Enabling cross-organisation access to legacy healthcare information systems in ARTEMIS using the IHE RID profile

The localisation of and access to electronically available patient-centric information across the boundaries of healthcare organisations is mostly limited to the field of telemedicine applications today. However, considering the specialisation of medical organisations, the need for cost reduction e. g. by avoiding unnecessary examinations, and the mobility of the population especially at European level, cross-organisational access to medical information related to a particular patient would certainly be beneficial. The EC-funded project ARTEMIS is developing a semantic web based P2P interoperability infrastructure for healthcare information systems. The ARTEMIS P2P network provides a Patient Identification Protocol (PID Protocol) – a mechanism to locate patientrelated documents in conformance with access authorisation and privacy regulations. For the retrieval of such documents, ARTEMIS combines the PID protocol with the Retrieve Information for Display (RID) integration profile proposed by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative. This profile enables users to retrieve and display patient-related documents on systems other than the document keeping systems. In combination with the ARTEMIS infrastructure, RID enables users to access medical information across boundaries of medical organisations.