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Connectathon Goes To Austria
The Ninth annual European interoperability testing event known as the IHE Connectathon will be held at Vienna, Austria on April 20th-24th. The IHE-Europe Executive Board is pleased to announce that the Ninth Annual European Connectathon will be held in Vienna, Austria from April 20 to 24, 2009. Hosting the Connectathon will support the Austrian IHE initiative in further developing their presence in the healthcare interoperability community, according to IHE co-chairs Peter Kuenecke and Karima Bourquard. > Workshop Registration for Connectathon Participants The Connectathon is a 'connectivity marathon' during which systems exchange information with complementary systems from multiple vendors, performing all of the transactions required for the roles they are implementing. At the IHE Connectathon, all companies which have implemented IHE’s Technical Framework specifications in their products have the chance to test them with many other companies’ products in a real interoperability environment. The Connectathon provides a unique opportunity for application interoperability testing. Vendors have the opportunity to identify and solve many ‘bugs’ during the event. According to vendors who have participated in previous Connectathons “the cost of identifying and solving a bug during a Connectathon is about 10 times less than the cost of a bug identified on site”. The specialist of each company is present at the Connectathon, as well as standards specialists. The results of the Connectathon will be published in the “Connectathon Results table” on the IHE-Europe website. Vendors may use the “IHE Integration Statements” to show the compliance of their products with the IHE Integration profiles. This is a clear benefit to vendors when responding to Requests for Proposals from users. Parallel to Connectathon 2009 IHE Austria and the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Vienna will offer a series of workshops entitled “Sharing Clinical Documents and Integrating Workflow: Practical Solutions from Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)" The workshops are organized in two tracks, one for users of health IT and another for vendors of such systems. The User Track will offer two sections, one for Clinical Content and the second for Management. * Clinical Content User Track : designed to show healthcare professionals the benefits of using content profiles in clinical work and will be of interest to suppliers and those involved in planning the implementation of healthcare IT systems. * Management User Track : designed to inform CEOs, CIOs, Financial Directors, Clinical Directors, IT / ICT Directors and Managers the benefits of this efficient and cost effective implementation of technology for the enhancement of communication within healthcare in Austria and Europe and will be of interest to suppliers and those involved in planning the implementation of healthcare IT systems. * The Vendor Track is designed to inform vendors about the IHE development process and how they can stay at the cutting edge by being part of it. It will be of interest to software suppliers and those involved in planning the implementation of healthcare IT systems. The eighth annual IHE-Europe interoperability testing event, or Connectathon, was held April 7-11, 2008 in Oxford, England. At St. Catherine’s College over 300 engineers from 83 companies put their equipment and software to the test using IHE integration profiles to interoperate communicating with each other and successfully exchanging medical data. More than 1,850 interoperability tests were carried out over the five days, verified by a team of over 31 volunteer monitors covering nine domains ranging from patient monitoring to laboratory results, and even assisting with surgeries. The IHE domains include IT infrastructure, radiology, cardiology, laboratory, radiation oncology, patient care coordination, patient care devices, pathology and pharmacy.
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