PCC TF-2/Preface

Preface to Volume 2

Intended Audience

The intended audience of this document is:

• Technical staff of vendors planning to participate in the IHE initiative
• IT departments of healthcare institutions
• Experts involved in standards development
• Anyone interested in the technical aspects of integrating healthcare information systems

Related Information for the Reader

The reader of volume 2 should read or be familiar with the following documents:

• Volume 1 of the Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) Integration Profile documented in the ITI Infrastructure Technical Framework
  (See http://www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/index.cfm ).
• Volume 1 of the Notification of Document Availability (NAV) Integration Profile documented in the ITI Infrastructure Technical Framework
  (See http://www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/index.cfm ).
• Volume 1 of the Audit Trail and Node Authentication (ATNA) Integration Profile documented in the ITI Infrastructure Technical Framework
  (See http://www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/index.cfm ).
• HL7 Clinical Document Architecture Release 2: Section 1, CDA Overview.
• Care Record Summary – Implementation Guide for CDA Release 2 (US Realm): Section 1
• Presentations from IHE Workshop: Effective Integration of the Enterprise and the Health System - June 28–29, 2005: http://www.ihe.net/Participation/workshop_2005.cfm, June 2005:
• for a RHIO-3.ppt Leveraging IHE to Build RHIO Interoperability
• Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS)
• Notification of Document Availability (NAV)
• Educ.ppt Patient Care Coordination
• Use Cases for Medical Summaries
• Ovrw.ppt Patient Care Coordination - Overview of Profiles

How this Document is Organized

Section 1 is the preface, describing the intended audience, related resources, and organizations and conventions used within this document.

Section 2 provides an overview of the concepts of IHE actors and transactions used in IHE to define the functional components of a distributed healthcare environment.

Section 3 defines transactions in detail, specifying the roles for each actor, the standards employed, the information exchanged, and in some cases, implementation options for the transaction.

Section 4 defines a set of payload bindings with transactions.

Section 5 defines the content modules that may be used in transactions.

Conventions Used in this Volume

This document has adopted the following conventions for representing the framework concepts and specifying how the standards upon which the IHE Technical Framework is based should be applied.

The Generic IHE Transaction Model

Transaction descriptions are provided in section 4. In each transaction description, the actors, the roles they play, and the transactions between them are presented as use cases.

The generic IHE transaction description includes the following components:

• Scope: a brief description of the transaction.
• Use case roles: textual definitions of the actors and their roles, with a simple diagram relating them, e.g.:

Use Case Role Diagram

• Referenced Standards: the standards (stating the specific parts, chapters or sections thereof) to be used for the transaction.
• Interaction Diagram: a graphical depiction of the actors and transactions, with related processing within an actor shown as a rectangle and time progressing downward, similar to:

Interaction Diagram

The interaction diagrams used in the IHE Technical Framework are modeled after those described in Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobson, The Unified Modeling Language User Guide, ISBN 0-201-57168-4. Simple acknowledgment messages are omitted from the diagrams for brevity.

• Message definitions: descriptions of each message involved in the transaction, the events that trigger the message, its semantics, and the actions that the message triggers in the receiver.

Copyright Permissions

Health Level Seven, Inc., has granted permission to the IHE to reproduce tables from the HL7 standard. The HL7 tables in this document are copyrighted by Health Level Seven, Inc. All rights reserved.

Material drawn from these documents is credited where used.

How to Contact Us

IHE Sponsors welcome comments on this document and the IHE initiative. They should be directed to the discussion server at http://forums.rsna.org or to:

Didi Davis
Director of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise
230 East Ohio St., Suite 500
Chicago, IL 60611
Email: ihe@himss.org