Cross-Enterprise
Document Sharing (XDS)
http://www.nist.gov/ehealth/
Bill Majusrski (bill@nist.gov)
Overview:
A patient record constructed as a collection of clinical documents
and organized by a document registry is a key component of an electronic
health record (EHR). The challenge is to make these documents available
to any healthcare professional, regardless of their organizational
affiliation, enabling them to make quality healthcare decisions.
The goal of this project is to collaborate in developing a standards-based
registry infrastructure that will allow healthcare professionals
to find and access all pertinent documents of clinical information
regarding a patient regardless of the healthcare organization that
creates and manage the documents.
Industry
Need Addressed: The use of document registries for sharing
clinical information intra-organizationally presents unique challenges.
Standardized metadata, interfaces and formats are required for interoperability
and interchange. The strict adherence to security and privacy policies
related to healthcare information must be supported by the technology.
Document registries, an emerging technology for indexing documents
on a network, provide solutions to many of these challenges. A number
of industrial and international standards organizations support
current document registry standards.
NIST/ITL
Approach: NIST/ITL is collaborating with industry to define
standards-based approaches to clinical document registries. We are
collaborating on the project 'Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise'
(IHE), an industrial effort with a focus on interoperability of
healthcare systems. NIST/ITL is a primary author of the IHE Profile:
Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing. NIST/ITL has also developed
a reference implementation for the XDS profile and a web-based test
suite, allowing vendors to determine conformance to the XDS profile.
Vendors also use the test suite as an early stage tool for interoperability
testing.
The
reference implementation is available as an open source project
hosted on Source Forge, called IheOs (i.e., IHE Open Source), at
http://iheos.sourceforge.net. The test suite is available at http://hcxw2k1.nist.gov/wiki/index.php/XDS_-_IHE's_Cross-Enterprise_Document_Sharing.
Impact:
The ability for healthcare professionals to access relevant
clinical information will greatly improve the quality of care decisions
and reduce the cost of healthcare in the US. Standardized clinical
document registries can help move the healthcare industry forward
in achieving this goal.
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