Our Contribution to Connectivity in Healthcare

Having all relevant information at your fingertips is a prerequisite for optimal and efficient patient care. Seamless integration of the hospital’s IT and Imaging Systems and their capabilities to interchange information without restriction are key success factors for facilitating your daily work. However, managing integration in larger healthcare settings where systems from multiple vendors co-exist often unveils deficiencies that require long-lasting, tedious efforts to overcome.

These are the reasons why Siemens has been instrumental in launching and advancing the IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) Initiative. The IHE Initiative is a long-term program sponsored by RSNA, HIMSS and other professional societies to promote the coordinated use of healthcare IT standards and to provide a common framework for multi-vendor systems integration. IHE re-uses existing standards such as DICOM and HL7 as the building blocks for assembling larger integrated solutions, thus the IHE framework is not re-inventing a new standard in healthcare but provides a practical method to make these standards work.