Collaborative Business Process Support in IHE XDS through ebXML Business Processes

Currently, clinical information is stored in all kinds of proprietary formats through a multitude of medical information systems available on the market. This results in a severe interoperability problem in sharing electronic healthcare records. To address this problem, an industry initiative, called "Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)" has specified the "Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS)" Profile to store healthcare documents in an ebXML registry/ repository to facilitate their sharing. Through a separate effort, IHE has also defined interdepartmental Workflow Profiles to identify the transactions required to integrate information flow among several information systems. Although the clinical documents stored in XDS registries are obtained as a result of executing these workflows, IHE has not yet specified collaborative healthcare processes for the XDS. Hence, there is no way to track the workflows in XDS and the clinical documents produced through the workflows are manually inserted into the registry/ repository. Given that IHE XDS is using the ebXML architecture, the most natural way to integrate IHE Workflow Profiles to IHE XDS is using ebXML Business Processes (ebBP). In this paper, we describe the implementation of an enhanced IHE architecture demonstrating how ebXML Business Processes, IHE Workflow Profiles and the IHE XDS architecture can all be integrated to provide collaborative business process support in the healthcare domain.