For more information, contact:
Caroline Wilson/SIIM
703-723-0432, ext. 315/cwilson@siimweb.org
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SIIM Hosts Referee Training Session for Connectathon
Scholarship program recruits healthcare IT professionals for volunteer effort.
Leesburg, VA (October 23, 2008) – The Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM), a sponsoring organization of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), hosted the first-ever IHE referee training session at its headquarters in Leesburg, VA, on September 29, 2008. The session, held in conjunction with the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), trained imaging informatics professionals to participate as monitors for the upcoming IHE North America Connectathon to be held February 23-27, 2009, in Chicago. The Connectathon is the health care IT industry's only large-scale interoperability testing event - a cooperative engineering event that brings together approximately 75 vendors, 300 engineers, and 45 monitors. Profiles from 10 IHE domains will be tested by 145 systems at the week-long Connectathon.
The recent training session will serve as a prototype for future IHE referee training sessions and is the most extensive education effort so far. SIIM provided 10 training scholarships to SIIM members to support their attendance at the training session. The session provided invaluable tools and experience for the trainees to learn to "ride the bicycle" of interoperability and to take this experience back to their own facilities. Having trained referees benefits the IHE initiative because they give clinical perspective and relevance to the IHE process and help bridge the gap to the real world. Vendors also receive more effective feedback during the Connectathon by working with a trained group of monitors.
Paul Nagy, Director of Informatics Research at the University of Maryland who spearheaded the training session, described similarities between the IHE and SIIM: "SIIM is defining a profession for informaticists in medicine with its necessary competencies and skills. IHE's standard-based framework is providing a blueprint on how to integrate all clinical information systems, making them more transparent and patient centered. Together, both IHE and SIIM are organizations transforming health care."
IHE sponsoring organizations support the testing process and test tools development, organize demonstrations and educational events, and promote IHE's mission and activities. Sponsors of IHE, such as SIIM, play an active role in improving patient care by advancing interoperability and efficient exchange of relevant information.
About IHE: IHE (www.ihe.net) is a global initiative, now in its tenth year that creates the framework for passing vital health information seamlessly- from application to application, system to system, and setting to setting – across multiple healthcare enterprises. IHE brings together health information technology stakeholders to implement standards for communicating patient information efficiently throughout and among healthcare enterprises by developing a framework of interoperability. Because of its proven process of collaboration, demonstration and real world implementation of interoperable solutions, IHE is in a unique position to significantly accelerate the process for defining, testing, and implementing standards-based interoperability among electronic health record systems.
About SIIM: The Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) is proud to be the leading health care professional organization representing interests and goals of those who work with and whose work is affected by the rapidly changing world of information and imaging technologies. SIIM seeks to spearhead research, education, and discovery of innovative solutions, and to explore new technologies and applications to improve the delivery of medical imaging services and the quality and safety of patient care. For more information, visit www.siimweb.org.
About RSNA: Founded in 1915, the Radiological Society of North America is a professional membership society committed to excellence in patient care through education and research. More than 40,000 medical imaging professionals are members of RSNA, including radiologists, radiation oncologists, medical physicists and allied scientists. RSNA hosts the world's largest annual radiology meeting, publishes two highly respected peer-reviewed journals, offers opportunities to earn CME, and provides research and education grants to young investigators. Learn more at www.rsna.org.
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