Alessandro Sulis, researcher with the Visual and Data-intensive Computing Sector at CRS4, has been elected Co-Chair of the Pathology and Laboratory Domain (PaLM) of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative.
IHE is responsible for defining and promoting the guidelines for the integration of clinical data generated within different clinical domains (e.g. Radiology, Cardiology, Laboratory Medicine), aiming to ensure that clinicians can have access to all the information they need to provide the most effective treatment. This activity has become ever more essential in modern medicine, which increasingly involves multi-specialist diagnostic and therapeutic approaches based on complex and heterogeneous data. The IHE Integration Profiles are the main reference for promoting interoperability between systems by different vendors; in 2017, the European Commission identified 27 of these profiles as crucial for the improvements of clinical processes and endorsed their adoption in all Member States.
The appointment to lead the IHE PaLM Technical Committee recognises Alessandro Sulis’ authority and deep knowledge of interoperability standards, which has contributed to CRS4’s decade-long effort in the study and modelling of clinical processes, with the purpose of improving integration profiles and, consequently, the completeness and quality of patient data. In particular, CRS4 is currently the main editor of the new PaLM domain’s Specimen Event Tracking Profile, that defines the guidelines for biological sample tracking. The SET profile is nearing completion and will be released during 2021.