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The first pan-Canadian Projectathon was held from March 21-23, 2022. This page provides introductory information about the approach, participants and requirements.

For information about the Projectathon agenda, daily reports and session webinars, please visit the Schedule: Projectathon 2022 page.

To read the pan-Canadian Projectathon - Final Report, please visit the Projectathons, Prototyping, and Validation page.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The objective of the first pan-Canadian Projectathon was to test and improve the quality of the pan-Canadian Patient Summary Interoperability Specifications (PS-CA Specifications) to ensure they are implementable, testable and meet expectations. The PS-CA supports several implementation patterns including MHD and a new Canadian National integration profile called CA:FeX. The CA:FeX supports saving and retrieving clinical data to and from a central document repository.

The aims of the Projectathon were to identify potential issues in the basic specifications, give implementers a chance to test their implementations in live environments, and strengthen implementation guidelines and standards in the health sector. Infoway views this as a preliminary event before any conformity assessment, quality label or certification process.

Participants

Vendors and jurisdictions who planned to implement the PS-CA Specifications were invited to participate in the Projectathon. In addition, any interested party that has Patient Summaries in their future roadmap were welcome to participate.

Participants of the Projectathon were able to:

Have the opportunity to be an early adopter and an influencer of the final specification;
Gain a better understanding of the expected integration patterns for their products;
Identify dependencies and integration challenges;
Interact with the jurisdictional teams that will ultimately use their products;
Ensure quality for the benefit of clinicians and patients;
Accelerate their readiness for implementation;
Save time and money through a harmonized pan-Canadian approach;
Get familiar with the validation/testing processes and tools; and
Help achieve our collective goals of developing a quality national standard.

Additionally, through participation in the Projectathon, participants were able to prepare for practical applications of the PS-CA Specifications.

Approach

A suite of virtual tools, collectively referred to as Gazelle, were deployed to support the free, 3-day remote testing event from March 21-23, 2022. Gazelle provides vendors an opportunity to validate the role they will be playing in an ecosystem and ensure they are able to satisfy the interoperability requirements. Furthermore, Gazelle offers several self-serve, self-test and innovation opportunities for jurisdictions and vendors to test their alignment to the represented integration profiles.

The Projectathon event was organized by Infoway with support from a world leader organization in the space - IHE Catalyst.

Preparation and Requirements

In preparation for the Projectathon, Infoway and IHE Catalyst:

Hosted training webinars;
Developed a FHIR document viewer;
Deployed an OpenAPI browser for both interface specifications (MHD and CA:FeX);
Developed clinical scenarios that identified the required test data for the Projectathon;
Offered helpdesk support prior to and during the Projectathon; and
Published a report on learnings after the Projectathon.

Participants were required to:

Register for the event
Attend training webinars
Review training materials
Complete pre-Projectathon and connectivity testing
Validate test cases and clinical scenarios
Integrate to Gazelle platform
Create test records
Implement APIs
Prototype FHIR transactions
Prototype the PS-CA FHIR document
Prototype export of FHIR document

Interoperability Specifications

pan-Canadian Patient Summary (PS-CA) The PS-CA Interoperability Bundle is comprised of the following specification documents that may be accessed here.	Revision	Revision date
pan-Canadian Patient Summary Interoperability Specifications (PS-CA Specifications) Implementable and testable specifications, based on the IHE International Patient Summary specification and the HL7 IPS Implementation Guide. Building blocks to create and share condition-independent and specialty-agnostic patient summaries, irrespective of the condition of the patient or the treatment sought or specialty of the provider delivery care.	0.2	January 28, 2022
pan-Canadian Patient Summary – FHIR Implementation Guide Implementable, testable specification for the HL7 FHIR composition that defines the data payload of the PS-CA specification, based on the HL7 FHIR IPS implementation guide. Contains information for solution developers to implement the PS-CA content data model using the HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard. It describes the data elements & types, cardinality, constraints, and code system references.	0.2	January 28, 2022
pan-Canadian Patient Summary - Companion Guide to Use Cases & Definitions Companion document to the PS-CA Specifications that presents the broader context for clinical, business, interoperability and solution development considerations that were discovered during the development of the PS-CA. Defines the healthcare problem that the PS-CA addresses and includes healthcare use cases and interoperability requirements in terms that will be traceable to the content in the pan-Canadian Patient Summary - Companion Guide to Reference Architecture.	0.2	January 28, 2022
pan-Canadian Patient Summary - Companion Guide to Reference Architecture Contains background information on the abstracted PS-CA actors and transactions for the Pan-Canadian Patient Summary Interoperable Specifications, describes baseline information on the recommended IHE profiles, and includes links to the IHE source documentation where stakeholders can get additional details on each PS-CA actor and transaction. Includes descriptions of alternatives and choices for implementation patterns and ecosystem architectures to support the PS-CA in current state, including sequence diagrams that demonstrate the relationship and dependencies between the PS-CA actors and transactions.	0.2	January 28, 2022
pan-Canadian FHIR Exchange (CA:FeX) The CA:FeX specification may be accessed here.	Revision	Revision Date
Addresses standardized sharing of vital patient information for the benefit of health care providers and patients using FHIR based information exchange. Similar to, and accomplishes the same objectives as, a Health Information Exchange (HIE). The first priority of this specification will be to define a document exchange interface for CA:FeX, clearly defining how a FHIR document can be transacted with a Clinical Data Repository.	0.1	January 28, 2022

In addition to the PS-CA Interoperability Bundle, you may wish to review this diagram which provides a high-level view of relevant Integration Profiles to support the PS-CA project. This view contains a superset of profiles that offer alternatives to exchanging Patient Summaries, depending on Jurisdictional service type and availability. Mandatory and optional capability support is described in the sequence diagrams associated with each Use Case analysis.

Registration

Participants were required to register for the Projectathon via the Gazelle test platform. The registration period was open from January 20 - February 21, 2022. A registration webinar was held on January 20, 2022 at 11AM ET. This webinar included an overview of the:

Scope of the Projectathon, including profiles and use cases
Gazelle tool
Registration in Gazelle
How the Projectathon will be organized
Relevant documentation, including specifications and training materials

Click here to register to Gazelle Test Management.

Pre-Projectathon Preparations

For successful participation in the Projectathon, pre-Projectathon tests and connectivity tests are important.

The purpose of the Pre-Projectathon tests are to help vendors:

Test their IHE profile implementation in their system using the virtual systems in Gazelle to find and fix issues;
Improve the quality of their tests prior to the Projectathon; and
Help familiarize themselves with the Gazelle tool prior to the Projectathon, including how to access and use Gazelle simulators to perform the tests.

The Pre-Projectathon Test period was open from February 17 - March 11, 2022. A Pre-Projectathon Test webinar was held on February 17, 2022 at 11AM ET. During this webinar, participants were shown how to access and use Gazelle in order to perform the tests.

The profiles that were tested during the Projectathon were:

Profile	Actor
CA:FeX	Data Source
	Data Consumer
	Data Recipient
	Data Responder
MHD	Document Source
	Document Consumer
	Document Recipient
	Document Responder
PDQm	Patient Demographic Consumer
PIXm	Patient Identifier Cross-reference Consumer
PMIR	Patient Identifier Registry
IUA	Authorization Client
	Resource Server
	Authorization Server (Authorization Broker)
ATNA	Service Node / Service Application (SN/SA)
ATNA	Audit Repository
CT	Time Client
CT	Time Server
XDM	Portable Media Creator
XDM	Portable Media Importer
XDS	Document Source
	Document Consumer
	Document Repository
	Document Registry
SVCM	Terminology Consumer
SVCM	Terminology Repository

In addition to the pre-Projectathon tests, there was a Connectivity Testing period from March 1 - March 11, 2022. The purpose of a Connectivity Testing period is to check, in advance, whether participants' systems are configured and ready to communicate with other vendor systems during the Projectathon event. A Connectivity Testing webinar was held on March 1, 2022 at 11AM ET.

Tools

Gazelle Testing Platform

The pan-Canadian Interoperability Gazelle Platform is available at https://pancanadianIO.ca. From the home page, you may access the documentation for various support tools, test tools, and utilities, by clicking on the respective PDF icon.

Testing Tools

To support participants' Pre-Projectathon testing, the following tools were developed:

An OpenAPI User Interface for the PS-CA APIs, including the MHD and the CA:FeX options
A PS-CA FHIR Renderer used to visualize PS-CA FHIR bundles provided as JSON structured data

A review of these tools was presented during the Overview of Tools Webinar on February 25, 2022 at 11AM ET.

Information Sheets and Videos

Below you will find some information to support registration for the Projectathon:

Get Support

Support Type	Contact Information
Questions, Issues, Comments related to the Projectathon	InfoCentral Collaboration Group for Patient Summaries - Topic: Projectathon March 2022 Support
Training Recordings	https://moodle.pancanadianio.ca
Moodle Account Access	Contact [email protected] with subject line "Projectathon"