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The IHETools project aims at proposing a catalog of architectural solutions based on potentially existing architectures (such as Medicoordination) for the interoperability in the eHealth sector by using IHE profiles for specific use cases.

ihetools

The prototype developed in the context of the Medicoordination project demonstrated that interoperability issues, which may arise between medical actors, can be solved with relatively easy solutions. The prototype however, concentrated on the exchange of medical documents, while implementing only minimal security requirements, and no patient or professional indexing at all.

Medicoordination helped assessing the power of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) XDS (Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing) Profile in a real context. The IHETools project, which is a follow-up project of MediCoordination, goes deeper in the learning and understanding of the different IT IHE Profiles. The objective of the IHE Profiles is to provide a common framework based on the coordinated use of standards targeted at building effective interoperable health IT solutions. As an example, Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) is an IHE Profile, which aims at providing a document archive for healthcare records from diverse institutional sources. XDS is content-agnostic, which makes it perfect for storing all sorts of media.

The first objective of the IHETools project is to propose a catalog of architectural solutions based on potentially existing architectures (such as Medicoordination) for the interoperability in the eHealth sector by using IHE profiles for specific use cases. It concentrates on the usage of several IHE profiles (CT, ATNA, XUA, EUA, XDS, PIX and PDQ) in the specification of two concrete architectures:

  1. An extended architecture based on the Medicoordination prototype, adding support for patient indexes, better security and audit logs;
  2. An architecture specification for a negotation platform between hospitals.

As a global objective, the project intends to specify a clear methodology on the usage of IHE Profiles, but also a list of potential Open Source libraries and tools implementing specific IHE profiles.

Publications concerning this project are available on http://publications.hevs.ch/index.php/topics/single/92