Cross Enterprise Workflow

Cross Enterprise Workflow (XDW) coordinates human and applications mediated workflows across multiple organizations.

Summary

The Cross-Enterprise Document Workflow (XDW) profile enables participants in a multi-organizational environment to manage and track the tasks related to patient-centric workflows as the systems hosting workflow management applications coordinate their activities for the health professionals and patients they support.

XDW builds upon the sharing of health documents provided by other IHE profiles such as XDS, adding the means to associate documents conveying clinical facts to a patient-specific workflow. XDW provides a common interoperability infrastructure upon which a wide range of specific workflow definitions may be supported. It is designed to support the complexity of health services delivery with flexibility to adapt as workflows evolve.

Benefits

XDW provides a common, workflow-independent interoperability infrastructure that:

• provides a platform upon which a wide range of specific workflows can be defined with minimal specification and application implementation efforts on the workflow definition (e.g., Medical Referrals Workflow, Prescriptions Workflow, Home Care Workflow);
• benefits many clinical and non-clinical domains by avoiding different competing approaches to workflow management;
• increases the consistency of workflow interoperability, and enables the development of interoperable workflow management applications where workflow-specific customization is minimized;
• facilitates the integration of multi-organizational workflows with the variety of existing workflow management systems used within the participating organizations;
• offers the necessary flexibility to support a large variety of different healthcare workflows by not being overly constrained.

Details

XDW supports a broad range of workflows that are:

• patient-centric;
• based on business/clinical needs that are defined externally to the XDW Profile. Such workflow definitions have to be known only by the applications within the participating systems, not by the XDW infrastructure (flexibility);
• executed in loosely connected, distributed environments, where centralized workflow management systems are not desired, or in many instances, possible.

The XDW Workflow Architecture (see figure below) builds upon the sharing of XDW Documents between “edge” applications using Document Sharing infrastructure. XDW supports the management of Workflow according to Workflow Definitions established between participating applications.

Systems Affected

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• PACS systems may store, manage, and/or display Evidence Documents.
• Display systems may query, retrieve and display Evidence Documents.
• Reporting workstations may retrieve, process and include details from Evidence Documents in reports

Actors & Transactions:

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Specification

Profile Status: Final Text <Replace "Final Text" with "Trial Implementation" or "Public Comment" as appropriate.>

Documents:

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IHE Radiology Technical Framework:

• Vol. 1 - Section 5 (SWF Profile)
• Vol. 2 - Sections 4.8 to 4.10, 4.14 to 4.19, and 4.23
• Vol. 3 - Appendix E

Underlying Standards:

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• DICOM
• HL7
• ...

See Also

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Related Profiles

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• Reporting Workflow [RWF] may use Evidence Documents as inputs to the reporting process.
• Simple Image & Numeric Reports [SINR] may include data copied from Evidence Documents.
• Cross-enterprise Document Sharing for Imaging [XDS-I] can be used to share Evidence Documents between sites over a network.
• Portable Data for Imaging [PDI] can store Evidence Documents on media such as CDs.
• Import Reconciliation Workflow [IRWF] can fix patient ids, etc. of Evidence Documents when importing.

Consumer Information

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Implementer Information

The Profile Implementation Template provides additional information about implementing this Profile in software. <Replace the link with a link to the actual Implementation page for the Profile>

Reference Articles

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This page is based on the Profile Overview Template