Cross-domain Strategic Planning Roadmap

IHE is a global initiative to promote the effective use of electronic health records and health information technology (HIT) by fostering the adoption of standards-based solutions for interoperability. IHE International brings together HIT experts and stakeholders in more than a dozen clinical and operational domains to develop implementation guides call IHE Profiles that define the use of standards to address specific HIT interoperability needs. It also oversees a process of testing that facilitates the use of IHE Profiles in real-world HIT products and care settings. IHE interoperability solutions are implemented in hundreds of products and in care sites around the world.

The goals of IHE include:

• Improving efficiency, quality and safety of care across medical specialties in all care settings by ensuring the integrity of health information and enabling secure and convenient access to that information for care providers and patients
• Enabling exchange of health information across institutional boundaries in regional and national health information networks
• Expanding the comprehensiveness of electronic health records to include the full range of health information produced in diagnosis, and treatment
• Supporting the use of clinical data for research, quality improvement and public health monitoring
• Expanding the connected network of care to include medical devices throughout hospital settings, medical offices and clinics and the patient home

Categories

To support these goals IHE has developed profiles in the following categories.

Refer to Profile Coordination Matrix.

Category	Description	Goals	Examples
Identity
Patient Identity	Find, manage & distribute patient identity and demographics.	Improve Safety Enable Exchange Expand the network	PIX, PDQ, PAM
Provider Identity	Find, manage & distribute details of provider organizations and staff.	Improve Efficiency Enable Exchange	PWP, HPD
Workflow
Ordering	Create & distribute requests for (clinical) activities.	Improve Efficiency & Safety
Activity Management	Manage performance of the activity (worklists, activity status, etc).	Improve Efficiency, Quality & Safety	SWF, CATH, EYECARE, LTW
Health Record Sharing
Electronic Health Record Systems	Submit, find & access patient-specific health information over networks.
Media Interchange	Export & import patient-specific health information on media.
Patient Documents	Standardized content & encoding (& distribution?) of patient-specific documents.
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