Software cements standards into health info exchanges

Health care software developer Healthvision has released an adapter that aims to help health information exchanges and applications developers more quickly adopt an interoperability framework being developed by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) consortium.IHE is a widely dispersed group of health care providers, associations, research organizations, vendors and government entities working on a detailed framework to wed health information technology systems and standards.IHE’s profiles, which specify how standards can be applied to address interoperability issues, are organized by domains such as radiology, laboratory and IT infrastructure.Healthvision’s Cloverleaf IHE Infrastructure Adaptor lets applications that are not IHE-enabled plug into IHE environments. This integration, in turn, lets health care organizations create health information exchange capabilities and reduces health application vendors’ development costs, the company said.On the health information exchange side, Healthvision is working with CareSpark, based in Kingsport, Tenn. CareSpark has committed to a “technical architecture that supports IHE…profiles for standardized content in clinical documents,” according to the organization.“We are acting as an IHE integration engine,” said Rey Currie, Healthvision’s vice president of product management and strategy. He said Healthvision’s software enables several of CareSpark’s older applications to communicate with the IHE infrastructure.Currie said health information exchanges and regional health information organizations are markets for the new adapter. He said the product offers those organizations a “quick start to the IHE framework,” particularly when older applications are involved. Using Cloverleaf and the adapter, exchanges and RHIOs can deploy the IHE framework without expensive customization, he added.Healthvision also markets its adapter to application partners that resell Cloverleaf. Currie said the adapter provides an IHE facade to applications that vendors would otherwise have to modify to be IHE native. In that way, the adapter saves vendors development effort and cost, Currie explained.The company’s Cloverleaf IHE Infrastructure Adaptor Version2.2 works in conjunction with its Cloverleaf interface engine. The adapter supports the Cross Enterprise Document Sharing, Patient Identifier Cross Referencing, Patient Demographics Query, Basic Patient Privacy Consents, Cross Enterprise Sharing of Scanned Documents, and Audit Trail and Node Authentication profiles in IHE’s IT infrastructure domain, according to Healthvision.