IHE Connectathons: A Unique Testing Opportunity
IHE provides a detailed implementation and testing process to promote the adoption of standards-based interoperability by vendors and users of healthcare information systems. The process culminates in the Connectathon, a weeklong interoperability-testing event.
IHE-Europe Connectathon 2010
The 10th annual IHE European Connectathon will be held April 12-16 at the
Cité Mondiale in Bordeaux, France. Registration is open until January 10.
Further information and registration are available here.
IHE North America Connectathon 2010
The 11th annual IHE North America Connectathon was held January 11-15, 2010 in Chicago. The HIT industry's largest interoperability testing event featured more than 150 systems from over 100 participating organizations. In all more than 3500 successful tests of IHE Integration Profiles were performed and verified at this year's event. In addition to nearly 500 systems engineers engaged in testing at the event, more than 100 attendees took part in a conference featuring prominent speakers on health IT and electronic health records on Tuesday, January 12. Further information on the Connectathon and presentations from the conference are available here.
Connectathon Overview
The IHE Connectathon is the healthcare IT industry's only large-scale interoperability testing event. Connectathons are held annually in Asia, Europe and North America. During the Connectathon systems exchange information with complementary systems from multiple vendors, performing all of the transactions required for the roles they have selected, called IHE Actors, in support of defined clinical use cases, called IHE Profiles. Thousands of vendor-to-vendor connections have been tested overall, and tens of thousands of transactions passed among the systems tested. The sponsoring organizations publish the results of this testing for public review (see below).
The Connectathon provides detailed validation of the participants' interoperability and compliance with IHE profiles. Participating companies prepare for the event using testing software—the MESA test tools—developed for this purpose. It offers vendors a unique opportunity for connectivity testing—removing barriers to integration that would otherwise have to be dealt with on site, at the customer's expense. Companies taking part have responded overwhelmingly that the IHE process addresses important issues in their product development plans.
Organizations interested in participating in future Connectathons are encouraged to refer to the Connectathon Fact Sheet that describes the process and timeline for the Connectathon.
IHE maintains a database of results from IHE-Europe and IHE-North America Connectathons.
