From the June 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Third-party systems like MIEs typically involve a locally installed server, which sits behind the firewall, allowing secure transmissions with outside facilities, but not all are like this. Asking questions about how the system connects to other systems and devices eliminates much concern after the fact. Interoperability ranks as No. 1 in terms of importance among end users and vendors alike. With more use of the word “enterprise” than a Star Trek episode, health care has changed to look more closely at the big picture than the needs of the individual departments.
Everything needs to work seamlessly together. Nearly everyone in the medical imaging field is familiar with DICOM and HL-7 standards, but the Integrating the Healthcare Environment initiative, better known as IHE, is the future of medical imaging interconnectivity. The IHE website (www.ihe.net) states, “IHE is an initiative by health care professionals and industry to improve the way computer systems in health care share information. IHE promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as DICOM and HL-7 to address specific clinical needs in support of optimal patient care. Systems developed in accordance with IHE communicate with one another better, are easier to implement and enable care providers to use information more effectively.” Over a dozen clinical domains are addressed by IHE and more than 135 member organizations — professional societies, government agencies, provider organizations, HIT companies and others — have joined the IHE initiative worldwide.
IHE defines integration profiles that provide the framework for interoperability and holds “connectathons” that test and demonstrate interoperability and conformance to the standards. Tomer Levy, general manager, workflow and infrastructure at McKesson, highlights the trends that will drive interoperability. “Medical images cannot be interpreted without the clinical context if we want to achieve better quality and better outcomes. The clinical context resides either in the big health care IT systems, primarily the EMR, or in siloed IT systems across the enterprise or even beyond it.
“When choosing the next imaging vendor, and that may be for traditional PACS, a VNA or a workflow solution, make sure interoperability is a key consideration. And interoperability is a two-way street. A technology vendor needs not only to expose data through standard interface, but also to be able to consume data from other systems to be seamlessly incorporated into the different workflows that are managed by that system. A truly advanced system will be able to share workflows, not just the data.” There are a number of factors that should go into the selection of these important systems.
