XDS - Cross Platform Document Sharing

Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) is focused on providing a standards-based specification for managing the sharing of documents between any healthcare enterprise, ranging from a private physician office to a clinic to an acute care in-patient facility.

The concept of a document in XDS is not limited to textual information. The XDS Integration Profile is not intended to address all cross-enterprise EHR communication needs.

To support composite documents, an XDS Document may be a Multipart document.

An XDS Document is the smallest unit of information that may be provided to a Document Repository Actor and be registered as an entry in the Document Registry Actor.

The XDS.b Integration Profile is now the basis for new IHE Profiles in the area of security (XUA Supplement) and Cross Community communication (XCA Supplement).

An XDS Affinity Domain is a group of healthcare enterprises that have agreed to work together using a common set of policies and share a common infrastructure.

A Document Repository is responsible for storing documents in a transparent, secure, reliable and persistent manner and responding to document retrieval requests.

A Document Registry is responsible for storing information about those documents so that the documents of interest for the care of a patient may be easily found, selected and retrieved irrespective of the repository where they are actually stored.

The Document Source Actor is the producer and publisher of documents. It is responsible for sending documents to a Document Repository Actor. It also supplies metadata to the Document Repository Actor for subsequent registration of the documents with the Document Registry Actor.

The Document Consumer Actor queries a Document Registry Actor for documents meeting certain criteria, and retrieves selected documents from one or more Document Repository actors.

The Document Registry Actor maintains metadata about each registered document in a document entry. This includes a link to the Document in the Repository where it is stored. The Document Registry responds to queries from Document Consumer actors about documents meeting specific criteria. It also enforces some healthcare specific technical policies at the time of document
registration.

The Document Repository is responsible for both the persistent storage of these documents as well as for their registration with the appropriate Document Registry. It assigns a URI to documents for subsequent retrieval by a Document Consumer.

The Patient Identity Source Actor is a provider of unique identifier for each patient and maintains a collection of identity traits. The Patient Identify Source facilitates the validation of 1860 patient identifiers by the Registry Actor in its interactions with other actors.

The Integrated Document Source/Repository combines the functionality of the Document Source and Document Repository actors into a single actor that does not initiate nor accept the Provide ad Register Document Set transaction. This actor may replace the Document Repository actor from the perspective of the Register Document Set or Retrieve Document transactions.