From February 12 to February 16, members of IHE International gathered for the Volume One Meeting at the Oslo Science Park in Oslo, Norway. The meeting gave members an opportunity highlight and advance work being done in the IT Infrastructure (ITI), Patient Care Coordination (PCC), and Quality, Research and Public Health (QRPH) domains.
The meeting provided an opportunity for IHE International peers to connect outside of the U.S.-based events, which can be costly for anyone outside of the country.
“The benefit to IHE and the profiles development; there are not enough qualified experts available in each country to solve the problem nationally,” says Daniel Berenzeanu, Director of Managed Services at Ready Computing, Inc. “The joint effort of developing at the IHE International level achieves a critical mass needed to deliver high-quality specifications.”
Without these important international events, IHE International would lose sight of its mission to improve interoperability worldwide.
“IHE’s deliberate efforts to bring other voices to the conversation – from outside the U.S. – is fundamentally important. Without a deliberate effort, IHE’s work products and artifacts run the risk of inappropriately focusing on domestic use cases and over-adopting a U.S.-centric context,” says Derek Ritz, principal consultant of ecGroup, Inc., and ITI Technical Committee member.“This is a genuine risk; U.S.-idiosyncratic digital health profiles may not be useful/adoptable outside the domestic American market – and this would fundamentally undermine IHE’s mission as an international organization.”
Highlights at the meeting include two new QRPH work items: the Aggregate Data Exchange Schema for HIV Content (ADX-HIV) and the Emergency Transport to Facility (ETF) profiles. The ADX-HIV profile is a collaboration between the U.S. CDC’s Global HIV Department and the open source District Health Information System team at the University of Oslo. The ETF profile is designed to support patient-centric outcomes during the transition of care from emergency medical services to acute care settings.
The Oslo meeting included work on profiles in the PCC domain as well. “IHE PCC is currently developing two profiles where the uses cases can benefit from the use of FHIR resources. One is the use of FHIR PlanDefinition to support dynamic Care Planning. The second is the use of FHIR to communicate pre-hospital care to the hospital prior to transitioning care from the ambulance to the hospital,” according to Denise Maxwell-Downing, MS, BSN, RN, CNOR, Gila Pyke of Cognaissance, and Emma Jones Emma Jones RN, MSN – BC Expert Clinical Business Analyst.
Attendees also worked on the XMCU (cross-domain metadata update) and AS4 (asynchronous secure transactions), profiles that have made headway in Europe, according to Berenzeanu.
The meeting in Oslo is just one way IHE International strives to ensure all of its members have a voice in advancing their domains and profiles.