We have begun working with Kevin Peterson and his ePCRN project.

XDS is a protocol for Cross-enterprise Document Sharing. The XDS profile defined by Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) defines a standards based method for managing the sharing of documents among healthcare service providers. The XDS profile defines a set of actors and transactions which allow documents to be registered in a central registry, queried and retrieved.

An XDS Affinity Domain is a group of healthcare service providers that have agreed to work together using a common set of policies and infrastructure. An XDS Affinity Domain may be a Regional Healthcare Information Organization (RHIO) that defines a group of enterprises which will have a protocol for sharing medical data. Though an RHIO is regionally located, an XDS Affinity Domain does not require regional proximity.

An XDS Affinity Domain requires a protocol for sharing medical data. This XDS profile is document based and includes a single Document Registry containing an entry for every registered document. The entry contains a set of metadata elements. Configuring an XDS Affinity Domain requires first identifying the location of the Document Registry. Second, defining policies decisions agreeable to all participating service providers. Policies include document format, values for metadata elements of document entries, coding systems and terminology.

We are interested in building an Open Source XDS server with the following components:

patient ID server
doc ID server
audit repository
data repository

I’ve attended several telephone and video conferences on the subject and spoken with a researcher at IBM Almaden Research Center. We are in the process of specifying just what it would take to build such a service.