Viewing an IPS Document

Many people reading this post will be aware of the International Patient Summary (IPS) Implementation Guide that describes a consistent set of key clinical data such as Medications, Allergies and significant conditions for use as a concise summary of a person’s health status when seeing an unfamiliar provider. It is widely used internationally, and even has its own website. 

There are a number of important things about the IPS (apart from the fact that it is globally usable).

Firstly, it defines the key aspects of a health record Clinicians need when treating a patient they are not familiar with – things like usual medications, any allergies (or a specific affirmation that there are none), important conditions and so forth.

And secondly, it defines these aspects in a way that is not only human readable, but also capable of updating an Electronic Health Record by defining specific codes for the elements, and the capacity to include specific resources such as MedicationStatement, Condition and AllergyIntolerance.

In this post, we’ll use the clinFHIR Bundle Viewer to take a look inside an IPS document and review those resources. We’ll note in passing that you could also use the Patient Viewer to view the bundle – it has a very similar display, but less technically focussed – no validation for example – so more suited to the business or clinical viewer.