05.21.07
The Common Medicines Project
In 2005 I was working as a consultant for Copenhagen County (now the Captial Region), getting myself involved in various internal and external it-projects. One of these revolved around the fact that all hospitals were required by law to enhance their EHR systems to report information about medicine given to patients during hospitalization to a central server at the Danish Medicines Agency. The deadline for having implemented this feature was originally set to January 1st. 2007.
At the time there was no common infrastructure for secure communication of information in the Danish health sector, so together with colleagues from the County of Ribe (now Region South) we started working on one. This became what is now known as the SOSI project a pilot, which tries out a single-signon infrastructure for web services with digital certificates. The project has now gone national and is being funded by Danish Regions.
While SOSI was being defined, MedCom was working on a similar project, “Den Gode Webservice†(DGWS). By means of the The National Board of Health, the two projects were brought together and coordinated: The single-signon assets from SOSI made it into DGWS and version 1.0 of the specification was released by MedCom last summer.
Since then, the SOSI project has made it into its final stages complete with a SAML IdP, clients and servers that communicate using DGWS over VPN with OCES digital certificates playing the role of credentials and adding non-repudiating and integrity. Project evalutation is imminent, and SOSI will presumably wrap up later this year.
It won’t disappear, though.
About six months ago, MedCom and The Danish Medical Association held a conference for decision makers with the intent of creating consensus for a national common medicines project (see my post about it). The conference was a huge success. Since then, The Danish Medicines Agency has become the driver of the project with MedCom and a number of other participants paving the road.
The Common Medicines project aims at making medicines information available where needed, when needed in the entire Danish Health Sector. This is done by defining a model for medicines data to be used initially among hospitals, private physicians, pharmacies, and retirement facilities along with web service interfaces, and a communication model, the infrastructure of which is based upon experiences from SOSI.
Though the technical details aren’t entirely completed yet, much work has already been done and the project is about to take off: Four pilot organisations have volunteered to update their systems with the changes required to communicate medicines data. This will be implemented in autumn of 2007 and pilot thu the early months of 2008. With good fortune, all hospitals should then be covered before 2009.
Last week MedCom and The Danish Medicines Agency held a workshop about the Common Medicines Project, and I gave a presentation of the security aspects in context of SOSI and DGWS.
An exciting project indeed!
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