For the sixth year CRS4, represented by Alessandro Sulis and Vittorio Meloni, will support the activities of the international IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) consortium by joining the evaluation team at the European Connectathon. In this annual event, which this year will be held at The Hague in the Netherlands on April 16th-21st, clinical system vendors meet to connect and validate their products’ interoperability and adherence to the IHE guidelines.
Since its creation 20 years ago, IHE has had a fundamental role in health IT interoperability, connecting experts with different backgrounds (such as clinicians, developers, vendors and researchers) and releasing community-accepted best-practices (i.e., Technical Frameworks) to standardize and thus improve the technology supporting healthcare processes. The Connectathon is a very important moment in the life cycle of Technical Frameworks. After the specialized clinical Domain Committees (for radiology, cardiology, pathology, laboratory, etc.) create the guidelines, this event gives the IHE the opportunity to verify them in the field and it allows vendors to test their products to ensure their compatibility.
This year CRS4 is again part of the Connectathon monitoring team, to review and judge the results of the interoperability tests performed during the event. The organization, which has been an IHE member since 2012, also has an active role in the creation of best-practices for laboratory and anatomy pathology – Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (PaLM) Domain – and a continuing leadership in the development of a new integration profile devoted to specimen traceability – Specimen Event Tracking Profile.