National and Regional:
More countries are developing a sustainable eHealth interoperability framework with the objective of ensuring consensus among stakeholders for adoption and implementation. To develop and maintain such a framework, requirements in the form of use cases and supporting interoperability specifications are needed as a foundation to realise interoperability
The interoperability governance will include:
- An organisation that supports the evolution of the sustainable eHealth interoperability framework;
- A set of processes and procedures that are published for transparency and in which stakeholders are engaged;
- Delivers and maintain resources such as test tools, to support ensure effective and compliant implementations.
It is also necessary to highlight the importance of the education of the stakeholders, users and vendors in order to implement properly the eHealth interoperability framework.
IHE-Services, the non-for-profit consulting entity of IHE, is assisting several countries in Europe and beyond, in strengthening their eHealth interoperability governance. Such support is often associated with a hands-on guide in the development of use cases, interoperability specifications.
Hospital:
Hospitals need to deploy interoperable IT systems and devices within the hospital. In addition, increasingly hospitals need to connect at the national level. But such external interoperability requires robust internal interoperability to ensure that accurate health information and workflows flow in a seamless way. The governance of interoperability within a care delivery organisation is equally important. Of course, each hospital can design and deploy its own interoperability framework, but it has been demonstrated that reusing interoperability standards and profiles would reduce the level of customisations, thus resulting in lowering the cost of deployment and sustainability.
IHE Profiles are among the most effective building blocks that, when adopted and reused, result in simplifying the development of robust hospital interoperability frameworks (See Interoperability Specifications).
Hospital Interoperability Governance is more than creating and implementing interoperability based on a well-documented set of use cases both at the departmental level and the overall hospital level and associated stands and profile-based interoperability specifications (See Requirements and Interoperability Specifications). Such governance also includes:
- The establishment of an interoperability testing strategy well suited to a hospital environment. It should rely on purchasing product upgrades and new products that have been successfully tested at IHE Connectathons and IHE Conformity Assessment reports for the specific profiles and actors needed.
- Engage hospital IT architects and staff along with clinical leadership in leading the governance of interoperability for the hospital. Provide them with the opportunity for standards and profile education. Requesting assistance from IHE-Services is available to accelerate skills acquisition and governance processes ramp-up.
- Build a roadmap of future use cases and corresponding profiles needed and when missing submit a request for a new profile to your IHE National initiative or the IHE-Europe EU-Affairs Committee. Contact: secretariat@ihe-europe.net.
- Encourage your national IHE National initiatives to develop new hospital centric interoperability use cases that are not yet included to be implemented in the care setting. Framework elements (like for example IHE-France) can be identified and become shared across a large number of hospitals.