The IHE-Bus: A practical tool to instrument and simulate IHE deployment

摘要

The IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) initiative provides essential guidelines for the deployment of a digitalhealth information management environment. IHE, while not inventing new standards, creates a system-level andcomponent-level design, based on the products of the leading standards, HL7 [ 6], DICOM [ 3], and more. As such, IHEcan be viewed as the “Standard of Standards”.The most significant value of IHE is that vendors can work on specific components of the enterprise solution, playingone or more of the IHE actor roles. IHE defines, for each actor, its external interface to the other actors in the system.Yet, the integrator of an entire IHE solution may find this job extremely difficult. The larger the number of vendorsinvolved in the solution, the tougher the job. The complexity of coordinating all the components to work as onecoherent solution multiplies and may become intractable. IHE defines very well “what” should be done, but not “how.”IHE-Bus offers a practical solution for the “how” question, with many advantages. This solution is borrowed from thebusiness integration sphere. IHE becomes a platform, and each actor can be “plugged” into it in a simple step. Newactors are independent of other actors already in the system. Missing actors can be simulated (by a “stub”) until replacedwith the real product in the future. Moreover, the entire IHE network is managed as a single coherent system withpowerful tools encapsulating the enormous amount of knowledge and expertise deemed necessary to uphold this job.