Description
Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) has specified the "Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS)"
Profile to store healthcare documents in an ebXML registry/repository
to facilitate their sharing.
Through a separate effort, IHE has also defined
inter-departmental Workflow Profiles to
identify the transactions required to
integrate information flow among several information systems.
Although the clinical documents stored in XDS registries are
obtained as a result of executing these workflows, IHE has not yet
specified collaborative healthcare processes for the XDS. Hence,
there is no way to track the workflows in XDS and
the clinical documents produced through the workflows are manually
inserted into the registry/repository.
Given that IHE XDS is using the ebXML architecture,
the most natural way to integrate IHE Workflow Profiles
to IHE XDS is using ebXML Business Processes (ebBP).
In this paper, we describe the implementation of an enhanced IHE architecture demonstrating
how ebXML Business Processes, IHE Workflow
Profiles and the IHE XDS architecture can all be integrated to
provide collaborative business process support in the healthcare domain.
The work described in this paper is realized within the scope
of the IST-2103 Artemis Project supported by the European Commission and is submitted for publication.
