Philips IntelliSpace PACS 4.4 will provide the first generation of ‘federated’ capabilities, allowing hospitals and imaging centers to combine their individual data to create a comprehensive medical experience of the patient.
Ideally, it is valuable for clinicians to be able to view images and reports regardless of where and when they were created. In reality, a patient’s historical images are often not stored together, as they visit multiple independent hospitals or imaging centers.
Creating a ‘federation’ or a ‘federated system’ of autonomous healthcare institutions that have the capability to share data, or behave as a single system, is often described as ‘federating a healthcare enterprise’.
Overcoming the challenges
The standards employed by information systems and PACS (HL7 and DICOM), do not provide enough functionality on their own to enable the levels of communication required for disparate systems to behave as a single system.
Members of RSNA and HIMSS have teamed to launch an initiative known as “Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise” (IHE). As a result, two new elements have been introduced:
- A Profile – A profile is a set of transactions that when properly executed result in the sharing of desired information in the appropriate context.
- An Actor – An actor is one of the systems playing a specific role in the execution of the defined transactions.
Sharing information
Profiles that assist in development of a federated system are XDS, PDQ, and PIX.
- Cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS) profile – An XDS profile is the creation of a cross-domain registry and a repository. Patient demographics are entered into a single holding area or registry. The registry allows for queries of the repository to find out where the patient has been and which locations hold exams. The repository is the holding area for the exams.
- Patient data query (PDQ) profile – The PDQ profile allows a user to submit a few elements of the patient demographics (i.e. name, DOB, sex), as part of the query, returning a list of patient data that is most likely a match.
- Patient identifier cross-referencing (PIX) profile – The PIX profile assumes there is some sort of patient identifier (ID) manager that keeps a table of all identifiers for the patient. A clinician can query the PIX manager using the patient ID and the data returned will be inclusive for that patient across the federated systems.
Ready today
At Philips we realize that the current need for federated facilities might be outpacing the deployment of these new IHE elements. With the introduction of the federated capabilities within the IntelliSpace PACS 4.4 release, Philips has built in components that enable federation, even in the absence of the IHE components.
Contact your local Philips technical team to understand what features are available to you today based on your individual environment.
+ Read the white paper