Overview
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative provides a set of infrastructure profiles that define standard ways to integrate healthcare information within and across care delivery organizations. A new member in the IHE profile family is the Cross-enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) profile. The XDS profile provides a standards-based specification for managing the interchange of documents that care delivery organizations have decided to explicitly share. The XDS profile has acquired a leading position in specifying the architecture and guidelines for sharing clinical and healthcare information across organizational boundaries.
XDS assumes that participating organizations belong to one or more clinical affinity domains. A clinical affinity domain (CAD) is a group of care delivery organizations (CDO) that have agreed to work together using a common set of policies and infrastructure. Each CDO may have its own legacy IT system and/or existing IT infrastructure. The CAD enables the sharing and exchange of medical information across CDOs by using the established policies and infrastructure.