Health Information Exchange Network Interoperability through Ihe Transactions Orchestration

Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is an initiative designed to facilitate the integration of healthcare information systems in order to exchange health care information in a secure, private and efficient manner. Solution vendors now offer IHE integration profiles as web services that can be integrated locally or regionally to coordinate standard heath care activities such as clinical documents management. Although IHE profiles promote the use of standards, the federation of health information systems is difficult because each node to integrate is generally very different. Each individual node has its own services, communication protocol, security scheme, performance, customization and extensibility capabilities. In addition, IHE profiles do not address workflow management process such as the mediation, routing and aggregation of the content of IHE transaction messages. In this paper, we describe an architecture solution that addresses these needs and provides the orchestration of IHE transactions (XCPD, XCA, ATNA) to support state wideHealth Information Exchanges.