ABOUT PHAST
PHAST,
leading national interoperability provider
An introduction to PHAST
In 1996, PHAST has built up the first French standard dedicated to hospital medication flows. Since then, PHAST has worked to standardize health data exchanges and has gathered the highest level of expertise and experience in semantic interoperability.
Its ambition is driven by two missions :
- CONTRIBUTION to standards development
- IMPLEMENTATION of interoperability solutions into healthcare systems
A global expertise
PHAST contributes to international efforts related to semantic interoperability and health data exchange standards. It sponsors the “Pathology and Laboratory Medicine” (PaLM) domain of IHE International, and is the correspondent of IHE to SNOMED for the IHE SNOMED CT free set. It contributes to various Work Groups of HL7 International, leads the introduction of new resources for order catalogs in the FHIR standard and is one of the primary editors of the International Patient Summary (IPS) standard. PHAST played a key role in the Trillium II Project funded by the European Commission to bring “International Patient Summary” standards in support to better patient care across borders. PHAST also closely works with the GMDN Agency.
An offer dedicated
to semantic interoperability
PHAST core mission : bring valuable content into the EHR
PHAST solutions aim at providing valuable clinical content in the Electronic Health Record’s (EHR) structure. With strong in-house capabilities focusing on interoperability, PHAST is able to introduce SNOMED CT into EHR underlying semantic components, including :

CIO : the reference healthcare catalogs

Medications
CIOmed collects data from many official sources and processes it in a standard format to support hospital practices around the medication circuit.

Medical devices
CIOmd provides description of over one million medical devices references into hospital software: references, vendors, labels, classifications (such as Cladimed), medical devices withdrawn from market, bar codes, …

Clinical laboratory services
CIOlab provides standardized descriptions for laboratory tests, prescriptions or requests for medical examinations, blood sampling plans, results and test reports.

TIO : interoperable terminologies into health systems
Healthcare software uses a large number of semantic resources. However, the way these resources are integrated can be completely archaic and induce reliability, availability, updating and interoperability defects. The TIO service aims at distributing three types of terminologies (value set, mapping and code systems) conforming to a standardized and interoperable format so that they can be shared by all components of the health information system.
SNOMED CT,
a unique expertise in France
Committed to promote a French version
In 2014, PHAST signed an agreement with SNOMED International, becoming the official translator of SNOMED CT in France. Since 2018, PHAST has been coordinating the SNOMED International “French Translation Project Group”, which produces a single French translation cooperatively with NRCs of French speaking member countries.
Build long-term solutions
PHAST seeks to encourage the creation of a more effective and interoperable French healthcare IT system by easing the integration and implementation of SNOMED CT into vendor applications. As part of this strategy, PHAST has brought a dedicated service, TIOct, to enable care institutions to encode their clinical information with SNOMED CT concepts in a way that can be processed automatically by their applications.
SNOMED CT Francophone Day
Every year, PHAST organizes the SNOMED CT Francophone Day. The 3rd edition will take in November 25, 2021 in Paris.