I’m sitting at O’hare waiting for my flight home after a wonderful visit with some friends from my graduate school days at IU that was preceeded by a week of work at the IHE North American Connectathon. As I start writing, it’s in the forth quarter of the NFC championship game, right here in Chicago, and to mood isn’t that great. Go Bears?

I’d be lying if I said that I had been looking forward to this trip. We in the CTO Office had built an XDS Registry and Repository solution to bring to the Connectathon, and while I was very happy with the solution architecture (I’ll write a separate post on this shortly) and we learned a great deal constructing it, I wasn’t expecting the actual Chicago event to be that interesting or fun. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The event is held in the lowest level of the Hyatt Regency Hotel that sits right on the lake and river in downtown Chicago. There is nothing fancy about the Connectathon layout, in fact, if you follow the link above to the Connectathon site you’ll see it exactly. There are three very long stretches of tables that seat perhaps 75 people on a side. Most companies participating in the event bring 1-2 solutions (EMC brought 2) with about 3 people supporting each solution. A solution has an assigned location along these tables onto which they set up their system. While we brought (shipped) a couple of racks, one primary and one redundant, and some vendors brought actual medical equipment, most just run their solutions on one or more laptops. Setup begins on Sunday, which is a time you can ensure that your system still checks out okay, can properly connect to the network, etc. and Monday at 10:30 the games begin.

The aim of the Connectathon is very simply to demonstrate the use of the IHE Technical Framework (TF) for IT Infrastructure in facilitating the connectivity between a variety of vendors in order to support operations in a healthcare setting. The IHE TF for IT is litterally hundreds of pages spread over a half dozen volumes plus another dozen addendums. They are almost exclusively specified via the application of multitude of standards such as SOAP, ebXML and HL7,plus a significant details specific to the healthcare market such as the definition of a domain for medical records, documents, patients, etc. I worked a bit with these standards more than a year ago, but then got very familiar with them over the last several months as we built out our registry and repository solution. After this development period and some pre-Connectathon testing I was already fairly impressed with the standards, they are certainly thorough, although also extraordinarily complex in places.

What happens when the “games begin” is that each vendor is assigned partners to whom they are to connect to within certain scheduled testing periods, and a list of specific tests that they must demonstrate and pass with that partnership configuration. For some tests the IHE provides a tool that dispatches those tests and for all tests the IHE provides a system into which test results are recorded by each of the vendors. As results are recorded they are graded by a team of a couple of dozen monitors or proctors who are also there to answer questions and help interpret the specs. As a registry and repository vendor we had partnerships that tied our registry with third party repositories, consumers (of data) and sources (of data), and similarly tied our repository with third party registries, consumers and sources. We didn’t know ahead of time who our partners would be. The services of a system are all offered (as specified by the IHE) as (I think exclusively HTTP) endpoints so when you connect to a partner you simply configure in their URIs and you should be good to go.

And here’s the thing – IT WORKS! This is my first reflection on the whole Connectathon event. With hundreds of pages of specifications,and probably thousands of developers interpreting them, for the most part, the systems could then interoperate. We had sources submitting documents and medical records, other sources applying lifecycle events such as versioning of existing documents, consumers querying for content, and other consumers retrieving DICOM images, etc. It was really, really cool. No one off solutions, no custom code to work with vendor A vs. vendor B. It actually all works the way it is supposed to.

My second reflection on the event is that it is a valuable event for the IHE organization because it does expose areas of vagury in the specifications when one vendor implements things one way and another does things another way. In some cases the verbiage in the spec leaves too much room for interpretation.

And third, what an extraordinary opportunity for us vendors. The five days we spend in that room connecting our systems to other vendors tests our solutions in a way that dozens or even hundreds of days of testing within in-house labs could never do.

In retrospect, I was totally blown away.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how collaborative the spirit was in the room. Of the 101 vendors at the event, more than 70 of them had essentially competing registry and repository solutions, yet we really stretched to help each other as much as possible, finding and sometimes diagnosing bugs with those “competitors” and burning the midnight oil to resolve something. I’m sure this spirit is largely due to the fact that the vast majority of the folks in the room are technologists, and well, geeks have in common an enthusiasm for technology and a desire to make things work. The days were long, but very fun and rewarding.

Oh, and I’m pleased to report that the EMC solutions both passed all tests receiving a nod of approval from the IHE. This is our ticket into HIMSS so come see us there if you are interested.

Every business trip I go on I ask myself at the conclusion whether it was worth it. This time the answer is a resounding “YES!”

Oh, and GO Jets!! (hi Boss. 🙂 )