Nogah Haramati MD, Abstract Co-Author: Nothing to Disclose

Mony Weschler, Presenter: Nothing to Disclose

Purpose: One of the basic tenets of the IHE is to facilitate integration between multiple disparate vendors in a standardized, uniform manner. Although, many large and small vendors have participated in IHE connectathons, most do not have extensive IHE production experience. We have created an onsite, multivendor IHE test environment to allow our vendors to tweak their integrations and for us to test those same integrations before we place them into our production environment.Methods: Core test systems from GE Medical Systems and IDX composed the core of our test environment. Image Acquisition actors were modalities from Philips, GE, Agfa and Siemens. The Image acquisition modalities include CT, MR, CR, DR, Digital Fluoroscopy, ultrasound & angiography. The IHE integration profiles for which the test system was designed include SWF, PIR, SINR, ARI, CPI & PGP.Results: Even at the test system level, it is evident that the vendors require brokers or other patchwork type accommodations to allow IHE functionality and workflow to occur. The vendors also required innovation and creativity to compensate for partial or complete absence of specific or general IHE functionality from other vendors. The IHE test environment functionally acts as an onsite connectathon and allows the customer the luxury of testing the IHE functionality against IHE and non-IHE systems.Conclusion: We feel that an onsite IHE test environment is crucial to the success of large scale IHE projects.

1. To undertand the critical role of IHE test environments2. To understand the differenece between an IHE connectathon and an IHE test environment3. To understand the role of the IHE in improved, open standards integration.

Haramati, N, Weschler, M, Onsite Multivendor IHE Test Environment: A Critical Component of IHE Implementation.  Radiological Society of North America 2004 Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting, November 28 - December 3, 2004 ,Chicago IL. http://archive.rsna.org/2004/4411198.html