" Information systems of a modern hospital govern extremely important functions as patient management, control of work flows, administration etc. However a great variety of recommended standards are used while in most cases no effective coordination and intercommunication is possible. Some years ago to simplify and resolve this problem IHE was created; it is a technical framework which identifies a number of components of the healthcare enterprise (the "actors") whose interactions are defined in terms of "transactions", that should be implemented according to HL7 and DICOM standards. Attempting an in-depth understanding of IHE structure and its principles of function, those transactions that can occur among the various actors, which of these are supported and which require specific actors, are analyzed. IHE is continuously evolving, therefore open to the factual contribution of all health professionals who can point out the main instances that emerge daily from their activity in the field. While its origin was specific for the field of radiology, the true soul and driving force of the project lay on the type of approach used: to get together medical specialists and information technology professionals in order to identify and solve the difficulties which hindered an effective and functional integration of healthcare information systems. "

" One of the key challenges of architecting electronic record sharing solutions that are scalable and can provide acceptable performance is how to create a longitudinal record for a patient when the desired data will be stored in several distributed point-of-service systems. This paper will review the design and standards selection process that has been made by Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, a multi-national collaborative of care providers and developers that analyzed a variety of approaches. In particular, the requirements, issues, and alternative solutions for scalable, standards-based data locating services supporting regional and national health information exchange solutions will be discussed. Guidance will be offered to architects of regional health information organizations to take advantage of this experience and leverage the IHE Technical Framework, its testing processes, and tools to accelerate their projects and facilitate the interfacing of EHR systems serving different care settings from different vendors or developers. The implementation experience in 2005-2006 of the IHE Integration Profile specifications supporting an interoperable RHIO solution among various EHR systems from more than 30 vendors will be analyzed, with key lessons summarized. "

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" Though more and more hospitals adopt PACS in Taiwan, they all meet the same problem of system integration. The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) association proposes an integrated technical framework and process profiles to solve problems of heterogeneous system integration in medical environment for information sharing. Therefore, this paper reports the experience of a case hospital that successfully applied IHE framework to integrate its HIS, RIS and PACS in Taiwan. This paper indicates that using the IHE can help evaluate the integration ability of PACS vendors, enhance staff's ability, shorten the PACS implementation time, reduce the cost, and reserve system's expansibility. The case hospital was able to successfully implement it's PACS because of executive's full support, using the standard, and providing complete training to reduce user's resistance. This paper not only shares the experiences of IHE adoption of a case hospital but also summarizes key factors to implement PACS successfully. Again, this paper confirms that standard is helpful to integrate heterogeneous system. "

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