FI-STAR Electronic Health Record Specific Enabler EHR-SE at Connectathon 2015: Passed the IHE Interoperability Profiles Testing
The eHealth Lab of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Cyprus (UCY) participated in the IHE European Connectathon 2015 in Luxembourg, and tested and passed the IHE profiles implemented in the FI-STAR Electronic Health Record Specific Enabler (EHR – SE). The UCY team consisted of PhD candidates Aristos Aristodemou and Ioannis Constantinou, supported by Zinonas Antoniou. The UCY team was the only University team participating among numerous well established eHealth industrial partners and SME's.
The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is an initiative by healthcare professionals and industry to improve the way computer systems in healthcare share information. IHE promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7 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.
Specifically, the EHR-SE implemented the PDQv3 and XDS.b IHE profiles. The PDQv3 supports a consumer profile and lets applications query a central patient information server and retrieve a patient's demographic and visit information. The XDS.b Profile (Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing) is focused on providing a standards-based specification for managing the sharing of documents between any healthcare enterprises. For this profile, UCY implemented two actors. The first is the consumer, which finds documents associated with a patient from a registry and then retrieves them from the repository. The second actor is the source, which is responsible for submitting a document for a patient in the repository. UCY's implemented profiles were tested with registries and repositories implemented by other companies participating in the five day connectivity and interoperability marathon. In total, 10 different companies took part in the performed tests with UCY and 20 tests were performed which were all successful.
The EHR-SE can also be connected with the other two enablers developed by UCY and InfoTEX, a Cyprus-based SME. A patient summary transfer enabler based on the EU project "European patient Summary Open Source services" (epSOS SE) supporting patient mobility, and a Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) enabler (PACS SE) based on the dcm4chee open source system for the support of medical imaging functionality. These three FI-STAR platform enablers are designed to facilitate the deployment of innovative applications and value added services in the health care sector.