About IHE
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is an initiative by healthcare industry professionals to improve the way computer systems in healthcare share information. IHE promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7 to address specific clinical needs in support of optimal patient care. Systems developed in accordance with IHE communicate with one another better, are easier to implement and enable care providers to use information more effectively. Physicians, medical specialists, nurses, administrators and other care providers envision a day when vital information can be passed seamlessly from system to system within and across departments and made readily available at the point of care. IHE is designed to make their vision a reality by improving the state of systems integration and removing barriers to optimal patient care. This interoperability vision is demonstrated in showcases at HIMSS, RSNA and ACC events.
About Initiate Systems and Interoperability
Initiate Systems recognizes that interoperability of health data enables patients and their records to be linked throughout the healthcare ecosystem, whether they visit their primary care physician, an emergency department, a pharmacy or any other type of medical facility. Globally, many national initiatives are calling for an interoperable electronic health record (EHR), and interoperability is being recognized as a key factor in accurately linking patients across facilities. As evidence, provincial exchanges, regional health information organizations (RHIOs) and integrated delivery networks (IDNs) are planning or implementing interoperability initiatives.
Initiate Systems participates in IHE to promote interoperability through standards adoption. Running on the Initiate Master Data Service™ platform, Initiate Patient™ is demonstrated as an IHE IT infrastructure provider acting as the PIX/PDQ Manager in various interoperability scenarios. Initiate Patient supports patient-centric transactions required by the IHE integration profiles, namely: Patient Identifier Cross-referencing (PIX), Patient Demographics Query (PDQ), Audit Trail and Node Authentication (ATNA), and Patient Administration Management (PAM). A recent IHE showcase demonstrated interoperability through an example that followed a cardiac patient. This fictional patient registered with his primary care physician, then traversed the healthcare network with inpatient stays, surgeries, images and follow-up provider visits. During each of these episodes of care, interoperability standards enabled the clinicians to have access to the other clinicians’ assessments and the patient’s results.
These showcases illustrate the capabilities of Initiate Patient to serve as an enterprise master person index (EMPI) solution that provides a high level of accuracy, rapid deployment, broad enterprise scalability and strong reporting and analytic applications to make the most of patient data. Initiate Patient accommodates a broad range of data elements that can be configured to meet each RHIO’s or IDN’s unique requirements for data access and security, while achieving the highest rates of patient identification and matching. Overcoming siloed, proprietary legacy systems, Initiate Patient™ can aid interoperability by using probabilistic matching methods that can use any available fields for matching, regardless of discrepancies in how each facility tracks its information.
More than 1700 healthcare sites use Initiate® software to improve data quality, which in turn helps enable healthcare professionals to improve patient safety and care, provide new services and improve regulatory compliance.
To learn more about Initiate Systems products and services that enable interoperability and more, visit www.InitiateSystems.com/healthcare.
Download a PDF of Initiate's IHE Integration Statement.
Read "Accurate Identification: The Healthcare Enabler"