Updated: Aug 26, 1998
This is the most recent structured information on this project. Complementary data can be found on previous documents
SYNAPSES Federated healthcare record server

Overview

Synapses addresses these requirements for seamless healthcare by proposing a standard for a Federated Healthcare Record Server. This server provides integrated views on the patient record, in principle, wherever and in whatever format the components of the source patient record are stored.

Purpose and objectives

The aim of Synapses is to provide client applications with a view of the patient record, where the record or parts of a record have been obtained from other information systems (referred to as feeder systems) storing or generating relevant healthcare information. At the heart of the Synapses is a server which is responsible for receiving and interpreting requests from the clients, decomposing them into appropriate requests to individual feeder systems, receiving and combining the results into a single integrated response at the client side. The aim is that the server presents the record or component of the record in a standardised form to the client applications, irrespective of the underlying record architecture used in the connected information systems. In addition, servers adhering to the Synapses standard are then potentially enabled to interoperate and hence to share records over enterprise-wide networks and allow hospital to hospital or transnational exchange of patient records.

Though usability is decided in terms of applications, the emphasis in Synapses is on facilitating data sharing between specialist feeder systems via the server, rather than on integrating the specialist systems that supply or use the data.

In order to share information components automatically, it is necessary not only to agree on common protocols for the exchange of information, but also to ensure that the exchange is meaningful i.e. that the participants share a common understanding. In the context of Synapses, which takes an object-oriented view of the Federated Healthcare Record, this means that it is therefore essential to adopt common standards for the definitions of the objects to be exchanged between feeder systems and clients via the server. This common set of definition of shareable healthcare objects constitutes the Synapses object dictionary and it lies at the heart of the server driving the interaction between clients, feeders and the server. The objects in the dictionary are in turn mapped onto those data representations used in the synapsed feeder systems, where the data itself is physically stored. For this mapping to be both implementable and unambiguous, the dictionary must be based on a rigorous common object model or formalism, known as the Synapses common object model.

Synapses aims to achieve an adoptable standard and has therefore based its work on the major efforts in Europe on record architectures, namely the work of CEN TC/251 WG1 in its project team PT011 represented in the pre-standard ENV12265 and GEHR (Good European Heathcare Record), a 3rd Framework project. The Synapses project has therefore reviewed carefully ENV12265 and the work of GEHR and has made such modifications or extensions as have been deemed necessary to meet the needs of a Federated Healthcare Record. This process has brought in additional insights from those users not heretofore involved in record architectures and has provided what is essentially a further validation aspect to the work of the project. In many respects, this is the most crucial task within the project, as Synapses is in effect sampling the views of the community on how to proceed with the work on Electronic Healthcare Records (EHCRs).

Thus the main feature of the implementation plan for Synapses is the importance of ensuring a rigorous and extensive validation of the specification using a variety of different technologies. The strategy of having multiple implementations, therefore, is one designed to provide the best coverage of potential platforms and computing environments.

Results

List of deliverables

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

List of participants

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