The transformation of healthcare by information technology is a vision shared worldwide. The time has come to make this vision a reality by harnessing the potential of healthcare IT to drive improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of care. IHE and HIMSS have taken the lead in sharing this message through a series of Interoperability Showcase demonstrations bringing the state of the art in interoperable healthcare IT to audiences of professionals at conferences in Europe and Asia. These events build on the successful showcases HIMSS has organized at its North American conferences for several years.
The IHE global initiative, now in its ninth year, creates the framework for passing vital health information seamlessly—from application to application, system to system, and setting to setting—across multiple healthcare institutions. IHE brings together healthcare information technology stakeholders to implement standards for communicating patient information efficiently among clinicians and other healthcare providers. About 100 conference attendees were able to join sponsors and various IHE committee representatives in the educational theatre theater offered at the showcase . There they learned more about how this framework can be leveraged to benefit current implementation of an interoperable patient information exchange that includes various healthcare specialties such as radiology, cardiology, laboratory, patient care devices, and infrastructure.
2009
The AsiaPac IHE Showcase event included: 8 participating companies, with 5 from Malaysia. A clinical scenario demonstrated included at least 4 IHE profiles and there were 15 educational sessions presented in the IHE theatre. The Minister of Health Malaysia toured the Showcase demonstration, asked excellent questions, and received the IHE fact sheet and scenario flyer. In all, 350 delegates toured the Showcase, which was nearly 20 percent of attendees, a higher percentage than is typical for our U.S. based IHE Showcases.