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

2. 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 □

3. 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 □

4. 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 □

5. 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 □

6. 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? □

7. 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? □