IHE Europe

Alignment of DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) capabilities among vendors is crucial to improve interoperability in the healthcare industry and advance medical imaging 2. However, a sustainable model for sharing DICOM samples is not available. To address this issue, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) has introduced the IHE SHARAZONE, a continuous cross-vendor DICOM data sharing test service.IHE is a highly regarded organization known for profiling standards such as DICOM, HL7 v2 (Health Level Seven, version 2), HL7 CDA (Clinical Document Architecture), and HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) into practical solutions for clinical practice. The primary goal of the IHE SHARAZONE is to provide a reliable and consistent cross-vendor DICOM data sharing system.To evaluate its effectiveness, a 5-month pilot was conducted with ten imaging vendors. The pilot concluded with a participant survey, which yielded valuable insights into the initial experience with the IHE SHARAZONE. These findings can inform future improvements and developments to this important service.

Innovative solutions are needed in Healthcare to deliver interoperable and secure digital services. Big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Personalized medicine, are considered as the main priorities by the European Commission for the coming years. As such, topics are placing high demands on medical data to ensure that they are consistent, relevant, and structured. In order to achieve this degree of consistency data that is to be exchanged, needs to be underpinned with protocols and standards which need to be clearly understood by those charged with implementation. To increase data quality, integration guidelines called profiles allow a harmonious combination of standards for answering specific clinical needs and workflows. Alignment and conformity of the IT systems to the requirements is the preferred approach to build trusted healthcare IT ecosystem. The chapter describes a comprehensive process that allows reaching the goal of developing Digital Health Space. Based on two concrete examples, firstly, the Integration Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is a profiling organization that proposes a use case driven methodology for successfully deploying interoperable systems that are tested during events called Connectathons. Secondly, The Conformity Assessment Scheme for Europe (CASforEU) designed in the European project EURO-CAS completes the process by proposing a rigorous evaluation of the conformity of products and solutions for better confidence of the interoperability implementation. This chapter initially introduces the concept of interoperability and then describes in detail how to implement the process in healthcare setting, It also provides some concrete examples of deployment projects, and introduces the concept and process of the conformity assessment scheme for healthcare IT products and solutions.

Numerous tools de ne metamodels to describe the require- ments included in CDA speci cations, the most recent and standardized one is the HL7 Templates Standard. The Templates Design resulting of this standard allow distribut- ing the CDA speci cation in a formal way. One application of this normalization is the validation of CDA documents. IHE-Europe/Gazelle team developed already a methodol- ogy named Gazelle ObjectsChecker in order to generate model-based validation of XML requirements, including HL7 CDA standard. The aim of this paper is to describe the way the re- quirements from HL7 Templates Standard are imported on Gazelle ObjectsChecker, and the bene t of such method- ology for CDA implementation guides and for CDA docu- ments validation.