Cross-Border Interoperability for Travelling Patients: A Proposal for Italian and American Patients

This paper describes how information and communication technology (ICT) can facilitate continuity of care for people travelling in foreign countries or on foreign continents. A possible solution is to share the Patient Summary, a clinical document containing information on the health status of the patient. Intercontinental sharing of this document would be easier if the Patient Summary were digitised and based on international standards of interoperability. A number of projects have been developed to create the Patient Summary as a digitallystructured document, and to share it on regional, national, European Union (EU) or American levels. However, there is no current infrastructure or infostructure capable of supporting intercontinental document sharing and implementation in the short term that will give immediate results. An initial experiment with the sharing of the Patient Summary, based on interoperability between physicians in distant countries with a high volume of reciprocal tourism, can bevundertaken in Italy and the United States of America (USA),vtwo countries that are currently experiencing an increase in tourism.