Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing-b (XDS.b)
The Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing-b (XDS.b) IHE Integration Profile focuses on providing a standards-based specification for managing the sharing of XDS documents across healthcare enterprises.
An XDS document is a composition of clinical information that complies with a published standard defining the document structure, content, and encoding. As a single unit for exchange in the repository, an XDS document is assigned with a globally unique identifier and is associated with its own metadata that reflects the content of the document. The metadata is not stored in the repository along with the document, but is registered in the Document Registry for subsequent queries and retrievals of the document.
Similar to any IHE Integration Profile in the IHE IT Infrastructure Technical Framework, the XDS profile is defined by the IHE actors involved and the set of transactions performed by these actors. To support a certain integration capability, the healthcare industry must have a product implementing the IHE actors and the corresponding transactions deployed.
This section contains the following topics:
IHE Actors
The various actors in IHE XDS.b ITI integration profile are:
Actors in IHE XDS.b:
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Document Source: Sends documents to a Document Repository and supplies metadata for registration.
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Document Consumer: Queries the Document Registry for documents and retrieves documents from a document repository.
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Document Registry: Validates and maintains metadata for each document and responds to document queries from the Document Consumer Actor.
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Document Repository: Persists documents and registers the document metadata with appropriate Document Registry. It also assigns a uniqueId to documents for subsequent retrieval by a Document Consumer.
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Patient Identity Source: Provides a unique identifier for each patient.
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Integrated Document Source/Repository: Combines the functionality of the Document Source and Document Repository actors to provide and register document sets in the repository.
The HDR's IHE XDS.b solution implements the Document Repository actor and its supported transactions.
Affinity Domain
An Affinity Domain is an administrative structure containing various healthcare entities that have agreed to share clinical documents in the common infrastructure.
To ensure effective interoperability between the different entities, a Document Registry is identified, and a number of policies are established in an Affinity Domain that specify the document format, vocabulary value set, coding schemes, and the Patient Identification Domain used by the Document Registry.
To build your Affinity Domain, follow the guidelines specified in Template for XDS Affinity Domain Deployment Planning, which is available from, http://www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/upload/IHE_ITI_White_Paper_XDS_Affinity_Domain_Template_TI_2008-12-02.pdf.