Patient Summary Background

A patient summary is defined by ISO/TR 12773-1:2009 (Business Requirements for Health Summary Records) as a “health record extract comprising a standardized collection of clinical and contextual information (retrospective, concurrent, prospective) that provides a snapshot in time of a subject of care’s health information and healthcare.”

A patient summary is not expected to be an exhaustive or comprehensive record of all medical data for that patient. As such, the Alberta Patient Summary would not be used as the mechanism to transfer a patient’s complete medical record from one provider to another, or from one system to another. The Alberta Patient Summary is designed to provide an easily consumable synopsis of the most relevant information, to improve coordination of care across the care team and to inform clinical decision-making throughout the patient’s journey.

A key consideration for the Alberta Patient Summary is that authoring providers will be able to curate the compiled record before submitting or sharing, which will optimize both the quality and the meaningfulness of the information being shared.

Authoring providers will independently submit a patient summary to Alberta Netcare ecosystem. Within that data exchange hub, the contents are validated and may be transformed as needed when publishing to a given consumer class. For publication in the Alberta Netcare Portal, the discrete data will be incorporated into a standardized textual layout and published as a text document (such as a PDF); where it then becomes a key component of the robust and comprehensive clinical data available through the provincial EHR. Alberta Patient Summary (PS-AB) Release 1 includes clinically relevant information about a patient’s health which could be used to inform and support patient care in many clinical settings. Its content was selected from the International Patient Summary standard in consultation with clinicians, to best represent the scope of responsibility for data contributions from an authoring clinician.