What is ISO 12967-1 — Health informatics service architecture about?
ISO 12967-1 provides guidance and requirements for the description, planning, and development of new systems, as well as for the integration of existing information systems, both within one enterprise and across different healthcare organizations.
ISO 12967-1 integrates through an architecture integrating the common data and business logic into a specific architectural layer, distinct from individual applications and accessible throughout the whole information system through services.
ISO 12967-1 is the first part of an international standard that uses the language and notations for specifying the architecture are based on UML (Unified Modelling Language) complemented by case studies and other paradigms widely utilized by other standards in health informatics.
Note: The architecture in ISO 12967-1 is intrinsically compatible, complementary, and synergistic with other models and standards, such as HL7 CDA, HL7 FHIR, ISO 13940:2015 (Contsys), and ISO 13606. Specific information objects and services are explicitly foreseen in the architecture to facilitate the implementation of views and communication mechanisms based on such standards.
Who is ISO 12967-1— Health informatics service architecture for?
ISO 12967-1 on health informatics service architecture is useful for:
- Public Health care organizations
- Nursing organizations
- Data analysis companies for hospitals
- Medical and biomedical organizations
- Bioinformatics companies
Why should you use ISO 12967-1— Health informatics service architecture?
According to the integration objectives at the organizational level, all aspects (i.e. clinical, organizational, and managerial) of the healthcare structure should be supported by the architecture. It should therefore be able to comprise all relevant information and all business workflows, structuring them according to criteria and paradigms independent from specific sectorial aspects, temporary requirements, or technological solutions.
ISO 12967-1 aims to achieve integration through a unified and open architecture, based on middleware, which is independent of specific applications. It is capable of integrating common data and business logic as well as of making them available to diverse, multi-vendor applications through many types of deployment.
ISO 12967-1 describes architecture according to the methodology of ISO/IEC 10746, to provide users with a formal, comprehensive, and non-ambiguous specification suitable to serve as a reference in the planning, design, and implementation of healthcare information systems.
ISO 12967-1 comprises an architecture that supports the activities of the healthcare organization as a whole, from the clinical, organizational, and managerial point of view. It, therefore, does not detail specificities of different subdomains but provides an overarching comprehensive information and services framework to accommodate requirements.
What’s changed since the last update?
BS EN ISO 12967-1:2020 supersedes BS EN ISO 12967‑1:2011, which is withdrawn. BS EN ISO 12967-1:2020 includes some technical changes with respect to the previous edition:
- Reference to further standards, such as HL7 and FHIR, updates to the Bibliography
- Addition of abstraction layers supplementing the viewpoint descriptions
- Introduction of example functions from ISO/HL7 10781 supporting the use case examples of BS EN ISO 12967-1:2020
- Addition of Annex C, Cross-Domain Interoperability, in line with the current (2020) ongoing ISO Interoperability and Integration Reference Architecture standardization initiative
