Interoperability
IHE 101: Two Conformant Systems, One Broken Department
Two vendors can implement every relevant DICOM SOP class and every relevant HL7 message perfectly and still produce a department where studies go missing. That unspecified space between conformant systems is where integration budgets go to die, and it is exactly the space Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise exists to fill. This paper is a transaction-by-transaction walk through IHE Radiology and Scheduled Workflow.b, the profile against which almost every RIS, modality and PACS on the market is sold, written for the engineers and technical product managers who have to specify, procure or debug the result.
What’s inside
- What an integration profile adds to a base standard, and how IHE is organised
- Scheduled Workflow.b: the nine actors, the twenty transactions and the twelve named options
- The identifier chain, and who mints the accession number and the Study Instance UID
- Both canonical process flows, administrative and procedure performance, step by step
- The unscheduled and unidentified patient cases, and the reconciliation profiles beside SWF.b
- What changed since 2020: the AIW-I, AIR and AIRA family, the web-native profiles, and MADO
- What a Connectathon proves, what an Integration Statement does not, and how to check one against the other
- Nine documented failure modes, and seven things worth writing into a procurement document
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