The Standard

HL7, in collaboration with the Argonaut Project, is excited to announce the launch of a new website dedicated to the International Patient Access (IPA) standard:ipa.hl7.org. This site is designed to provide a central resource for healthcare organizations, policymakers and patients to understand, implement and support patient-controlled access to health data using the HL7® FHIR® standard.

A Milestone for Global Interoperability

IPA is a global standard aimed at empowering patients with access to their health records across different systems and countries. By defining a minimal yet meaningful set of FHIR-based profiles, IPA ensures that applications can seamlessly retrieve patient data regardless of geographic or system-specific differences.

The new website serves as a hub for information about IPA adoption, implementation guidance and ongoing development efforts. It provides insights into how healthcare systems worldwide can enable secure, authorized access to patient records through standardized APIs, reducing barriers to interoperability.

HL7 FHIR empowers patients to access health data with third-party apps in a growing number of countries. As nations, locales and regulators across the world look to increase their citizens’ access to health data through third-party apps, they naturally turn to FHIR. The International Patient Access (IPA) standard aims to enable regulators, empower patients, guide app developers, and promises greater consistency across countries for multinational apps and FHIR servers.

• For patients, greater access to health data empowers them to standardly and computably access and retain their digital health data.

• For regulators and national specification authors, the IPA specification provides a starting point to jumpstart a national health API ecosystem, with an emphasis on patient access. The IPA FHIR profiles are the result of an analysis of existing national base profiles, and is the lowest common denominator globally.

• For app developers, IPA outlines the global base set of access and security mechanisms and content format. This increases the size of the addressable market for apps, both in terms of geography and of systems.

• For systems vendors, IPA defines a base set of functionality, enabling less adaptation and custom work when the system is deployed to a new market. More apps and other systems are readily interoperable with the system.
  
• For healthcare systems, adoption of IPA means less expensive and more robust systems, as fewer market-specific customizations are required. Support of IPA will also enable healthcare systems access to a wide ecosystem of interoperable apps.