Next month a major milestone for clinical interoperability in healthcare will be achieved, with the first Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Connectathon, to be held in the UK at St Catherine’s College and Merton College in Oxford.
During the Oxford Connectathon more than 100 healthcare IT suppliers will be working together to test and demonstrate the conformance of their application software with the latest IHE integration profiles. It will represent the latest step in IHE’s efforts to enable interoperability between different healthcare systems and organisations.
As part of the Connectathon week the British Computer Society (BCS) Health Informatics Forum and IHE UK will host a workshop on Wednesday, 9 April, also in Oxford, called “Sharing clinical documents and integrating workflow – practical Solutions from the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise Organisation”.
The workshop will include the opportunity to visit the IHE-Europe Connectathon, which runs concurrently in Oxford from 7-11 April.
At April’s Oxford Connectathon, the first in the UK, each supplier must show that its systems can interoperate with those of three other suppliers as specified by the IHE Integration Profiles. The tests are verified by a team of independent monitors
The Connectathon also provides a practical review of the IHE Integration Profile documents. It is virtually impossible to produce a complex specification document without including errors of one sort or another. As a result of the Connenctathon there is a steady improvement in the quality of the Integration Profiles.
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The results of successful tests are listed on the IHE web sites. Suppliers publish on their web sites the details of which IHE Integration Profiles are supported by each of their products. This allows purchasers to buy systems that will interoperate according to the IHE Integration Profiles.
During the last part of the Connectathon week, group tests are performed using systems that will be demonstrated at public shows, such as professional conference exhibitions. These sets of systems from different suppliers demonstrate end to end interoperability of a series of transactions and processing required to support defined clinical tasks.
For details on how to register for the “Sharing clinical documents and integrating workflow – practical solutions from the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise Organisation” workshop visit the BCS website or the IHE-UK website
Nick Brown