The Athens Digital Health Week activities kicked off today, in the Royal Olympic Hotel in Athens, with the first X-Bundle retreat of the xShare project. This project aims to create the xShare button and the associated industry label that will allow everyone to get their data in a machine-readable interoperable format, the European electronic health record exchange format (EHRxF). The EHRxF allows citizens to quickly access and share their health data with healthcare professionals within the EU under the future European Health Data Space regulation. The X-Bundle retreat also brought in key participants from the XpanDH project, that has originated the notion of an X-Bundle to advance the EHRxF by aggregation of the required interoperability assets and create an ecosystem around the European EHRxF to prepare the ground for the European Health Data Space (EHDS).

The X-Bundle retreat brought together more than 20 representatives of standards developing organizations [CEN/TC 251, HL7 Europe, SNOMED International, CDISC, and IHE Europe] with competence centers, ISCTE, MEDIQ, FORTH, Digital Health Slovakia, and DIGITALEUROPE. The key question addressed were firstly, what are the available content, service and adoption components of X-Bundles for the different priority categories of electronic health data mentioned in the EHDS, namely, Patient Summaries, ePrescriptions/ eDispensations, Laboratory reports, Imaging Reports, and Hospital Discharge Reports. The discussion will continue during the week and will conclude on Friday with a first draft of the Annual plan for the European EHRxF Standards and Policy Hub. This Hub will function as a single point of contact for information on the EHRxF, including X-Bundles, and references to external sources of information.

The Commission Recommendation on a European Electronic Health Record exchange format (C(2019)800) of 6 February 2019 sets out a framework for the development of EHRxF to achieve secure, interoperable, cross-border access to, and exchange of, electronic health data in the Union. The recommendation comes to support the upcoming EHDS regulation.