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Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is an initiative that attempts to improve the way in which health information systems share information. IHE produce technical specifications for health information systems interoperability. Specifications that relate to a particular problem are grouped in an IHE profile. Standardised IHE profiles such as XDS or PIX describe and restrict the use of other standards in order to achieve full system, syntactic and semantic interoperability. IHE profiles are pragmatic as they attempt to make use of existing standard that already have wide adoption so that integration of the IHE profile into existing systems can be simplified. IHE profiles are also very use case specific. This has the benefit of allowing them to clearly specify exactly how semantic interoperability can be achieved, however, it also mean means that different IHE profiles are needed for each different use casescase. IHE covers many of the priority use cases, however, it is difficult to cover all use cases due to the many different uses of health system information exchange world-wide.
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