To efficiently implement e-Health to meet the rising needs of mobile citizens, patients and providers, its fragmented interoperability initiatives must come together and coordinate with the increasing need to link clinical data to information from basic biological sciences and evidence of best clinical practice. Considering the need for interoperability at the Member State and cross-border level of the European Union - as expressed in the EU e-Health Action Plan - and for global interoperability - as represented by WHO - it is necessary to embark on a process that will prompt the divergent initiatives to join forces for the benefit of all citizens.

This SemanticHEALTH SSA develops a European and global roadmap for RESEARCH in health-ICT, focusing on semantic interoperability issues of e-Health systems and infrastructures. The roadmap will be based on consensus of the RESEARCH community, and validated by stakeholders, industry and Member State health authorities. It

identifies key short-term (2-5 years) and medium-term (4-10 years) RESEARCH needs to achieve semantic interoperability of e-Health systems (including issues of nomenclatures presently in use, classifications, terminologies, ontologies, EHR and messaging models, public health and secondary uses, and decision support, their relationships, mapping needs, limitations)

analyses unsolved RESEARCH issues arising in the context of realistic approaches to priority clinical and public health settings (reflecting on models of use, benefits expected, concrete application experience and lessons learned; relevance of open source model)

takes into account the impact of non-technological (health policy, legal, socio-economic) aspects

reflects and integrates results of related FP6 (e-Health ERA, I2-Health and other) studies.