Collaborative knowledge networks based on IHE

The recent trend towards integrated healthcare increases the need to support interdisciplinary collaboration along with the patient treatment lifecycle. However, for effective interdisciplinary collaboration health professionals and patients need to monitor and trace the medical and clinical information flow. This may lead to challenges as clinical information systems are often proprietary applications breaking the information chain. Integration and traceability of health data from multiple sources is dependent on the existence of appropriate standards that will allow technical interoperability. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is an initiative to improve the interoperability of medical information systems. IHE provides typical clinical use cases defined in integration profiles, which integrate health data and documents. We present an approach combining selected IHE integration profiles to explore and visualize the flow of information within and among healthcare providers. Based on this information flow we apply collaborative knowledge networks, which support interdisciplinary collaboration along with the patient treatment process.