When working in a distributed environment there are several obstacles to overcome. How does information that a certain patient has relevant priors in another system in the enterprise become visible to the end user? How can the user access this data? Is it possible to interact with the existing data, i.e. create a new report or a second opinion? When this work is completed, how does the new work/data become available to other users within the enterprise?
In order to be able to access and display information from other systems these systems needs publish or to be queried for potentially relevant data. A key item here is “relevant data”, in many cases non-relevant data need to be accessed in order to decide what parts that actually are needed. When the correct data is found this data then needs to be retrieved and displayed to the user in a safe, fast and easy to use way.
The XDS design principle that one single registry is a single query/access point and holds the indexing data about all documents that are available from multiple repositories in the Affinity Domain, is the key point here.
- IHE technical framework
By looking at standards recommended by IHE solutions to many of the problems regarding interoperability can be found. The XDS-I profile recommend that a central index (registry) is deployed within the enterprise. This index will keep track of all imaging documents produced in various systems and make them available to other systems.
By implementing support for key actors within the XDS-I profile, as stated by IHE, systems provided by Sectra will be able to provide access to radiology data across the enterprise. And, if other systems support
the corresponding profiles, ensure interoperability. The central index, the “registry”, is the key to all information within the enterprise. Sectra PACS will be able to do an extended search for information published by other systems. This search is fully integrated in the normal user interface and will present the user with the full patient history.
Data created is published and registered in the central registry when available and relevant data is sent to the repository. This publication can be triggered by the approval or authorization of a radiology report or the archiving of images. The registry can be queried for data and the data can then be accessed from the correct repository. The repository in turn holds a subset of the available information to enable the user with the possibility to narrowing down the selection to only relevant data. This ensures that data is available on-demand throughout the enterprise while still keeping unnecessary transport of large data volumes over the network (WAN) to a minimum.