Focus of Scope for 2017-2018 Foreign Exam Management (FEM) IHE Proposal

Hello CHI Diagnostic Imaging Community,

One of the discussions on the call today was about ensuring that FEM gets accepted (prioritized) as a profile for the 2017-2018 IHE cycle, as it narrowly missed the IHE Planning Committee voting approval last year.

There are several key elements to this:

1.) ensuring that CHI members are paid, eligible voting IHE members (see link here to verify)
2.) doing some of the template pre-work prior to the profile submission (we are already working on this with the Tuesday FEM technical calls by initiating the development of the template)
3.) verifying that the IHE Technical Committee "level of effort estimate" is sufficiently low that it does not exceed the available IHE Technical Committee bandwidth and is not automatically eliminated

Elements 1 and 2 are being implemented by many proposal authors now. Hard to differentiate too much more there.

However, we discussed element #3, proposal scope, at length on the call. To be clear, however, per Kinson's comments as well, having a well defined, narrow scope to begin often results in a better technical solution, better documentation, a less overwhelming specification, easier training, and more vendor adoption. It should not necessarily be viewed negatively.

Currently, the FEM proposal consists of the following Use Cases:
1) Radiology Priors, including Reports, with XDS.b infrastructure,
2) Radiology Priors, including Reports, with DICOM infrastructure,
3) Imaging and Reporting performed in separate facilities,
4) Emergency patient transfer,
5) Remote Consult

The current proposal on the table is to limit FEM for this next upcoming 2017-2018 cycle to only the FIRST TWO use cases with the goal of increasing the probability of passing the final vote in the IHE Planning Committee in Sept/Oct 2017. The risk is that FEM does not make the IHE Rad prioritized list at all.

The other Use Cases, or potentially at least Use Cases 4 and 5, could be proposed as additional features, possibly as Named Options, for the 2018-2019 IHE Rad cycle. To be clear, however, this would require an additional/new profile proposal in August 2018 and would need to pass the voting/prioritization process again. There is no guarantee that will happen. (but there is also no guarantee the reduced scope FEM will pass in the current cycle either.)

No decision was made on the CHI DI Community call today, other than to create this post to initiate thought and discussion. A decision does need to be within two weeks or so to be able to refocus the FEM template development, however.

PLEASE REPLY/COMMENT WITH YOUR THOUGHTS AND CONCERNS!

Many thanks,
Teri