In February the Institute for High Performance Computing Networking (ICAR) and National Research Council of Italy (CNR) hosted a week-long meeting for four Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) domain committees in Naples Italy. The Quality Research and Public Health, IT Infrastructure, Patient Care Coordination, and Pharmacy domain committees gathered for this international meeting to discuss new work items and cross-domain concerns.
A number of key profiles were discussed during meeting, including the following:
- Patient-centric Data Element Location Service (PDLS) introduces the means to access data elements extracted from shared structured documents.
- Query for Existing Data (mobile) (QEDm) defines transactions to query a list of specific data elements such as vital signs, allergy and intolerances, problems, diagnostic results, 140 medications, immunizations, procedures, encounters and provenance.
- Mobile Care Services Discovery (mCSD) supports discovery of care service resources in federated environments, enabling users to find organizations, locations, practitioners and specific health services.
Many of the profiles discussed make use of emerging standards such as HL7 FHIR, that are based on RESTful services, the standard method of data interchange on the World Wide Web.
The setting of the meeting drew IHE stakeholder members from around the world. Members who might not have the chance to regularly participate in U.S.-based meetings were able to attend, European participants had the opportunity to express their priorities for healthcare IT standards and interoperability. The mix of attendees made the meetings especially productive.
“We were able to address cross-domain concerns, such as how ITI’s PDLS profile will develop in parallel with PCC’s QEDm,” said Eliot Silver, MSc, senior standards analyst, imaging workflow and care solutions at Change Healthcare. “The ITI technical committee agreed on the actors and transactions involved in the PDLS and mCSD profiles; and we were able to significantly complete work on the Remove Documents and Metadata (RMD) profile, which allowed it to go to Public Comment in March, two months ahead of our typical schedule.”
The profile documents developed at the meetings were released for public comment in March and, following review meetings in April, will be published for trial implementation at IHE Connectathons in 2018.