Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing

At HC2008 I was introduced to the XDS standard for Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (not to be confused with several other uses of the XDS acronym). XDS is a profile of the ebXML standards for registries and other related standards to specify a system for sharing medical documents. The important point is that XDS is supported by several major vendors and has been deployed in clinical health systems in several countries. As far as I'm aware, it has not made any impact in the grid world.

The basic XDS standard can be extended to address particular use cases or to add functionality. One popular extension handles DICOM files (a format widely used in medical imaging). Another (XCA) supports federated registries, removing the single point of failure of the basic model.

I think it is worth investigating for other e-Science applications. It may be simpler to leverage this work than to reinvent it. Also, it might be possible to apply our work on e-infrastructure security to the federation scenarios in XCA, which does not have adequate security mechanisms of its own.

Comments

Unknown said…

I agree, IHE XDS is certainly something one should look at - with the caveat that it offers an infrastructure for the exchange of documents.

Not all of the data exchange requirements are covered by documents, some are better covered by messages. See this whitepaper about the distinction between the two - at least how this distincion is understood within the HL7 community.

The documents shared in the context of XDS mostly use HL7's Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard. That standard is also worth a look at..

-Rene

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