Sharing Clinical Documents IHE Oxford – April 2008 Ian Herbert Vice Chair BCS Health Informatics Forum

IHE-UK steering committee now part of BCS HIF BCS + IHE IHE-UK steering committee now part of BCS HIF BCS now IHE-UK sponsor Good for BCS Good for IHE Much synergy in the relationship □

What have we heard? IHE enables systems to support the clinical process IHE is about starting from here Recognises evolution as a fact of life the perfect may be the enemy of the good patient data will always be distributed IHE profiles existing standards: to enable end-to-end interoperability for a particular use case encourages system supplier takeup validates that takeup Is on everyone’s side, and nobody’s □

IHE … Is not a standards making body But ideally needs some new stds, e.g: XDS document types XDS metadata types both ideally for global affinity domain Does not assess solution scaleability □

IHE XDS IHE XDS is about document: an EHR is a type of document □ publishing and discovery retrieval document can be of any type an EHR is a type of document □

After IHE XDS succeeds … Is information overload a threat? Need to get inside structured documents particularly EHRs to retrieve structured data Skill stop is to retrieve relevant documents metadata not sufficient for this IHE aware of the problem ultimately to search (multiple) documents for specific types of data How far will XDS scale? □

IHE is for real - now Involves all the relevant interests Users & patient? System suppliers Standards bodies Care provider organisations Aware of the changing nature of healthcare Aware of the changing nature of standards Does once what should be done once Is there an alternative? □