contribute to and conduct research and studies
• Publish and promote all documentation relating to the use of the framework and protocol specifications developed by HL7 who shall exercise all applicable copyrights to said materials.
• Support and contribute to clinical trials.

The work of HL7 has been recognized by the academic community as notable development of the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) has been published in accredited journals.

HL7 Europe aims to further mobilize the European community to contribute to these from a European perspective, enabling in collaboration with affiliates easy and consistent implementation.

HL7 Europe has participated in a number of projects co-funded by the European Commission:

• Semantic Healthnet "Semantic Interoperability for Health Network" (2011-2015), EC
• SEHGovIA "Supporting the European eHealth Governance Initiative and Action", PI for HL7 Europe, 2011-2014
• Trillium Bridge "Bridging Patient Summaries across the Atlantic" (2013-2015) EC 7th Framework Program
• Antilope "Adoption and take up of standards and profiles for eHealth Interoperability", (2013-2015) 
• AssessCT "Assessing SNOMED CT for Large Scale eHealth Deployments in the EU" (2015-2016)
• OpenMedicine (2015-2016)
• EXPAND "Expanding Health Data Interoperability Services" (2015-2016) EC, Competitiveness and Innovation Program,
• eStandards "eHealth Standards and Profiles in Action for Europe and Beyond" (2015-2017)
• Trillium II "Trillium Bridge II - Reinforcing the Bridges and Scaling up EU/US Cooperation on Patient Summary" (2017-2019)
• Gravitate Healt "Empowering and Equipping Europeans with health information for Active Personal Health Management and Adherence to Treatment" (2020-2025), EC Horizon2020, Innovative Medicine Initiative 2
• UNICOM "Up-scaling the global univocal identification of medicines" (2019-2023)
• Gatekeeper "Smart Living Homes – Whole interventions demonstrator for people at health and social risks" (2019-2023), EC Horizon2020
• FAIR4Health "Improving Health Research in EU through FAIR Data" (2018-2021), EC Horizon2020
• PanCareSurPass "PanCare studies of the scale-up and implementation of the digital Survivorship Passport to improve people-centred care for childhood cancer survivors", (2021-2025) EC Horizon2020
• X-eHealth "eXchanging electronic Health Records in a commom framework" (2020-2022), EC Horizon2020
• WHO - ITU mHealth Hub in EU, mHealthHub (2020-2022)

HL7 Europe also serves in advisory capacity to the following initiatives:

• PharmaLedger (2020-2022) EC Horizon2020, Inovative Medicines Initiative 2, 2018
• InteropEHRate "Interoperable EHRs at user edge" (2020-2022)
• NFDI4Health, German project on the management of scientific data for health

Through those projects and its participation in the eHealth Stakeholders group of the Health and Aging Well Unit of DG Connect, participation in the JIC, and a formal relation to CEN/TC251, HL7 Europe aims to engage the HL7 community in further advancing eHealth interoperability standards in Europe and Worldwide.

HL7 Europe is governed through its Board of Directors, which for 2020-2022 are:

• Christof Gessner, Germany
• William Edward Hammond, PhD, United States
• Jens Kristian Villadsen, Denmark
• Henrique Manuel Gil Martins, MD, PhD, MLaw, FIAHSI, Portugal
• Anne Moen, RN, PhD, Norway
• Line Andreassen Saele, Norway
• Julia Lynn Skapik, MD, United States
• Robert Arjen Stegwee, PhD, The Netherlands
• Walter Gustavo Suarez, MD, United States, Ex Officio  
• Giorgio Cangioli, PhD, Italy
• Catherine Chronaki, Greece
• Mark Mc Dougall, United States
• Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD United States