June 20, 2004 ebxmlforum.org
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), a health care consortium that aims to get relevant and accurate information for patient care into the hands of practitioners at the right time for making medical decisions, released its draft specifications for document sharing, and the core of the mechanism is the ebXML registry. When implemented, the IHE specifications, including ebXML registries, will affect our day-to-day health care experiences.
Health care presents one of the most difficult challenges for information technology, yet it also offers some of the best opportunities for improving the work of health care practitioners, which affects just about everyone as consumers of health care services. Among the most pressing challenges faced by the industry is the need to get all of the relevant and accurate information needed for patient care into the hands of practitioners at the right time for making medical decisions. This is the objective of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), an initiative that encourages the integration of systems in health care institutions.
IHE is a technical consortium under the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society that is building a technical framework to encourage the integration of health care systems. Rather than creating new standards to define this framework, the group relies on existing standards, one of them being ebXML On 17 June 2004, IHE issued for public comment four draft technical supplements to its Infrastructure Technical Framework, with one devoted to Cross-Enterprise Clinical Documents Sharing, or XDS. The XDS document specifies the ebXML registry (version 2.0) as a key part of its proposed solution.
