Last month, the Portuguese Ministry of Health started a pilot to make it easier for citizens to get 'proof of fitness', a requirement to obtain or renew a driving licence. For this purpose, the Portuguese National Broker (PNB) platform was extended to include the exchange of Driving Licence Certificates between the Ministry and the Portuguese Institute for Mobility and Transport (IMT, I.P.).
The PNB platform is the national eHealth message exchange, providing technical, semantic and legal interoperability between all health-related entities in the country. Its role is to facilitate the exchange of messages (services/interfaces) while at the same time implementing security mechanisms for authentication and access control. The infrastructure currently processes an average of 300,000 messages per day.
Interconnectivity
The PNB platform has been built (starting in 2015) by the Technical Interoperability Team of the Health Ministry's Shared Services Centre (SPMS, EPE). The software is based on international eHealth standards and has been published as open source software.
The PNB exchange is connected to the Public Administration interoperability (iAP) platform that provides interconnectivity between ministries. Connections to systems in other countries are possible through the National Contact Point (NCP).
This pilot is the first project that actually uses the connection with the iAP platform.
