IHE Connectathon Provides Tune-Up for HIMSS

January 29, 2007 | Commanding 9,000 square feet of the exhibit hall at the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference next month will be the largest live demonstration of connectivity via regional health information organizations (RHIOs) to date, the Interoperability Showcase.

"We will be simulating four RHIOs and transfer of care across those RHIOs at HIMSS," says Didi Davis, director of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). IHE, sponsor of the Interoperability Showcase, is a joint project of HIMSS, the American College of Cardiology, and the Radiological Society of North America that is meant to promote implementation of multiple health-IT standards to address specific clinical needs.

At last count, 67 health-IT vendors and organizations were scheduled to participate in the showcase, up from 37 a year ago. To make sure things go smoothly at the HIMSS conference in New Orleans in late February — and that interoperability projects continue in the real world — some 77 participants spent last week testing more than 160 different applications at the eighth-annual North American IHE Connectathon.

During the five-day Connectathon, IT systems were expected to complete electronic transactions with similar systems from other vendors, based on predefined clinical use cases, testing the usefulness of existing data standards and finding workarounds for any roadblocks to integration and interoperability. "We're trying to do the dry run of what people are doing at the showcase," Davis explained at the Connectathon, held in a large Chicago hotel ballroom.

And what they will be doing at the Interoperability Showcase is demonstrating how RHIOs ought to work in and across specific clinical domains: cardiology, IT infrastructure, laboratory, coordination of patient care, medical devices, and radiology.

In radiology, participants are expected to track the flow of information from the moment an emergency physician electronically orders a chest x-ray. If all the proper connections are in place, the order should lead to the capture of digital images and then to documentation in a picture archiving and communications system (PACS). Following the test, the images should be made available to a RHIO so the patient's regular physician can reference them in a follow-up visit.

Upwards of 350 software engineers and technicians were on site at the Connectathon to configure, test, and troubleshoot the systems, and independent monitors volunteered their time to make sure participants followed the prescribed rules. To get credit, vendors had to test interoperability with three other participants per clinical use case to prove their products actually comply with established standards.

Results of the Connectathon should be posted at www.ihe.net by the end of this week, alongside statistics from past IHE testing. Viewers can query results by participant or testing domain going back to 2001, Davis says.

Each participating vendor publishes an IHE "integration statement," spelling out which integration profiles their products support. IHE encourages healthcare providers to reference the profiles when issuing requests for proposals in health-IT.

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