Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art ...

Distributed Patient Identification Protocol 245
Figure 4. Actors and transactions in the patient identification protocol (simplified)
repository as an alias to the local patient ID that identifies a specific patient in
the context of the current query transaction and can be used to request medical
records for this specific patient.
Medical.Record.Access
Once a requestor has identified one or more record repositories that have clinical
documents pertaining to the current patient available, the appropriate documents
have to be selected, requested, retrieved and displayed. This comprises the second
phase of the protocol described in this article. Since no global standard for electronic
health care records exists at this time that could be used to provide record access
in the cross-border scenario previously described, we suggest using the retrieve
information for display (RID) (IHE, 2004) protocol defined by the integrating the
healthcare enterprise (IHE) initiative (Eichelberg, Poiseau, Wein, & Riesmeier,
2003) for this purpose. IHE is a non-profit initiative addressing the issue of system
integration in health care with strong participation from industry, science, and medical
professional societies in North America, Europe and Japan. While IHE does not
develop standards as such, it selects and recommends appropriate standards for
specific use cases and develops restrictions (application profiles) for these standards
that allow for a simplified system integration. The result of this technical work is
published as the IHE Technical Framework and revised annually. The IHE Technical
Framework for IT Infrastructure (IHE, 2004) gives the following short overview
about the purpose of the RID integration profile:
The retrieve information for display integration profile (RID) provides simple
and rapid read-only access to patient-centric clinical information that is located
outside the user’s current application but is important for better patient care (for
Copyright © 2007, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission
of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.