Anatomic Pathology Workflow

This profile is part of the Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (PaLM) domain, which merged the former AP and LAB domains since 2016, January 4th.

Anatomic Pathology Workflow (APW) integrates the pathology department in the healthcare institution, and covers these specialties: surgical pathology, clinical autopsy, cytopathology.

Summary

APW establishes the continuity and integrity of basic pathology data acquired during examinations ordered for an identified inpatient or outpatient. This profile covers three main aspects of the workflow:

• The ordering aspects of the workflow - APW specifies a number of transactions to maintain the consistency of ordering information and specimen management information.
• The reporting aspects of the workflow - APW specifies a number of transactions to create and store observations and reports outside the Pathology department and to maintain the consistency of these results.
• The imaging aspects of the workflow - APW specifies a number of transactions to create and store images and to maintain the consistency of these images. Worklists for image acquisition is generated and can be queried. This Integration Profile also describes evidence creation.

Benefits

Reduces Errors and Enhances Patient Care

• Prevents manual data entry errors by ensuring that each piece of information is entered only once, by the person closest to the source of this information, and from there, made available in due time to any system who needs it.

Details

The scope of this profile includes surgical pathology, biopsies pathology, cytopathology, autopsies, and related techniques (immunohistochemistry, molecular pathology, etc).

Use cases:
This profile supports 5 major use cases:

• Use case 1: Surgical pathology – Operative specimen
• Use case 2: Surgical pathology – Biopsies
• Use case 3: Cytology
• Use case 4: Autopsy
• Use case 5: Tissue Micro Array (more than one specimen from more than one patient per container)

This profile leverages IT Infrastructure profiles [PAM] for sharing up to date patient and encounter data, and [ATNA] and [CT] for security.

Systems Affected

Systems involved in this profile are:

• The hospital Clinical Information System
• The system of the pathology laboratory
• Imaging modalities
• Multimodalities

Actors & Transactions:

Specification

Profile Status: Trial Implementation

Documents: IHE Pathology Technical Framework:

• Vol. 1 Rev 2.0
• Vol. 2 Rev 2.0

Underlying Standards:

• HL7

See Also

Related Profiles

• Integration Profiles APW depends on

• Patient Administration Management (PAM) provides accurate patient demographics to APW actors: An application implementing one of the Actors Order Placer, Order Result Tracker, Order Filler shall also implement the Actors Patient Demographics Consumer and Patient Encounter Consumer from the PAM profile.

• Integration Profiles depending upon PWF

Consumer Information

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