IHE expands reach into cardiology and IT

Extending its efforts outside the realm of radiology, the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise announced collaborative initiatives focusing on cardiology, the HL7 initiative, and IT infrastructure.

The IHE will work with the American College of Cardiology to identify the integration needs of the college's 27,000 cardiologists.

"We can now collaborate with the leadership of the American College of Cardiology and its member experts, as well as the other cardiology societies to further define integration needs of clinicians," said Joyce Sensmeier, director of professional services for Healthcare Information and Management Systems Services.

Cardiology experts from subspecialty cardiology societies will define their integration needs. The IHE will then develop the appropriate integration profiles.

The move to collaborate with the ACC will allow the IHE to extend its success in developing interoperability guidelines from the radiology arena into the cardiology domain, she said.

The IHE has also formed committees to address IT infrastructure planning and technical issues. The IT infrastructure committee is developing the following integration profiles:

? query display and synchronized patient view
? enterprise master patient index
? advanced security

"This work will benefit radiologists as well in that it will protect the data and provide them with access to critical information such as lab results that will help them with their clinical decisions," Sensmeier said.

In an additional initiative,the HL7 organization has appointed a board liaison to the IHE.

The healthcare community can look forward to further efforts to expand integration guidelines to areas such as medication management and pharmacy, according to Sensmeier.

'With these information-sharing guidelines provided by IHE, healthcare will have a crucial tool to uniformly deliver cost-effective, safe, quality care to people when and where they need it," she said.