COCIR promotes participation in IHE Connect-a-thon

The annual IHE Connect-a-thon is a ‘connectivity marathon’ linking leading healthcare and healthcare IT companies with users as part of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative.  The Connect-a-thon will take place in<st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Barcelona</st1:place></st1:city> on April 24 to 28. 

The IHE initiative has developed a wide Technical Framework that specifies the use of standards (DICOM, HL-7, XML, CDA, etc) in the most common processes of the healthcare enterprise. Although IHE started its activities in the radiology domain back in 1998, today’s scope includes many domains like cardiology, laboratory, information technology infrastructure, patient care coordination… This last domain, patient care coordination, aims to achieve interoperability among different electronic healthcare records, so that clinical data of every patient can be easily and immediately accessed independently of how and where they were originated.

IHE Europe’s connectivity marathon, the so-called IHE Connect-a-thon, is held once a year. In this event, all companies that have implemented IHE’s Technical Framework specifications in their products have the chance to test them with many other companies’ products in a real interoperability environment. An “IHE Integration Statement” will be published only for those products that have successfully passed the tests.

COCIR and its members will be actively participating among the 70 companies, 110 products and 250 participants who will attend the Connectathon.  COCIR also provides the secretariat and legal framework for IHE in <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>.

For more information on IHE go to: www.ihe-europe.org