IHE broadens IT Infrastructure Support with extensions and new profiles for 2010

The IT Infrastructure Domain of IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) has finalized its scope for its 2010 activities.  It includes three new Profiles focused on back-office support and three extensions to existing interoperability Profiles:

• New Profile: System Directory for Document Sharing (SDDS): This Profile is intended to support the participating systems (EHRs, Clinical IT systems, PHRs, etc.) in the Health Information Exchange (HIE) to discover the web services end point metadata of the infrastructural services. The Profile will target the Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) family of Profiles, but will likely be extensible to other network service endpoints.
• New Profile: Healthcare Provider Directory (HPD): This Profile develops a unified approach for authorized users discover healthcare provider organizations/individuals. This Profile will define network transactions to Directories/Registries and the attributes and vocabularies available. 
• New Profile: Enhanced Sharing of Value-Sets (ESVS): Healthcare interoperability is enabled by the combination of syntactic and semantic consistency. This Profile builds upon the IHE Shared Value Set supplement profile to add Value-Set Registry Actors dedicated to vocabulary distribution. This will enable consuming systems to discover and access the most current and relevant set of terminology codes.
• Update to Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) to allow updating of document entry metadata held by the XDS Document Registry. This new transaction will allow privileged entities to modify the metadata about a document without replacing the document. This also will include a way to mark a document entry as removed without deprecation. 
• Update to Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) and Cross-Community Access (XCA) to support the sharing of document content that will be created at the time of retrieval. This will allow a publishing endpoint to indicate that it is willing to provide an instantiated document upon demand that will include the most current information.
• Update to Cross-Enterprise User Assertion (XUA) to define specific authorization attributes based on the experience of existing regional and national project experience. This extension is looking to enable Role-Based Access Control, Level-of-Assurance, Legitimate-Relationship, and others.

Overall this year the IHE IT Infrastructure committee will be focused on making small adjustments to the overall Healthcare IT infrastructure. This is recognizing the maturity of the Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) family of profiles as an infrastructure to build a Health Information Exchange (HIE).