CEN TC 251/ISO TC 215 Health Informatics NORMAPME mirror committee

This is the NORMAPME Mirror Committee for CEN TC 251 on e-health, and for ISO 215 on e-health. The Mirror Committee is the group of SMEs that support the NORMAPME expert in presenting the views of SMEs during the drafting of standard.

The objective of CEN TC 251 is to ensure the following:

• suppliers, purchasers and implementers of information systems and devices to be used in healthcare have clarity as to the standards they should adopt to enable interoperability;


• national advisory organisations have clarity as to the standards they should adopt to enable interoperability;


• the standards meet the need of the market;


• market requirements are met.

Healthcare very often occurs in an SME and local environment , that it be in clinics, laboratories, ambulances, pharmacies, nursing care or in companies producing specific medical devices. E-health is a sector of standardisation which is still under early development. It is bound to have an impact on all SMEs in the health sector, that the SMEs be manufacturers or users. There is no precise figure at the moment of the number of SMEs in health or of health workers in Europe: as stressed in DG Sanco's "Green paper on the EU Workforce for Health", published on the 10th of December 2008, there is a lack of Europe-wide information on health workers and of "up-to-date, comparable data and information (...) on numbers of health workers" (http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_systems/docs/workforce_gp_en.pdf)

Despite the lack of clear figures, and as SMEs in e-health can be manufacturers, installers, service providers, users, etc, the potential impact of interoperability standards in e-health on SMEs is high, both for inclusion in future systems and on a cost basis.

The work of TC 251 is in the frame of the joint project "eHEALTH-INTEROP" of CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, a project mandated by the European Commission. The three European Standards Organisations (ESOs), CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, accepted mandate 403 from the European Commission in March 2007. M/403 aims to provide a consistent set of standards
to address the needs of the rapidly-evolving field of eHealth for the benefit of future healthcare provision.

M/403 can be found at http://www.etsi.org/website/document/aboutetsi/ec_mandates/m403_en.pdf

The work of the CEN TC 251 is coordinated with the work of ISO TC 215 under the Vienna Agreement.

Important discussion documents, such as draft standards, can be found under [All documents]. The group forum is where Mirror Committee members can discuss work in progress.

If you wish to download and read the documents posted here, or participate in the forum discussion, you will need to register (Go to "Update your profile">My Mirror Committee>I would like to register to the following mirror committees. Once we have evaluated your profile, you will be granted acces to the information and discussions in the mirror committee

This Mirror Committee is managed by NORMAPME expert Mr Martin Prager (prager@prager.at) from Ubit / Wkö, and by Elisabeth Tryselius (e.tryselius@normapme.com).