Is Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) a standard development organization (SDO)?

NO. IHE is not an SDO.

Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) provides a process that fills the gap between standards and systems implementation which has, until now, required expensive, site-specific interface development to integrate even standards-compliant systems. IHE started in 1997 and was sponsored jointly by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Currently, several other associations sponsor IHE. IHE has expanded over several clinical domains and benefits from international support in North America, Europe, and Asia.

IHE offers an approach that is driven by care providers and is executed by industry experts. Care providers identify the key interoperability problems they face. Healthcare manufacturers and information technology professionals cooperate to agree upon an implementation of established standards to provide a solution for each identified interoperability problem. Their incentive for participation is the opportunity to demonstrate that their systems can operate efficiently in standards-based, multi-vendor environments with the functionality of real hospital information systems. Interoperability demonstrations are regularly organized at major conferences worldwide such as the annual meetings of RSNA, HIMSS, and the American College of Cardiology (ACC).

IHE achieves a common language for integration by promoting the use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7 to address specific clinical needs. Technical solutions are documented and detailed in the IHE Technical Framework.

Each problem along with its solution is detailed as a single Integration Profile that is described with actors cooperating through Standards-based Transactions in order to achieve clinical information exchange and workflow. Many Integration profiles can be deployed to achieve interoperability in healthcare.

(For more information, visit www.ihe.net and www.ihe-canada.com

What is the Connectathon?

The Connectathon is a weeklong live testing event where all participants’ products gather in the same place at the same time to test real IHE integration profiles implementations with real-world clinical scenarios. The Connectathon allows participating companies to test their implementation of IHE capabilities with corresponding systems from industry peers and to fix any remaining interoperability problems, as experts from all manufacturers are available for immediate problem resolution.

During the event their systems exchange information with systems from multiple vendors, performing all of the transactions required for the actors they have selected, in support of Integration Profiles.

A registered actor must successfully complete the Connectathon in order to successfully complete the testing process. The success criterion, for a specific actor registered in a specific profile, consists in successfully completing the required testing scenarios with three different peers.

Test results from Connectathons are published by the sponsors although failures are not. Connectathon test results attest to the participating companies’ ability to conform to IHE Integration Profiles in supervised testing. As IHE is not a certification body, making the Connectathon results available encourages customers to discuss with manufacturers about their products interoperability capabilities.

For more information, visit: www.ihe.net/Connectathon/connectathon2006.cfm

Dr Rita Noumeir, ing., co-president IHE-Canada,
info@ihe-canada.org

Do you have questions on Regulatory issues? Send your questions to Katherine Taverner