IHE workshops open Connectathon to medical community

IHE-Austria organized an ambitious two-day program of of presentations and workshops during Connectathon 2009 to increase awareness and understanding of IHE methods and best practices for a broad range of healthcare clinicians and health technology managers, as well as product manufacturers and service providers.

Entitled "Sharing Clinical Documents and Integrating Workflow" the workshops ran in parallel to the annual testing event. Presentations and demonstrations from regional and national cross enterprise electronic health record (EHR) implementations placed a special emphasis on "Practical Solutions from IHE," highlighting the advantages and savings of effective implementation and improvement of IT systems in healthcare.

Connectathon 2009 in Vienna also included a VIP tour for executives from Switzerland who are considering application of IHE methodologies and practices.

Special thanks for a successful event

Special recognition for the successful event is given to the University of Applied Sciences (Fachhochschule Technikum Wien) led by Gabriele Költringer that coordinated and organized the event.

The addition of 120 workshop participants from the Austrian healthcare community with the 230 health technologists working in the Connectathon testing area created a vibrant ambience.

Special thanks is given to event sponsors:

* Telekom Austria deployed its special events team to network over 25 kilometers of cabling in three days. Florian Eckkrammer of Technikum Wien who was in charge of the technical infrastructure and the IHE Connectathon managers congratulated the Telekom Austria team for the most reliable connectivity in the nine-year history of the event with only five minutes of downtime reported.

* The Austrian Ministry of Health provide funding for the food and beverage services, including a luncheon for 350 people each day.

Workshops open CAT to healthcare community.

"We saw the Connectathon as a both a challenge and a chance to teach people about IHE, so we seized the opportunity," explained Gabriele Költringer from the University of Applied Sciences in Vienna who organized the ninth annual interoperability testing marathon for the host organization, IHE-Austria.

Connectathon creates a closed community of engineers and programmers focused on testing health information technology, she explained, but IHE-Austria also saw a perfect setting for opening the event to a wider community of actors in the healthcare community.

"We had a broad base of contacts through the IHE-Austria board, which includes doctors and clinicians as well as technology companies across the country, and we really worked those networks," she said.

The result was a conference area often filled to capacity with more than 120 paying participants for the two-day workshop program entitled, "Sharing Clinical Documents and Integrating Workflow" that emphasized practical solutions from IHE projects across Europe and Austria. [See related story Update: IHE advancing in key European programs or view the IHE-Austria workshop program.]

Stefan Sauermann, a founding member of IHE-Austria who organized the workshop program, explained that the Austrian government in 2007 formally adopted IHE profiles for cross enterprise document sharing (XDS) as the foundation for architecture being developed for the national electronic health record by Arge ELGA (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Elektronische Gesundheitsakte).

IHE frameworks, profiles and the IHE network and processes are now an integral part of the national program that features eight project tracks converging toward an implementation phase in 2013, he explained.

"IHE is a must and Connectathon turns up at a lot of places in project documents," he said, explaining that hosting the European Connectathon in Vienna created a perfect moment to involve stakeholders, users, and other actors in the Austrian program.

"We wanted to show that people using IHE really can get the job done and encourage them to learn from real projects," he said.

An Acting Program Director in the Biomedical Engineering Sciences Master's study program at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Vienna, Sauermann heads the committee for "Medical Informatics" of the Austrian Standards Institute, and also contributes to international standardization work within CEN, ISO and IEEE. He is also the moderator of the Working Group 2 "Interoperability - Standards" of the Austrian e-Health Initiative, and contributes to the Austrian Electronic Healthcare Record project (ELGA).