About the Nordic Health Information Partnership

The Nordic Health Information Partnership is the cooperation of the pharmaceutical product compendia of the Nordic countries: Medicin.dk (Denmark), Pharmaca (Finland), Felleskatalogen (Norway), and FASS (Sweden).

Nordic FHIR ePI

The four compendia have launched a joint project to supply electronic package leaflets (ePIL) in the Nordic languages for the testing scenarios of Gravitate Health. The structured, electronic package leaflets are taken from the compendia's internal repositories, converted from their proprietary formats to a common standard based on HL7 FHIR, and delivered through a shared repository to Gravitate Health. The use of HL7 FHIR, an established international standard for data exchange format, reduces the implementation effort needed for Gravitate Health's end-user applications and helps to achieve consistent handling of the content across languages, and at the same time prepares the software ecosystem for consuming the future FHIR ePIs from EMA.

The common Nordic standard that each Nordic ePIL is expected to conform to is represented in computable form as a FHIR implementation guide (IG). The project's IG documents the resource profiles, code systems, and value sets, building on the HL7 Vulcan Accelerator's global Electronic Medicinal Product Information (ePI) FHIR Implementation Guide, with the stated goal of being compatible with the electronic package leaflets that are expected to be available from the EMA ePI pilot system.

While the project scope is limited to the package leaflets used by Gravitate Health for testing scenarios, the conversion and cooperation gives the compendia the opportunity to explore the emerging European common standard for ePI, and to give feedback into the development of the standard based on implementer experience. Knowledge of, and contribution to the development of the standard can strengthen the compendia's position as the future distribution channel of the electronic package leaflets, both for human and machine consumption.

Nordic FHIR data exchange

The Nordic compendia already have some established interfaces for data exchange, both with each other and with various private and public partners in the Nordic countries. Most of these interfaces are developed for certain integrations and use structures developed for specific use cases. Cooperation in a project based on HL7 FHIR has the potential to facilitate transitioning these APIs toward standardized data exchange, in alignment with development trends in the industry and regulatory authorities.

Experience with standardization and engagement with the HL7 community can encourage each compendium to participate in the work done by national HL7 affiliates, such as the creation of national or Nordic base profiles, and in the larger regional or international HL7 organizations.

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