Members of the ESC Working Group in Computers in Cardiology are active in Information Technology in HealthCare (IHE), an initiative to improve and to standardize intra and inter-hospital communication between computer systems and medical equipment.
Can you imagine a state-of-the-art hospital without modern Information Technology (IT)? Common hospitals use a respectable number of specialised systems in daily routine. Not only imaging and ECG acquisition modalities make intensive use of computer assistance.
IT is also absolutely necessary for patient administration, billing, examination documentation, quality assurance and scientific work.
But while these specialised systems fulfill local requirements very well, quite often there is a lack in the communication between these systems. It happens that necessary patient information – such as patient information, order codes or diagnoses - cannot be transferred from one system to another.
Those communication gaps result in suboptimal clinical workflows when information must be gathered multiple times or examination results are not available when needed.
At the same time, in many European and North American Countries, there is a strong need to increase efficiency in patient care. Hospitals need to pay more and more attention to the integration of their IT systems. Year after year, millions of Euros are spent in system integration. A large amount of these expenses could be saved by a better interface standardisation.
This is exactly the goal of the Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative.
What is IHE?
The first steps of the IHE were in the domain of Radiology. At the time the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and the Health Information Management System Society (HIMSS) sponsored the initiative.
In the meantime IHE was extended to other medical domains, such as Cardiology, Laboratory or Pathology.
For all of these domains, representatives of user organisations and vendors came together to solve domain-specific problems. In Cardiology both the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) are supporting the IHE initiative.
How is IHE moving forward?
In IHE, users define year by year a small number of workflow problems in the real world. Users and vendors find together technical solutions (integration profiles) based on available communication standards such as HL7, DICOM or web services. After that vendors start to implement these technical solutions into their products.
In order to verify functionality and proper implementation, engineers meet for a so-called connect-a-thon, once a year.
During this event, intensive interoperability tests between different systems of different vendors are performed and test results are monitored by independent experts. Results are available on the European IHE website.
IHE Cardiology
In Cardiology users asked vendors to solve open issues in the Cath and Echo Lab environment including emergency examinations, order handling and multi modality examinations. Furthermore, the access to ECG’s from workstations outside the Cardiology Department and the way to transfer reports from specialised department systems have been solved.
What is the use of IHE for doctors?
IHE is not a specific product that can be bought commercially. The idea is that vendors implement IHE functionality into their existing products. From the outside the products remain seamlessly the same. For better visibility vendors will publish ‘Integration Statements’ and indicate their products.
As soon as you see the ‘Integration Statement’ you can be sure that the product supports the abstract workflow models and is tested in a very practical environment! That means that usage of IHE compliant systems facilitates high level integration.
Ask vendors for IHE compliance and for results from the connect-a-thon!
IHE Live Show at ESC
As during the ESC Annual Congress in Stockholm (2005) and Barcelona (2006) there will be a live demo of IHE in Vienna (1-5 Sept 2007).
In a virtual 80m² hospital 12 systems of 6 different vendors demonstrate IHE workflows.
A clinical expert will guide visitors though this hospital and explain the different clinical steps and the benefit of IHE. Guests of the ESC congress can use this opportunity for discussions with IHE experts.
 | Come and learn how IHE can improve workflows in your department!Exhibition Hall (B740 - Zone 3) |