Adherence to standards improves reliability, affordability, and vendor choice

Karos Health is committed to developing and implementing open standards that promote industry collaboration. We believe that to establish the Electronic Health Record, vendors and healthcare enterprises must base solutions on industry standards that accommodate both legacy systems and future growth.

It’s not enough for clinical information exchange to simply succeed. Information exchange must not only be secure, but it must also be reliable and above all affordable. Reliability puts patient records and images at any point of care when and where required, despite information system disparity, incompatible data formats, proprietary interfaces and communication rules. We believe that adherence to standards improves reliability and reduces the costs of integration, making clinical information exchange affordable.

As a result, Karos builds products that are based on standards from both the medical community and from the software industry. These standards help to ensure the accuracy of implementations and allow developer community groups (such as open source communities) to implement and validate software components based on common standards such as DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) and HL7 (Health Level 7). Overall, open standards improve product quality and accommodate scalability.

To ensure that these standards continue to meet emerging needs, members of our team serve on global and national healthcare standards committees, in particular Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE®).

Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise

Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE®) selects and recommends appropriate standards for healthcare informatics solutions and their real-world implementations. IHE specifies how standards should be used to solve real-life problems, which is an invaluable tool for companies working to build standards-based solutions that meet specific clinical needs.

IHE proposed a practical solution to meet the challenge of sharing patient records between healthcare enterprises and developed the Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) and Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing for Imaging (XDS-I) integration profiles accordingly. IHE XDS is a transactional profile that identifies the infrastructure standards used to exchange data between collaborating systems within an EHR. The XDS profiles are built upon existing healthcare standards such as HL7 and DICOM.

Karos ensures that its products adhere to the IHE technical frameworks and its integration profiles because these profiles greatly simplify interoperability with other IHE-compliant products. Karos’ products are validated annually at IHE Connectathons in North America and in Europe.

The following IHE Integration Profiles are supported:

• Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS.a, XDS.b)
• Cross-Enterprise Sharing of Medical Summaries (XDS-MS)
• Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing for Imaging (XDS-I.b)
• Patient Identifier Cross-Referencing (PIX)
• Patient Demographics Query (PDQ)
• Personnel White Pages (PWP)
• Audit Trail and Node Authentication (ATNA)
• Consistent Time (CT)
• Cross-Enterprise User Assertion (XUA)
• Cross-Community Access (XCA)
• Basic Patient Privacy Consents (BPPC)
• Scheduled Workflow (SWF)
• Patient Information Reconsilidation (PIR)

And many more… for detailed information please check our Standards Conformance Statements in resources or the IHE Product Registry by searching for Karos Health.