This document defines the core data set for a concise international patient summary (IPS), which supports continuity of care for a person and assists with coordination of their care.

This document provides an abstract definition of a patient summary from which derived models are implementable.

This document does not cover the workflow processes of data entry, data collection, data summarization, subsequent data presentation, assimilation, or aggregation. Furthermore, this document does not cover the summarization act itself, i.e. the intelligence, skills and competences, that results in the data summarization workflow. It is not an implementation guide that is concerned with the various technical layers beneath the application layer. Representation by various coding schemes, additional structures and terminologies are not part of this document.