Resources & Q&A from IHE Community Meeting – April 17, 2025

Hi IHE Community members,

Thank you to everyone who joined our session on April 17, 2025. For those who missed it—or would like to review—please find the materials below:
• Recording: IHE Community Meeting_20250417
• Presentation Deck: IHE Community Meeting Presentation_250417
• Remaining IHE Methodology Session: Elliot has kindly offered to deliver the portion we couldn’t finish due to time constraints. That recording can be accessed here: IHE Methodology Part 2 .

Q&A Highlights from Elliot
1. Is it normal to ask a vendor for their Integration statement? Or is it just assumed that they follow it and will map if there are items that are proprietary and that they don't follow?
Answer: Yes, it is absolutely normal to ask a vendor for their integration statement, and many will publish them on their website. Vendors can also register their integration statements with IHE (www.ihe.net/testing/ihe_product_registry/).

I would never assume a vendor “just follows” IHE. First, there are unfortunately many vendors that don’t follow IHE. Secondly, there are many profiles, actors, and options for them to choose from, and the vendor may not implement the ones you are looking for.

I’ve also seen RFP responses like “Do you implement IHE PIX (Patient Identifier Cross-reference)? Yes, we provide patient cross-reference capabilities via <some completely proprietary way>." The integration statement is a clear yes/no response with no room for those sorts of games. By the way, that’s a bad RFP question, because you really want to know whether the vendor’s product implements the PIX Patient Identifier Cross-reference Consumer actor to go with your existing PIX Patient Identifier Cross-reference Manager—ending up with two systems both implementing the PIX Manager actor wouldn’t be useful.

I would warn though that just because an integration statement for a product claims to support some PIX actor, and claims to support some XDS actor, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the part of the system supporting PIX is at all related to the part supporting XDS, so you’ll need to ask those questions if EMPI lookup prior to document retrieval is important to you.

2. For the whitepapers. If we have already set up document sharing, are their new standards we need to review and change if nothing is wrong with our XDS currently?
Answer: With XDS, particularly, the family of profiles around document sharing continues to grow. Depending on how old your environment is, there may be new capabilities to explore. On the other hand, you say there’s nothing wrong with your current environment now, so it would be up to you. The Enabling Document Sharing Health Information Exchange Using IHE Profiles white paper does a good job of providing an overview of various profiles. One area of development in the last few years is a FHIR interface to an XDS infrastructure, called MHD (Mobile Access to Health Documents), which may be of interest.

I was going to point you to profiles with "XC” (Cross-Community) or just “X” (Cross-enterprise) in the name, but there are also many profiles around document content, metadata updates, privacy control, etc., that you might find of use. The full list of profiles can be found at wiki.ihe.net/index.php/Profiles#IHE_IT_Infrastructure_Profiles (or formatted slightly differently at www.ihe.net/resources/technical_frameworks/). The document sharing (XD*) white paper is probably the best orientation and is updated to include new profiles as they are released.


If you have further questions or topics you’d like to raise, please feel free to ask in this thread.

Thanks again for your participation and engagement!