The IHE-Bus: A practical tool to instrument and simulate IHE deployment

Abstract

The IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) initiative provides essential guidelines for the deployment of a digital health information management environment. IHE, while not inventing new standards, creates a system-level and component-level design, based on the products of the leading standards, HL7 [6], DICOM [3], and more. As such, IHE can be viewed as the "Standard of Standards". The most significant value of IHE is that vendors can work on specific components of the enterprise solution, playing one or more of the IHE actor roles. IHE defines, for each actor, its external interface to the other actors in the system. Yet, the integrator of an entire IHE solution may find this job extremely difficult. The larger the number of vendors involved in the solution, the tougher the job. The complexity of coordinating all the components to work as one coherent solution multiplies and may become intractable. IHE defines very well "what" should be done, but not "how." IHE-Bus offers a practical solution for the "how" question, with many advantages. This solution is borrowed from the business integration sphere. IHE becomes a platform, and each actor can be "plugged" into it in a simple step. New actors are independent of other actors already in the system. Missing actors can be simulated (by a "stub") until replaced with the real product in the future. Moreover, the entire IHE network is managed as a single coherent system with powerful tools encapsulating the enormous amount of knowledge and expertise deemed necessary to uphold this job.