Initial Experience of 10 Imaging Vendors with the IHE SHARAZONE: a New Multivendor Peer-to-Peer Test Service for DICOM Objects.

Alignment of DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) capabilities among vendors is crucial to improve interoperability in the healthcare industry and advance medical imaging . However, a sustainable model for sharing DICOM samples is not available. To address this issue, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) has introduced the IHE SHARAZONE, a continuous cross-vendor DICOM data sharing test service.

Building an interoperable regional health information network today with IHE integration profiles.

One of the key challenges of architecting electronic record sharing solutions that are scalable and can provide acceptable performance is how to create a longitudinal record for a patient when the desired data will be stored in several distributed point-of-service systems. This paper will review the design and standards selection process that has been made by Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, a multi-national collaborative of care providers and developers that analyzed a variety of approaches. In particular, the requirements, issues, and alternative solutions for scalable, standards-based data locating services supporting regional and national health information exchange solutions will be discussed.

Clinical implementation of the IHE presentation of grouped procedures integration profile in a multivendor environment--workflow modification and barriers to implementation.

The implementation of presentation of grouped procedures (PGP) integration profile, as described in the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Technical Framework, on computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) scanners as well as the picture archiving communication system (PACS) addresses the problem faced by many institutions in which there are multiple-requested procedures performed in one acquisition. It is a solution that, just like the initial implementation of PACS, requires substantial modification to workflow. Implementation of PGP not only speeds access to relevant images for the requested procedure, it reduces network traffic and is less demanding on workstation hardware because of the smaller data sets transmitted.