IHE Profile Proposal (Brief)

1. Proposed Profile: Appointment Workflow

Proposal Editor: Christophe Trébuchet(CH Sud Réunion) (Karima Bourquard (GMSIH)
Date: N/A (Wiki keeps history)
Version: N/A (Wiki keeps history)
Domain: <…ITI/GMSIH and CH Sud Réunion>

2. The Problem

In hospitals, the centralized appointment solutions are more and more frequently implemented and used. They are interfaced with care management solutions, EMR or with the patient agendas and resources. Because of the lack of a good integration between centralized appointment solutions and RIS or any others healthcare solutions, several problems will be occured: - collusion between radiology appointment with others appointments ; - no possibility to take appointments in radiology following or preceding others appointments in other specialties ; - no possibility to take a radiology appointment with the attendance of a non radiologist resource ; - no possibility to consult radiology appointments inside the care management.

3. Key Use Case

An easy answer to solve this problem is possible today because of the improvement of the management of the resources inside of the most common centralized appointment management solutions. The management of the radiology resources , appointments and agendas will be done in the centralized solution. Then it is necessary to create a workflow between the RIS and the centralized appointment solution for each appointment with the given data : date, hour, room, act, radiologist, devices. The RIS will register as usual the patient when patient arrives in radiology department and the rest of the procedures is the same. The workflow between RIS and the EMR will be the same that already described in the radiology workflow (feedback from radiology department : radiology report, state of the appointment,…). This answer can give the possibility to hospitals to use a unique centralized appointment solution. It can be also used by any solution in a ward department using a specific appointment management solution.

4. Standards & Systems

  The general workflow will be the following :

Schema : see document

Actors : Appointment Requester (AR): this system requests for placing a new appointment for a patient according to the others constraints Appointment Filler (AF): this system, after managing the requests and validation by the appointment requester, sends to the appointment tracker all the datas of the new appointment for the patient Appointment Tracker (AT): after receiving the appointment, permits to the user to consult a particular or a list of appointment for one or several patients. It also publishes the status of the appointment given by the Order Placer (in the ward) or the Order Filler in the others departments. The standards which could be used are HL7V2.5 or V3

5. Discussion

this kind of profile is under the competency of IHE. This problem was discussed between memebers of IHE few years ago with no answer. Because of the maturity of the domain and memebers in IHE, I am confident that it is now possible to solve it in ITI domain. The reason is that the appointment is a transversal function in the Hospital IT.

Appointment Workflow - Brief Proposal