Karos Health Blog

The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) North American Connectathon is the healthcare IT industry’s largest interoperability testing event. It‘s held every year in Chicago and this year over 150 vendors and more than 600 engineers tested the interoperability of their systems, setting a new participation record. IHE is focused on helping industry stakeholders develop better systems by fostering compliance with standards, electronic health record system connectivity and interoperability exchange of patient health information. There is no better way to demonstrate our interest and our commitment to enabling clinically relevant flow of patient information between providers and institutions.

Like last year, the Karos team loaded up a van with computer equipment and drove from Waterloo, Ontario to Chicago, an 8 hour trip. Although we have been participating in Connectathons for a number of years now, it is still a major undertaking that starts every year in September. In September each year, we decide on what we want validate, what products to bring, and start planning our activities for pre-connectathon testing in November and December.

While we have gained a lot of experience with these events throughout the years, we set the bar high for ourselves in always testing something new, and validating our assumptions as part of our product release cycle. For us, Connectathons are part of our product release cycle and not something we do on the side. Our focus this year was on validating the support for several IHE Integration Profiles for the latest release of Rialto Discover, which provides indexing of patients and clinical information.

In total, the latest iteration of our Rialto platform clearly demonstrated its interoperability leadership by successfully passing all tests for thirty-three (33) IHE Integration Profile / Actor combinations. We successfully validated several IHE Integration Profiles including the Patient Identifier Cross-referencing (PIX) Manager, Patient Demographics (PDQ) Supplier and the XDS Document Registry actors. In addition, we validated our support for the latest changes in the IHE Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS.b) and IHE Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing for Imaging (XDS-I.b) Integration Profiles for the Imaging Document Consumer, Document Consumer and Content Consumer actors.

Our team in Chicago with support from others in our office did an amazing job completing close to 200 tests. It is always impressive to see the vendor collaboration throughout the Connectathon week, all working to get the job done. One of our first timers to the connectathon sums it up nicely:

“For me, Connectathon was a great learning experience, it was great to see how other vendors work, the types of products and services offered by other vendors – and it just gives a whole new context to the work we are doing. Being able to speak with other vendors, meet them, and connect to their products from the inside (as opposed to describing your product to somebody, you are actually connecting to their product with yours and directly communicating and showing each other what your product does and that it works). Speaking with the different vendors and seeing the variety of companies and services around the world was amazing. The kindness and willingness of other vendors to run tests with you and others is fantastic – sure sometimes some of them are occupied, but most of them are extremely willing to help and run tests when you approach them. I think it was all around a great experience!”

Validating our products at the IHE Connectathon is core to our commitment to developing and implementing open standards that promote industry collaboration. We prepared, we drove, we did it again!

Thank you, to all our partners and customers, for an amazing 2011. In the past year we’ve significantly grown our organization to meet the demands of our customers. We’ve released several new product versions and launched our newest product, Rialto Keystone at RSNA. We’ve successfully deployed our products in key customer environments and created significant partnerships.  These achievements could not have been made without your support.

The progress we made last year prepares us well for the many opportunities that lie ahead. We are very excited about that and looking forward to collaborating with our partners and customers in the new year. We wish you, your families and organizations best wishes for 2012.

Last week a contingent of the Karos Health team was in Chicago for the 97th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. That’s a bit of a mouthful, and around Karos we just refer to it as RSNA. It’s an important annual event on our company calendar, as the Technical Exhibits portion of the assembly — essentially a trade show — provides an opportunity to meet with a vast number of healthcare hardware and software vendors.

We were at the event last year as well, but with a much more modest presence.

This year, we had our own booth, and many of the meetings that we had with partners and customers were held there. We had four demo stations, in contrast with our single station last year, and there were several occasions when we had multiple demonstrations going on. As with last year, we were quite proactive in arranging meetings ahead of time. In an encouraging development over last year, we saw more people who sought us out in our booth based on a recommendation or having a specific problem that they hoped one of our products could solve.

We introduced a new product at this year’s event and I was happy to be able to demonstrate it in its current early state. People were engaged, we got some good input and feedback, and the product looks like it meets a real need.

The event was a complete success for Karos. We could not have expected a better experience than we had. Now the work of following up on potential opportunities begins.