Introduction

The pan-Canadian Patient Summary Interoperability Specification is an implementable, testable specification, based on the IHE International Patient Summary (IPS) specification and the HL7 IPS Implementation Guide. It defines 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 delivering care. PS-CA building blocks are configurable to address necessary Canadian jurisdictional variances. A patient summary is a health record extract, at a point in time, comprised of a standardized collection of clinical and contextual information (retrospective, concurrent, prospective), including the minimum necessary and sufficient data to inform a patient's treatment at the point of care.

The  PS-CA specifications, written in line with international best practices, contain the information necessary for an implementer to consume and develop the components necessary for creating, consuming and sharing a Patient Summary and may be applied to existing and new information systems.

Intended Audience

The intended audience of this document includes but is not limited to:  

• Those interested in integrating healthcare information systems and workflows
• IT departments of healthcare institutions
• Technical staff of vendors participating in the IHE initiative
• Experts involved in standards development
• Software developers 

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to address the following functionality for release 1:

• Address three PS-CA use cases,
• Provide a detailed set of requirements (including Actors, Transactions and References to specific profiles and standards),
• Describe the implementation patterns that enable the exchange of the PS-CA, and
• Describe the set of requirements that complement the set of IHE Profiles, pan-Canadian Interoperability Specifications (e.g. CA:FeX), and HL7 FHIR® Profiles required by the PS-CA specifications with Canadian-specific constraints.