As part of our work with the Norwegian Health Archive (NHA) and Eark, Piql is pleased to announce that our Content Information Type Specification for eHealth1, Patient Medical Records, procedures and guidelines have now been approved and published by the Digital Information LifeCycle Interoperability Standards Board (DILCIS) Board.

DILCIS Board is an international group of experts committed to maintain and sustain digital preservation standards for all types of information, setting best practice for information archival, handling and access.

A huge volume of historical patient medical records exists at hospitals and other care providers in both physical and digital form. The storage of these legacy archives can cause major problems for care providers, but they also hold enormous potential value for the transparency of patients’ healthcare history and as sources of historical data for medical research.

The eHealth1 specification, developed by Piql, is now proposing a new standard for electronically extracting health records from healthcare providers’ electronic medical records systems for submission to a central health archive. This includes digitisation of physical records, archiving of aged data from online systems and construction of centralised repositories that can be mined for valuable information.

The new standard also allows for records to be provided to next of kin in compliance with open information regulation as well as harvesting the vast amount of historical healthcare-related data for medical research. Importantly, the specification recommends the use of international domain standards for descriptive metadata, to ensure the files are enriched and compliant with E-ARK standards and built on their common specifications.

The documents are available on the DILCIS Board website, to assist archivists achieve best practice for digital preservation of health data.