Cross Community Access - Discussion

Introduction

The Cross Community Access profile supports sharing of patient health information across communities. A community is defined as a coupling of facilities/enterprises for the purpose of sharing patient-relevant medical information. A community must have an established mechanism for sharing medical information among the organizations belonging to the community. An example of a community is an XDS Affinity Domain which defines document sharing using the XDS profile. This profile supports sharing of medical documents across XDS Affinity Domains. This profile should allow for extensions which support sharing of patient health information between communities other than XDS Affinity Domains. These extensions are out of scope for this profile.

In 2006 a [http://www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/upload/IHE_ITI_TF_White_Paper_Cross_Community_PC_2006_08_15.pdf White Paper] was developed by the ITI technical committee proposing a set of profiles that should be developed to allow cross community patient data access. This proposal is one of the profiles specified in the White Paper.