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Jointly written by IHE members, HIMSS, Laura Bright and Johanna Goderre, this book highlights success stories and challenges to implementing health IT standards.

The IHE NA Connectathon hit its 19th year in 2018 and the IHE profile development and testing process continues to advance the adoption of interoperable health IT system.

Think of a highway where there is no guidance to regulate how drivers must operate while on it. It would be chaotic and dangerous, to say the least. The same is true for the information networks that health care providers and patients traverse daily. The Sequoia Project is a mission-driven non-profit focused on the real-world implementation of secure and efficient health data sharing nationwide. Interoperability on this scale is a multifaceted challenge, so The Sequoia Project has several, complimentary solutions.

Back in the day, did you ever hand-deliver an x-ray to your doctor’s office – to make sure they had the right images to diagnose your case and provide the best treatment?

On April 13, 2017, IHE USA submit comments to the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology in response to the 2017 Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA).

The automation of the patient’s health record has seen considerable procedural and technological changes from its commencement

Surescripts, the nation’s leading health information network, will offer electronic health records (EHR) software vendors free access to its National Record Locator Service (NRLS) until 2019. A number of leading EHR vendors, including Aprima, eClinicalWorks (eCW), Epic, Greenway Health, and NextGen Healthcare have already agreed to offer the capability to their users. NRLS provides care teams with access to a more complete picture of a patient’s care history regardless of where care was delivered and through any EHR vendor.

IHE Connectathons provide participants (and their clients) the ability to use the IHE Profiles to exchange Healthcare information with many different vendors in a collaborative environment. “These great opportunities to work together with other Healthcare IT vendors in a collaborative environment, engineer-to-engineer,” said Qvera’s CTO Ron Shapiro. “Face-to-face meetings have a way of facilitating problem solving in an incredibly efficient manner. We’ve solved problems in minutes instead of months outside the Connectathon events.”

Building on its reputation as the premier testing venue for standards-based interoperability, the IHE North American (NA) Connectathon 2017 launched several activities designed to unite the efforts of IHE with the industry’s latest technology advances focused on mHealth apps, APIs, and HL7 FHIR®. The 19th annual IHE North American Connectathon was held Jan. 23-27 at the Huntington Convention Center and HIMSS Innovation Center in Cleveland. New this year, the mHealth Plug-A-Thon and Devices on FHIR gave developers the opportunity to learn how to develop innovative technologies leveraging IHE Profiles.

The Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHAlliance) and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) are launching several joint initiatives in 2017 that will focus on improving the ways health IT systems share information. The two organizations share the mission of improving interoperability and overseeing conformity testing and certification of products worldwide. IHE’s primary domain is in clinical healthcare settings and exchange of health information across enterprise, while PCHAlliance focuses on home and remote health settings.

IHE USA provided written comments to the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology in response to the 2017 Interoperability Standards Advisory. Read more.

If it’s the end of January, you can only find our team of engineers and developers in one place: Cleveland – digging deep into interoperability testing at the IHE North American Connectathon. As the only event of its kind with around 500 participants annually, we take part in an unprecedented opportunity for health IT vendors from across the marketplace to test real-world scenarios, uncover interoperability challenges, and then work together to identify and test solutions. Our company has come to rely on this as one of the most integral parts of our product development cycle.

IHE International and HL7 are working in coordination to expedite the development and adoption of HL7 FHIR. Today, IHE has 18 IHE Profiles that leverage FHIR technology.

HL7 and NCQA are partnering to host the first Digital Quality Summit—gathering the best and brightest in health care and technology to demonstrate methods for eliminating measurement burdens and bridging the digital gap. This two-day event brings together key players to demonstrate emerging technology standards for quality reporting. • Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard will play a major role in breaking down barriers to interoperability. • Clinical Quality Language will harmonize standards between electronic clinical quality measures and clinical decision support. The unstructured nature of the sessions will give your staff one on one time with key members of this growing community, and to participate actively in the outcomes of the sessions. Learn more https://www.hl7.org/events/digital_quality_summit/2017/sponsorships.cfm, or contact Karen Van Hentenryck with questions. This is not the typical conference of presentations and PowerPoint slides: This is a working summit. Plan for interactive work sessions, networking with peers and hands-on demonstrations. Teams will work with specific quality measures to solve data challenges and demonstrate solutions. You will learn how IT can increase the efficiency of quality reporting and reduce the burden of data collection. Workstreams are focused on Interoperability Use Cases for Policy makers, Implementations in Systems, Decision Support and Quality Improvement. There may even be a few opportunities to have your relevant subject matter expert join final workstream development.