Friday, December 30, 2011

Introduction to IHE profiles

I got my first real "Ask me a Question": 
"Do you know of any good introductory training resources for HealthCare IT workers to better understand IHE profiles/transactions in general? Beyond the documentation on IHE.net. "
The formal specifications are all on the IHE web site known as the "Technical Frameworks", "Supplements", and "White Papers". This site is not very helpful, it is simply a list of the documents that could be downloaded. These are the formal specifications, so ultimately you must understand them.

There is a more helpful listing by profile available on the IHE Wiki. Each of these are linked to a short description of the profile which includes specific pointers into the formal specification. I tend to point at these more often than the formal specifications simply as one can point at a profile, rather than a volume fragment of a profile in a library (aka Technical Framework). 

The most useful 'training' is the many overview webinars of the profiles. Most of these webinars were recorded and the recording is available. All of them have the PDF version of the slides listed. Unfortunately they are listed by the date that the webinar was given. 

For the ITI committee, which I am a member, they have these webinars further documented on the wiki. On this site is the Powerpoint version of the slides.

For the Privacy and Security webinar, I have further expanded this on my blog as a bloginar.

All of these are available from IHE. I must say that I am not aware of training beyond this. I would guess that there is some out there. I just simply have pushed all my efforts to create training into IHE for global and free publication. 

2 comments:

  1. Strange as it may seem: if there are tons of publicly available training materials (which, as you point out, is true for IHE) - people get swamped again with the old "data overload" issue.

    My company provides commercial training courses - and even though I point people to the available materials, many vendors still wish to attend a 1-day teacher led training course - to make sense of the plentitude of information.

    The first thing to do, as you did, is to point to ihe.net and its webinairs. But some may prefer a book (which doesn't exist), or a classroom training course.

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  2. I was asked to include a reference to the IHE specific training course (held at various European locations): http://www.ringholm.com/training/ihe_en.htm

    Our DICOM, HL7v2, and HL7 v3/CDA training courses include relevant parts of the IHE specification. To discuss DICOM or HL7v2 without toching upon IHE Radiology, or to discuss CDA without talking about IHE PCC would be madness - these standards are so heavily intertwined one can't really discuss them in isolation.

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