IHE Standards Come Of Age In The Age Of Interoperability

At the Radiological Society of North America’s annual conference this year, a real-world use case of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) medical image and personal health record standards is slated for demonstration. IHEs road leading up to RSNA 2012, however has been a long and involved one.

Back in 1998, HIMSS and the Radiological Society of North America created Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), in an effort to coax some more efficiency into health IT systems and help them communicate — or, as the industry speaks now, become interoperable.

As the U.S. healthcare system faced financial and technological challenges in healthcare over the past decade, IHE has been one much-needed vehicle for interoperability, with its frameworks helping organizations develop health IT integration plans, through the use of standards like DICOM and HL7...