'IHE Suisse' initiative set up to support Switzerland's endorsement of IHE architecture

The IHE Suisse organisation will be formally incorporated in March, 2010. It currently provides a forum for regular contact between participants that include the national office for eHealthcare, the vendor community association IG eHealth, the interoperability working group ALIS-Connect, and VGI-CH.

A kick off meeting for the national IHE group was held in June, 2009, followed by two IHE Foundation Core Team meetings. At the November meeting of the Core Team, the new name for the organisation was decided "IHE Suisse".

A key moment for advancing IHE in Switzerland was the guided tour for a delegation of Swiss officials and health system administrators to the European Connect-a-thon in April, 2009 in Vienna.

IHE integration profiles are already in use in Switzerland at a few hospitals, but the endorsement of IHE integration profiles for the National e-Health Strategy has heighten interest as health information teams explore concrete modeling and technical guidelines to define projects that will conform with the strategy outlined by the Swiss Federal Council.

The Coordination Office Confederation-Cantons said standardisation of the Swiss eHealth infrastructure will be built around the processes and user cases described by IHE and specifically endorsed the use of cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS), the PIX/PDQ master-patient-index, the cross-enterprise user assertion profile (XUA) and the ebXML Registry for business processes.

In a recent interview leading organizers with the IHE Suisse Core Team explained that the formal adoption of IHE integration profiles for the Swiss National e-Health Strategy, have helped health information system users, vendors and other stakeholders to rally to the new IHE national initiative as an essential platform for the exchange of information and for greater education about IHE methodologies.

According to Christian Kohler, Managing Director of KDS GmbH, one of the key issues for IHE Suisse is to maintain a central focus through an open organization that embraces emerging ideas and represents the diverse interests of the stakeholders in Swiss e-health.

"There is a great deal of hype right now for IHE in Switzerland, yet there is only a core group of experts who really know IHE," explained to Tony Schaller, who is the chair for the Swiss HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) working group and the CEO of medshare GmbH.

Schaller and Kohler said the Core Team of IHE Suisse has established a foundation with a strategy and good 'in-time' performance while also generating a high level of interest for the first official IHE training, approved by the Board of IHE Europe.

The maximum number of participants turned out for this IHE training session held in Thun in late October 2009, they said, where as part of the agenda, IHE Suisse described an IHE roadmap outlining activities for the next two years.

"We need to do a lot of lobbying and information distribution," Tony Schaller said, including developing a how-to guide for users and explaining integration concepts. IHE Suisse will also encourage interested vendors of health information applications prepare for testing at Connect-a-thon and earn verification as an IHE Demonstrator.

At the IHE training session in Thun in October a hot topic to emerge among participants was asserting a "Swiss-ness" around the planned, distributed XDS infrastructure to conform with requirements of the Swiss Privacy and Information Access Policies.

"There are many questions we need to answer to implement IHE in Switzerland," Christian Kohler explained, such as guidelines for field contents that IHE does not specify for the identification of physicians, hospitals, departments in hospitals, homecare, and so forth.

"And much more is necessary to build the Swiss distributed XDS infrastructure for the envisioned Health Records," he added.