IHE adoption has increased significantly across Europe in the last few years. Many national/regional projects and countless healthcare institutions have adopted IHE Profiles to support their interoperability needs. Also, in July, the European Commission announced that 27 IHE Profiles are now eligible for referencing in public procurements as technical specifications. This is following extensive consultation and evaluation of the European Multi Stakeholder Platform on ICT standardisation and sectoral experts.

The European Commission stated that the 27 IHE Profiles have the potential to increase interoperability of eHealth services and applications to the benefit of patients and the medical community leading to their recognition in referencing in public procurement throughout the European Union.

IHE has been developing detailed specifications over the last 15 years in the field of healthcare IT and the Committees of IHE optimise the selection of well-established standards describing the different layers of interoperability – e.g. protocol communication, technical, semantic, syntactical – with a view to defining interoperability solutions for exchanging or sharing medical data. This was fully recognised by the European Commission in coming to their decision.

The Europe 2020 strategy for “Smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” requires standardisation as a support role and recognises the specificity of the ICT standards where ICT solutions, applications and services are developed by global ICT fora and consortia that emerge as leading standards development organisations - such as IHE.

For more information please visit:

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ:JOL_2015_199_R_0011