National Initiatives

Recognizing the specific nature of European health care systems and their differing requirements, IHE in Europe encourages the setting up of IHE Initiatives at the national or regional level. IHE-Europe today counts national intitiatives in Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

A national IHE initiative promotes, supports and implements IHE activities within the respective country, and often at the regional level within the country. National IHE initiatives also assume the responsibility to represent the needs and requirements of their respective health care systems within activities of IHE-Europe.

National Initiatives are sponsored by professional associations and include membership and staff of these groups, as well as local hospital and vendor representatives.

A key role for a national initiative is to coordinate the deployment of the IHE Technical Framework and Integration Profiles and to then give input to development of this documentation relevant to local needs and issues. Specific IHE documentation relevant to individual European countries is contained within the national extension annexes to the technical framework documents accessible through the respective IHE National Initiatives.

The role of the national IHE Sponsor, an association or company committed to the support of IHE within the sponsored national initiative, is to provide support, direction and requirements for selecting integration problems most critical to the members of the sponsoring professional organizations. They also support vendors in the definition of the technical specifications related to the identified integration problems.