TC eHEALTH

Developing technical standards in the eHEALTH domain to ensure interoperability, efficiency, security, privacy and safety in the provision of health services worldwide.

ETSI’s Technical Committee on eHealth (TC eHEALTH) co-ordinates ETSI activities in the eHealth ICT domain.

TC eHEALTH is committed to the creation of a standards-based market for ICT enabled health. The standards and reports produced by the committee promote a climate of innovation, where the content of the technical standards underpin assurance of interoperability, efficiency, security, privacy and safety in the provision of health services worldwide.

Global health care can be improved by the practical application of technology, and particularly of communications technology. Innovation through standardisation is essential in bringing stakeholders together to achieve consensual access to this market by both existing stakeholders and new developers.

Technical standards offer an effective way to ensure levels of excellence that are expected in a new age of patient-centric medical care.

Key areas of work

Security of systems and data

In close collaboration with ETSI’s TC DATA and TC CYBER, and increasingly with ETSI TC SAI, the aim of TC eHEALTH is to ensure that any data upon which a health or medical decision is made has proof of provenance. The common security principles of least privilege and least persistence are applied to eHealth with particular care paid to the necessity of enabling lifetime access to patient data where who needs to have access at any time is unknown. In addition the many roles played by patient data are considered to ensure healthcare is prioritised with full audit of how data is used (i.e. a patient exists in the wider context of societal and familial health).

Quality of services

Alongside security aspects, a further key aspect of eHealth is data quality. Irrespective of its provenance, poor quality data presents potential risks to patients and other parties. Thus the intent in TC eHEALTH is to identify metrics to be able to be applied to data and services that give assurance to the recipient of the data or service that is meets an agreed quality mark.

Interoperability and validation by testing

TC eHEALTH endorses the engineering maxim that a claim without proof by testing is hearsay. In this respect TC eHEALTH works with ETSI’s TC MTS (experts in testing) to ensure that any requirement stated in an ETSI deliverable from the group is tested with clear pass/fail criteria. Where necessary TC eHEALTH will run Plugtests interoperability events to ensure the validity of requirements.

Usability

Any health data or service must be usable by its intended user. In this regard TC eHEALTH works with ETSI’s SC USER and TC HF committees to ensure eHEALTH is consistent with the state of the art.

What we do

TC eHEALTH is responsible for coordinating ETSI’s activities in the eHealth domain, identifying gaps where further standardisation activities might be required and addressing those gaps which are not the responsibility of other ETSI bodies.

TC eHEALTH has primary responsibility to:
- Collect and define Health ICT related requirements from relevant stakeholders and to input the requirements to the concerned ETSI Technical Bodies.
- Identify gaps, where existing ETSI standards do not fulfil health ICT requirements, and suggest further standardisation activities to fill those gaps.
- Develop Health ICT related deliverables in all areas not covered by existing system specific and horizontal Technical Bodies or other SDOs.
- Ensure the co-ordination of Health ICT related activities with the relevant ETSI Technical Bodies in order to avoid duplication of effort and deliverables.
- Ensure that activities within TC eHEALTH are co-ordinated with other European and International Standards making bodies to avoid duplication of effort.
- Co-ordinate and represent ETSI positions on Health ICT related issues.
TC eHEALTH published two ETSI White Papers ‘The argument in favour of eHealth standardization in ETSI‘ (September 2018) & ‘The role of SDOs in developing standards for ICT to mitigate the impact of a pandemic’ (May 2020) and a Technical Report [TR 103 477 V1.3.1 (2023-01)] on ‘Standardization use cases for eHealth’. TC eHEALTH co-operates in ETSI in areas including Pandemic Monitoring (Contact Tracing), IoT Security, Privacy, Safety and SAREF mapping to eHealth developments.

TC eHEALTH is responsible for the maintenance of the GS/GR published by the closed ISG E4P that developed a framework and consistent set of specifications for proximity tracing systems, to enable the development of applications and platforms, and to facilitate international interoperability and expects to re-address these items in 2026 to ensure they meet the expectations set out by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

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