Combining EPCglobal and HL7 to deploy innovative ehealth services for patients affected by multiple intolerances

ICT technologies are going to play more and more a fundamental role in the healthcare scenario. They aim to implement innovative e-health services able to improve patient safety and quality of care. Particular attention is focused on patients affected by multiple intolerances. This people struggle every day to perform elementary actions such as the choice of food and/or drugs because of the adverse reactions that particular components could cause if taken. New item-level tracing systems based on RFID and EPCglobal are very important and able to face these problems but they do not represent yet a complete solution. In fact, a very interesting challenge in the e-healthcare field is currently focused on the combining of tracing systems with hospital information systems, compliant to HL7 (Health Level Seven). In this paper, a prototypal ICT system able to support medical and nutritional applications, based on the combining of the two different standards EPCglobal and HL7, is shown exploiting a concrete case study in the immunology field. Potential benefits, derived from new e-health services for the main actors (e.g. doctors, pharmacists, patients, etc.), are discussed in order to define attractive future research works.