Since 1998 the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative is attempting to stimulate integration of healthcare information resources to improve clinical care. They have been developing frameworks and profiles for testing of interoperability and standards compliance.

The approach employed in the IHE (http://www.ihe.net/) initiative is not to define new integration standards, but rather to support
the use of existing standards�HL7, DICOM, IETF, and others; as appropriate in their respective domains in an integrated manner, defining configuration choices when necessary.

At the conclusion of each “Connectathon” event. IHE makes the Profiles and Technical Frameworks available Public Domain. In fact, draft Technical Frameworks are available prior to the next event.

1) Is there interest from open source project leaders to take on the tasks of bringing your projects into compliance with the published Profiles and Technical Frameworks? The results of this process could lead to eventually becoming a “qualified vendor” under the IHE umbrella.

2) Is there sufficient interest in the open source healthcare applications (clinical and technical) community to form a project to work on extending the IHE profiles and maybe informing their process at the same time? This would no doubt lead to parallel work going on with work inside IHE but that might not be a bad idea.

I appreciate your thoughts on these questions.