Scope

As expressed in the introduction, the International Patient Summary is:

• a minimal and non-exhaustive patient summary,
• specialty-agnostic,
• condition-independent,
• but readily usable by clinicians for cross-border unscheduled care of a patient. In this context, minimal and non-exhaustive means that an IPS is not intended to reproduce (the entire) content of an Electronic Health Record (EHR).

Specialty-agnostic means that an IPS is not filtered for a specialty. As an example, allergies are not filtered to the specialty of internal medicine, thus may also include food allergies, if considered to be relevant for, e.g. unplanned care.

Condition-independent means that an IPS is not specific to particular conditions, and focuses on the patient current condition(s).

Furthermore the scope of the IPS is global. Although this is a major challenge, this implementation guide takes various experiences and newer developments into account to address global feasibility as far as possible.