IHE as Solutions Provider for eHealth Interoperability

The building blocks of real-world eHealth solutions, IHE Integration Profiles, will be the focus of a special session at the World of Health IT Conference on Tuesday, 4 November. Concrete examples from European countries deploying Integration Profiles will be used to illustrate how profiles are developed based on IHE’s pragmatic, open-standards methods, and then applied to diverse clinical settings.

IHE-Europe User CoChair Karima Bourquard, PhD, will present the IHE approach of winning a joint commitment from users and industry to commonly develop and deploy Integration Profiles and to provide solutions for Healthcare Professionals from general practitioner to hospital and health networks.

Director of Interoperability and Standardization at GMSIH (Groupement de modernisation des systèmes d’information hospitalier), a national organization working for all French hospitals and healthcare networks, Dr. Bourquard will describe the IHE-Europe ‘Connectathon’ that brings together national and European user associations with 70 participating companies from 11 European countries to validate compliance with IHE profiles.

Geert Claeys, Technology Manager at Agfa Healthcare, will present high level view of IHE Integration Profiles for eHealth today and the roadmap for the future in a talk entitled, “IHE Integration Profiles as an architectural blueprint for ehealth solutions.”

Previously an IHE-Europe Vendor Co-Chair, Claeys says eHealth solutions are complex by nature with modularity serving as the main architectural tool to manage this complexity. Based on open, mature standards, IHE Integration Profiles are able to effectively address issues such as persistence, security and integration. Two eHealth projects in Europe that utilize IHE Integration Profiles will be presented to share best practices as well as lessons learned.

“IHE XDS based Cardiology Network Friesland,” will be described by Maarten Festen, an IT project leader at Leeuwarden Medical Center in the Netherlands. The cardiology network built for the Dutch province of Friesland enables cardiologists at five hospitals to share information about their patients. Using the IHE XDS profiles, cardiologists can share, rather than exchange, angiography, echography and electrocardiography data sets and are also able to include reports and patient histories.

According to Festen, “Compared to conventional methods of data interchange, using IHE XDS improves the quality of patient care by providing richer data sets of true diagnostic quality in a more timely manner, while at the same time reducing patient stay and decreasing the workload for the support staff, effectively lowering overall costs of patient care.”

The head of the Secure Business IT Infrastructures at the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering (ISST) in Berlin, Germany, Dr. Joerg Caumanns will present “EFA roadmap integrating XDS,” describing the application of IHE profiles for a decentralized infrastructure of independent medical organizations with emphasis on the coupling of IHE XDS with web security standards for authentication and authorization.

The Elektronische Fallakte (eFA) is a distributed patient electronic case record being created by a consortium of hospital enterprises that is based on the legal foundation of patient consent, which authorizes assigned medical professionals to access patient's medical data.

Dr. Caumanns will show how the specifications for the eFA incorporated all elements of the IHE XDS profile and then exceeded the existing profiles such that ISST, the consortium’s designer, is now working with IHE-Germany to update and enhance the XDS profile to include specifications developed for the project, including a nested registry structure, distributed repositories, authorization mechanisms and some extensions to metadata.