BCS & the IHE or the trouble with standards Ian Herbert Vice Chair, British Computer Society Health Informatics Forum

The Requirement Care increasingly cooperative Patients & HCPs increasingly mobile Information must follow the patient, and mean the same wherever it is Suppliers don’t want to have to design a specific mechanism for each interaction with each different system Purchasers don’t want to be locked in to a particular supplier □

We need semantic interoperability Standards vital, but must be used This means enforcement / accreditation Standards should cover:  Physical interconnection  Application interconnection  Patient data & knowledge representation □ The Solution

The Players Hence the current push behind standards development by :  CEN in Europe  Snomed CT internationally  HL7 multinationally  OpenEHR multinationally  ISO, W3C as world bodies  national bodies eg ANSI, Continua, BSI □

The Result Many standards – take your pick They do not share a common underpinning semantic model, so:  Their scopes overlap  There are gaps  There are competing standards  There are some semantic conflicts Many difficult to use, e.g. HL7 v3 □

The Fix? Need to profile standards deployment to remove scope overlaps Need to agree common underpinning framework Need to plug the gaps Needs to be done across standards bodies But also need to demonstrate that the standards work, e.g. by implementing real significant interoperability scenarios □

Enter IHE IHE a world-wide organisation It implements real & significant interoperability scenarios by:  Selecting & profiling relevant standards  Publishing the specification  Demonstrating the results publicly □

IHE & BCS We welcome IHE UK into BCS HIF IHE sees this as helping them extend their mission into work outside imaging It contributes to BCS HIF’s mission to develop the full potential of health informatics Thank you □