PEPA (Personal Cross-Enterprise Health Record)

The objective of this project is the implementation of a personal cross-enterprise electronic patient health record (PEHR) and the ongoing development of the PEPA concept.  It facilitates regional communication between all health services / health care providers involved in a patient’s treatment. It combines benefits of a pure physician-controlled cross-enterprise electronic patient record (e.g. Med.Netz.Nord) along with the benefits of electronic health records, while the patients hold the responsibility to control the access rights as well as the contents. The PEPA approach enables patients to administer their data with the help of access rights management, besides ensuring high quality and completeness of the data that emerges directly from the primary systems of the service providers. The primary systems are integrated using international standards such as HL7 and DICOM. Furthermore, IHE-Profiles are also used. This ensures compatibility with the telematics infrastructure besides avoiding the new data islands. Additional health care providers are connected to PEPA through appropriate adapters, thereby avoiding media interruptions in cross-enterprise communication. This enables cost reduction by reducing the number of examinations needed for the patients as well saves the time for patients by cutting down on the missing file searches.