ISO 13606-1:2008 specifies the communication of part or all of the electronic health record (EHR) of a single identified subject of care between EHR systems, or between EHR systems and a centralized EHR data repository.
It may also be used for EHR communication between an EHR system or repository and clinical applications or middleware components (such as decision support components) that need to access or provide EHR data, or as the representation of EHR data within a distributed (federated) record system.
ISO 13606-1:2008 will predominantly be used to support the direct care given to identifiable individuals, or to support population monitoring systems such as disease registries and public health surveillance. Use of health records for other purposes such as teaching, clinical audit, administration and reporting, service management, research and epidemiology, which often require anonymization or aggregation of individual records, are not the focus of ISO 13606-1:2008 but such secondary uses might also find this document useful.