IHE Patient Care Coordination (PCC) Technical Framework Supplement: Retrieve Clinical Knowledge (RCK)

A wide range of web resources support access to clinical knowledge (e.g. about a specific disease, medical condition, set of symptoms or complaints, or medication) for both clinicians and patients. However, these resources have inconsistent structures and programming interfaces, making them difficult to integrate into healthcare IT solutions.

The Retrieve Clinical Knowledge (RCK) profile describes how health IT systems and information exchanges can retrieve clinical knowledge that is consistent and suitable for presentation to a clinician or patient. The profile also provides a more complete implementation specification that will assist electronic and personal health records to integrate with new providers of clinical content.

This supplement to the IHE Patient Care Coordination Technical Framework combines information presently found in standards and implementation guides from Health Level 7 International (HL7), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and IHE to describe a single interface that can be used by any system needing access to clinical content.

Main sections:

· RCK profile overview

· Actors, transactions and content modules

· Use case: patient education

· Infobutton knowledge request and response

· Security considerations

· Cross-profile considerations

· Appendix A – Infobutton implementation considerations