IHE Connectathon

Last week I attended an event called IHE Connectathon. IHE stands for Intergrating Healtcare Enterprise. The Connectathon is an event that is put on by IHE in different countries at various times during the year. I attended the IHE North America Connectathon in Chicago. My purpose for attending was to implement some of the various profiles available in my company's emr application. The goal of our implementation was to be able to exchange xml documents across many different emr systems developed on different platforms with different languages. Anyone in the software development industry can appreciate the enormous complexity of this feat.

Several months leading up to the event my colleague and I prepared vigorously, working long hours. We constructed a database model I was proud of, and the code was not too shabby either. So we packed up and headed off to snowy Chicago ready for the Connectathon. We were quite surprised when Monday morning rolled around and all 300 attendees were there and started buzzing around like insects when the start bell rang. We sat in quiet confusion as we tried to digest the testing process that was happening all around us. After the first day we had figured out how to accomplish what it was we were supposed to accomplish. Mind you, we knew that we had to pass these certain tests, but knowing what our task was and how to accomplish it were two different things that first day.

As the week progressed we fine tuned our system, and dropped a few profiles (which meant less tests to pass), and by the end of the week we had our system functioning properly and passed twenty tests in total. Some companies passed more, some less – all in all it was a successful week and we have had the opportunity to really lay the groundwork for interoperability in my company's application. I discovered that Connectathon really wasn't about passing the tests as much as it was about learning how to become interoperable. In fact, "gold stars" or certification type awards were given out the first few years, but heavy marketing of these types of merits quickly negated the intention of the Connectathon. It created too much competition between the participating vendors, which had a negative effect on the cooperation of those normally competitive companies. You see, at Connectathon, it pays to work with your competitors – if they win then you win and vice versa. While there is a large sense of respect for each company's privacy, there definitely is a focus on working toward win-win situations. I spoke with one infrastructure vendor (one who supports repositories of patient data) who said they do not require anyone working with them to implement and pass the Connectathon tests – they simply have to be able to complete the tasks necessary for the types of transactions they wish to implement.

Where these tests will come into play is when other government-backed health initiatives push certifications forward using the IHE profiles. This is coming – it's a fact! The tests may be in a different form – administered differently, or what have you, but some of the same interoperability functionality we programmed for the Connectathon will be required in the future to have a successful emr application.

Whatever the future holds for me and health care interoperability I am excited to be a part of what it happening. I think it is revolutionary and I think that it will all affect our lives sooner than we realize.