Extending International Efforts, Integrating The Healthcare Enterprise Adopts Enhanced Principles Of Governance

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 22 Nov 2007 - 3:00 PDT

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Dedicated to improving patient care by promoting the adoption of standards-based and interoperable solutions for healthcare information systems, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE®) has taken a major step in its evolution as an international organization by adopting in October the IHE Principles of Governance. This document, unanimously approved by the IHE Strategic Development Committee, establishes IHE International as an association comprised of many member organizations. The IHE International Board also will take the necessary legal steps to form a non-profit corporation by March 2008.

"IHE has been an extraordinarily successful voluntary venture which has produced a large body of testable interoperability specifications in a relatively short time frame through the efforts of a large number of varied stakeholders," said David S. Mendelson, MD, co-chair, IHE international board, and chief of clinical informatics, director of radiology information systems pulmonary radiology, Mount Sinai Medical Center. "This step is a formalization of this organization that will allow it to extend its international efforts and work to deliver practical interoperability solutions in the quickly evolving world of healthcare."

IHE International governs the development of IHE Technical Frameworks and related activities and provides a common, detailed manual of policies and procedures for the committees in each of IHE's clinical and operational domains. It also creates new committees to address other vital areas of IHE's mission. The IHE Principles of Governance document is available at http://www.ihe.net/governance/.

Highlights of the Principles of Governance are:

- Establishment of the IHE International Board

- Documentation of consistent criteria and requirements for current IHE participants and simple procedures for new member organizations to join IHE committees

- Expansion of international participation and representation with continuing independence for national and regional IHE participants

- Establishment of a Marketing and Communications Committee to ensure consistency across IHE International

- Creation of a Testing and Tools Committee to coordinate the testing activities

- Agreement on an intellectual property policy that binds all member organizations to patent disclosure and copyright and licensing provisions, eliminating potential conflicts of interest among contributors to the IHE Technical Frameworks and increasing confidence for users of these documents.

Creation of the new governance framework was spurred by the growing scope of the organization and its increasing engagement with national and regional healthcare IT and electronic health record exchange projects.

IHE International is currently accepting applications for potential member organizations. The current members of the Strategic Development will act as the IHE International Board until new board elections are held in early 2008. Member organization applications are also available on the IHE Governance Web page: http://www.ihe.net/governance/.

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