The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is an initiative by healthcare professionals and industry 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.

To lower the barrier to integration and expedite healthcare interoperability, OHF provides client side implementations of several key IHE profiles. These implementations were used successfully by 12 systems at the 2007 IHE North American Connectathon, 9 systems at the 2007 HIMSS Interoperability Showcase and 3 systems at the 2007 IHE European Connectathon.

• ATNA: Audit Trail and Node Authentication
• PDQ: Patient Demographics Query
• PIX: Patient Identifier Cross-Referencing
• XDS: Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing

Each of these transactions can be invoked via POJOs, Eclipse Plugins or Web services via the OHF Bridge.

• Stable Release: Milestone 2 (used successfully at the IHE 2007 Connectathon)
• Development Release: not available

Should I start with the POJOs, plugins or the OHF Bridge?

Adoption rates have been split evenly between plugins and web services. For some systems, such as LAMP or PHP based applications, the Bridge was built for you. For others, you have a choice. We highly recommend taking advantage of the greater capability and flexibility provided by using the plugins. Both options have been used in systems that successfully passed the 2007 IHE Connectathon requirements.

Functionality
The plugins were developed with full feature capability in mind while the Bridge supports a simplified implementation of core functionality. Review the Bridge WSDL API for available features.

Ease of Integration
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For more information regarding the OHF implementation of IHE Actors, please consult the resources below. To obtain code for the IHE components please go to the following page: Getting Started

IHE Project Resources

• IHE
• OHF Wiki
• OHF on Bugzilla. Submit a bug
• Newsgroup (See About the newsgroups if you have access problems)

User Guide Material

• PIX Source
• PIX Consumer
• PDQ Consumer
• XDS Consumer
• XDS Source
• XDS Metadata
• ATNA Agent (documentation to be posted soon)