A Collaborative Space for Healthcare Interoperability
The 2025 IHE North America Plugathon, will be held during the latter half of the IHE North America Connectathon Week in Toronto from February 5th to 7th, 2025 following the Experience Days. The Plugathon provides a unique opportunity for healthcare professionals, vendors, and experts to collaborate and advance interoperability in the field. Building upon the successful model of the IHE-Europe Plugathon 2024, this event focuses on fostering innovation and knowledge sharing through educational, interactive workshops and testing sessions.
The Plugathon, a less formal counterpart to the rigorous Connectathon testing, encourages open exploration of emerging technologies and IHE profiles. The event is structured around dedicated tracks that cater to specific areas of interest, offering participants a platform to:
- Learn: Gain insights into emerging IHE profiles, particularly those based on the HL7 FHIR® standard, and explore their practical applications.
- Share: Exchange experiences and challenges encountered during the implementation of IHE profiles with peers and domain experts.
- Test: Evaluate preliminary prototypes in a controlled environment, leveraging tools like Gazelle simulators and validators, with support from experienced mentors.
- Shape: Contribute to the evolution of IHE profiles by providing feedback on existing implementations and identifying potential areas for improvement or new profile development.
The Plugathon format fosters a dynamic exchange of ideas and knowledge, bridging the gap between user needs, vendor solutions, existing standards and harvesting industry innovations.
Who Should Attend the Plugathon?
- Developers and product managers involved in digital health.
- Business analysts and standards experts focused on interoperability.
- Leaders shaping healthcare technology strategy.
- Facilitators and QA teams preparing for conformance programs.
Toronto 2025 Plugathon Tracks
Track 1 | Emerging IHE Profiles: Explore the latest advancements in IHE interoperability standards and actively contribute to shaping the future of healthcare information exchange.
- Infrastructure ITI (Domain Lead, Matt Blackmon)
- Scheduling for Mobile
- Finance & Insurance
- DSUBm
- DSG JSON
- Medical Devices (Todd Cooper)
- SDPi Gemini project
- RAD (David Kwan / Kevin O’Donnell)
- IMR - this is proposed in HTN-2 rules, image links in diagnostic reports;
- IRA - FHIRcast
- Introduction to IDR - FHIR based Image Diagnostic Report
- What does the future holds: FHIR based IHE profiles (Grahame Grieve)
Track 2 | IPS & Patient-Mediated Access: Discover how IPS empowers patients with control over their health data and enables secure information exchange, while contributing your insights to the evolution of this critical standard.
Draft Schedule:
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Track 3| Advancing the Pan-Canadian Shared Interoperability: Collaborate with Canadian architects and standards experts to develop standards addressing key national interoperability challenges, with the potential for these profiles to evolve into international standards. Your expertise will directly influence the future of healthcare interoperability in Canada.
Why Attend the Canadian Interoperability Track?
- Hands-On Learning: Engage directly with key interoperability standards.
- Real-World Insights: See live demos, hear success stories, and explore challenges and solutions.
- Collaborative Networking: Connect and collaborate with healthcare leaders, developers, and innovators.
- Shaping the Future: Contribute to discussions that influence Canada’s digital health roadmap.
Canadian Interoperability Program Highlights:
- Pan-Canadian Digital Health Interoperability Roadmap Highlights and Insights
Get the big picture! Discover how the interoperability roadmap incorporates interdependent building blocks like PS-CA, CA:FeX, and CA Core+ to create a unified healthcare system.
- Patient-Mediated Access and Demonstration with PS-CA & CA:SHL
Explore the use of CA:SHL for patient-mediated access, how it’s evolving into Verifiable Health Links, and how it enables patient-centric data sharing. Witness a live demonstration showcasing how patients can securely access and share their health data through Sharable Health Links, with insights into deployment challenges, benefits, and lessons learned.
- Regulated APIs and Framework Refinement with CA:FeX
Dive into the “recipe” for crafting compliant, secure, and interoperable APIs in healthcare. Real-world examples from vendors, such as Venuiti, will inspire innovative thinking as we jointly consider potential improvements that can launch CA:FeX into an international approach.
- Insights Data Management with CA:eREC & CA:CSD
Explore how to manage large datasets, maintain real-time data accuracy, and standardize queries for seamless system interoperability. Learn best practices for data maintenance, bulk exports, query parameters, and have a role in evolving the future of the pan-Canadian eReferral/eConsult specifications.
- Insights Testing Readiness and Gap Analysis with CA Core+
Prepare for system validation with a focus on testing tools, workflows, and environments. This session will identify interoperability challenges and provide actionable steps to enhance conformance and functionality.
- HALO Sessions
Delve into key elements of an innovative interoperability approach that can reduce the design and development burden on vendors and accelerate connected care. See British Columbia’s implementation of HALO in action and support further development of the specification, covering practical applications and innovative developments in digital health interoperability.
Track 4 |Taming AI with IHE Profiles: Participate in shaping the future of AI interoperability in healthcare by exploring how IHE profiles can be used to standardize and improve AI integration. Contribute your expertise to the development of robust standards that ensure patient safety, effective caregiver experience, and responsible AI implementation.
- AI in Medical Imaging
- Intro to AI in Imaging (Kevin O’Donnell), Introduction and hands-on experience with using AI for Imaging
- Using AI for Image Data (Brad Genereaux), What can you do with the NVIDIA NIMS platform?
- AI Assisted Data Capture and Legacy Data Processing
- Generative AI / LLM (Lead – TBD), Using Generative AI to generate traditional report and/or a FHIR Diagnostic Report
- Impact and Governance of Auto-Scribing (Alexander Goel), Provenance and Interoperability needed for Public Registries and downstream use of data
- AI and Terminology, Using Generative AI to auto-code and generate traditional clinical note or diagnostic report (Lead – TBD)
Track 5 |Trust Frameworks and IHE as their Technical Enablers: Understand the crucial role of IHE profiles in establishing trusted health information exchange within broader trust frameworks, enhancing security and reliability. Contribute to the ongoing development of these frameworks and help shape the future of secure health information exchange.
Forecasting attendance from, a focus on and contributions from:
- FAST Security IG Testing (David Pyke)
- Catalyst Testing OAuth
- FAST RI
- https://hl7.org/fhir/us/udap-security/
- WHO (Carl Leitner - CTO)
- ONC (John D’Amoure , Matt Rahn)
- European Experience with EHDS (Lapo, Alexander, Jurgen)
- Canadian Trust (Infoway)
- South America/Australia/Middle East
Draft Schedule:
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Questions?
We are glad to assist you. Please contact IHE USA at Connectathon@ihe.net.