IHE Document Sharing (XDS) Metadata management Handbook

The IHE IT Infrastructure Technical Committee has published a new Handbook as of August 20, 2018: Document Sharing Metadata

The above document is available for download at https://www.ihe.net/Technical_Frameworks/ or at User Handbooks.

The full IHE formal announcement


The Document Sharing profiles from IHE including XDS and XCA, enable a Community to share Patient specific medical documents. This is described in the Enabling Document Sharing through IHE Profiles white paper (HIE using IHE). Each document shared is described by metadata. A Community deploying an HIE this way needs to define some metadata constraints and practices, so that the documents are found when they are needed. This handbook helps a Community to come up with appropriate constraints.

Purpose of the Document Sharing Metadata Handbook

This handbook is intended to assist the reader on the steps necessary to define how document metadata would be used, how to enforce and propagate that use, and how to evolve the document metadata use constraints over time. Use of this handbook will produce a set of documentation and plans that we call your “Community Metadata Specification”. A well-managed Community Metadata Specification is an essential component of an efficient and coordinated Document Sharing system. This becomes more important with increase in participation, the number of patients, document types, and shared documents.

This handbook uses the term “Community” as defined in the Enabling Document Sharing through IHE Profiles white paper (HIE using IHE). This definition is inclusive of an XDS Affinity Domain, an XCA Community, or a set of XCA Communities. This definition is also inclusive of the use of MHD (XDS-on-FHIR), although further discussion of MHD is not explicitly included in this handbook.

This handbook constrains document metadata to enable optimal discoverability of the shared documents within your Community. There are other responsibilities of Community management: patient identity and demographics management, organizational identification and credentialing, privacy policy, security policy, partner certification processes, etc. IHE addresses these broader topics in other publications listed in , Section 1.3, including the whitepaper “Template for XDS Affinity Domain Deployment Planning”.

Continued Discussion and sharing

These and other examples can be found at https://wiki.ihe.net/index.php/Metadata_Handbook. A discussion forum has also been setup at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ihe-metadata

August 24, 2018 -- added
For Fun I put the handbook on GITHub in Markdown format. Comments (issues) welcome.


Other articles of mine on Healthcare Document Sharing (HIE)