communityLink

communityLink connects multiple healthcare enterprises or groups of enterprises (called communities) into a larger network so clinical information can travel with the patient beyond the boundary of a single enterprise.

As a fully-featured IHE XCA Gateway, communityLink interfaces with local information systems in order to securely expose selected clinical content managed by these systems to remote healthcare enterprises. It also makes clinical information from the remote enterprises accessible to the local enterprise.

Many EMR vendors, including Epic and Cerner, support the XCA standard standard as a means of exchanging clinical information with external systems, enterprises, or communities of enterprises. Moreover, the Office on the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology recommends XCA as a interoperability approach for exchanging clinical data between disparate EMR systems.

Leafsprout utilizes communityGateway internally as a way to bring external health records into its own echosystem, and to allow external systems/EMRs access its own content.

Features:

• Implements the IHE Cross Community Access (XCA) Initiating Gateway and Responding Gateway.
• Handles inbound (foreign enterprise to local) and outbound (local enterprise to foreign) queries and retrievals.
• Locates both local and remote health records pertaining to the patient of interest.
• Translates patient identities between communities with the help of a Master Patient Index (MPI).
• Interfaces with IHE Cross Community Patient Discovery (XCPD) gateways.
• Supports XDS-based information systems out of the box.
• Utilizes SAML tokens and digital certificates for enforcement of strict access controls.
• Integrates with proprietary (non IHE) systems via XDS-compliant adapters from third-party vendors or via custom-developed interfaces.
• Administration via a web-based client.