Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Europe will hold its ninth annual Connectathon event in Vienna, Austria, on 20-24 April next year.
The Connectathon provides a unique opportunity for application interoperability testing, taking existing standards and frameworks and showing they work in real systems.
The event will be hosted by the Austrian IHE initiative, which says it hopes acting as host will help further develop their presence in the healthcare interoperability community. A series of workshops will be run alongside the Connectathon event.
The Connectathon is a ‘connectivity marathon’ during which systems exchange information with complementary systems from multiple vendors, performing all of the transactions required for the roles they are implementing.
The IHE Connectathon, gives all companies that have implemented IHE’s technical framework specifications in their products the chance to test them with many other companies’ products in a real interoperability environment.
Vendors have the opportunity to identify and solve ‘bugs’ during the event. According to vendors who have participated in previous Connectathons the cost of identifying and solving a bug during a Connectathon is about 10 times less than the cost of a bug identified on site. A specialist of each company is present at the Connectathon, as well as standards specialists.
The results of the Connectathon will be published in the “Connectathon Results table” on the IHE-Europe website. Participating vendors may use the “IHE Integration Statements” to show the compliance of their products with the IHE Integration profiles.
Running alongside the Connectathon 2009 IHE Austria and the University of Applied Sciences Technikum, Vienna, will run a series of workshops based around sharing clinical documents and integrating workflow, focused on practical solutioms from IHE.
The workshops will be run in a series two tracks for users of health IT users and system vendors.
The user track is designed to show healthcare professionals the benefits of using content profiles in clinical work and is intended to be of interest to suppliers and those involved in planning the implementation of healthcare IT systems.
The management user track, meanwhile, is designed to inform CEOs, CIOs, financial directors, clinical directors and senior manager of the benefits of this efficient and cost effective implementation of technology.
The vendor track is designed to inform vendors about the IHE development process and how they can stay at the cutting edge by being part of it.
The previous IHE-Europe interoperability testing event, or Connectathon, was held April 7-11, 2008, at St Catherine’s College in Oxford, England. Over 300 engineers from 83 companies put their equipment and software to the test using IHE integration profiles to interoperate communicating with each other and successfully exchanging medical data.
Over the five days more than 1,850 interoperability tests were carried out, by a team of over 31 volunteer monitors covering nine domains ranging from patient monitoring to laboratory results, and even assisting with surgeries.
The IHE domains include IT infrastructure, radiology, cardiology, laboratory, radiation oncology, patient care coordination, patient care devices, pathology and pharmacy.
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