The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative is a multi-year project designed to advance the state of data integration in healthcare. Its fundamental objective is to ensure that in the care of patients all required information for medical decisions is both correct and available to healthcare professionals. IHE demonstrates that imaging and other healthcare information and management systems can be successfully integrated and highlights the ways that this integration will benefit patients and health professionals.
IHE does not create new standards, but rather drives the adoption of standards to address specific clinical needs. IHE Integration Profiles specify precisely how standards are to be used to address these needs, eliminating ambiguities, reducing configuration and interfacing costs, and ensuring a higher level of practical interoperability. IHE is now truly multi-domain with Integration Profiles for Radiology, Cardiology, Laboratory, Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure, and Patient Care Coordination, which enable interoperability both within and across multiple enterprises.
Sponsored by Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC), IHE brings together the major vendors in the healthcare information and imaging systems industry to agree upon and demonstrate standard interfaces and data architectures.
Leading technology companies that normally compete against one another work in harmony at the annual Connect-a-thon's to ensure that their systems are interoperable. They improve on their ability to communicate with other systems according to specific data standards to support clinical care, including sharing patient data in a network of healthcare facilities like the regional health information infrastructure organizations (RHIOs) currently being designed and implemented.
Why is IHE Needed?
We are undergoing an explosion in medical information and increasing amounts of data are available and needed to make the best decisions for patient care. Physicians need access to information in order to deliver optimal care. Systems need to share information seamlessly for the enterprise and community to operate efficiently. Administrators need to know they can integrate systems in a cost-effective manner. IHE is working to meet these needs.
What is the goal of IHE?
IHE's goal is to encourage enterprise-wide and cross enterprise sharing of the patient's clinical information by imaging and information systems used in healthcare. The goal of IHE is to remove barriers to optimal patient care by making all relevant clinical data accessible on demand to care providers at the point and time it is need for medical decisions and care.
Optimal Patient Care
Optimal patient care requires efficient access to comprehensive electronic health records (EHRs). The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative accelerates the adoption of the information standards needed to support EHRs. More than 100 vendors have implemented and tested products based on IHE. IHE improves patient care by harmonizing healthcare information exchange. IHE provides a common standards-based framework for seamlessly passing health information among care providers, enabling local, regional and national health information networks.
IHE enhances the quality of patient care, resulting in the following benefits:
- Safety through the reduction of medical errors
- Savings through lower implementation costs and more efficient workflow
- Satisfaction through better informed medical decisions and faster results for both patient and physician
The Four Steps of the IHE Process
IHE follows a defined, coordinated process for standards adoption. These steps repeat annually, promoting steady improvements in integration.
- Identify Interoperability Problems
Clinicians and IT experts work to identify common interoperability problems with information access, clinical workflow, administration and the underlying infrastructure.
- Specify Integration Profiles
Experienced healthcare IT professionals identify relevant standards and define how to apply them to address the problems, documenting them in the form of IHE integration profiles.
- Test Systems at the Connectathon
Vendors implement IHE integration profiles in their products and test their systems for interoperability at the annual IHE Connectathon. This allows them to assess the maturity of their implementation and resolve issues of interoperability in a supervised testing environment.
- Publish Integration Statements for use in RFP's
Vendors publish IHE integration statements to document the IHE integration profiles their products support. Users can reference the IHE integration profiles in requests for proposals, greatly simplifying the systems acquisition process.
What are IHE Integration Profiles and Actors?
IHE Integration Profiles
Integration Profiles model the business process problem and the solution to the problem They describe clinical information and workflow needs and specify the actors and transactions required to address them. A single vendor system might support one or more than one Integration Profile.
IHE Actors
A system or part of a system that creates, manages or acts upon data. Each actor supports a specific set of IHE transactions. A given information system may contain support for one or more than one actor.
Complying with IHE profiles make systems integration faster, more efficient, less expensive and more successful. We are committed to advancing integration in health care and playing a key role in promoting healthcare standards and ultimately improving patient care.