Integrating the Health Enterprise (IHE) will hold its annual North America Connectathon January 26–30 at the Cleveland Convention Center and HIMSS Innovation Center in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.

IHE is an initiative by healthcare professionals and industry to improve the way computer systems in healthcare share information. IHE promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7 to address specific clinical needs in support of optimal patient care.

During the Connectathon, participating systems exchange information with complementary systems from multiple vendors, performing all of the transactions required for the roles they have selected, called IHE Actors, in support of defined clinical use cases, called IHE Profiles. Thousands of vendor-to-vendor connections have been tested overall, and tens of thousands of transactions passed among the systems tested. The sponsoring organizations publish the results of this testing for public review.