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forBridge – cross community access to patient information

forBridge enables cross community access to patient information

ForBridge enables your XDS-based Health Information Exchange (HIE) network to access patient information that resides outside your home community.

ForBridge is based on the Cross-Community Access (XCA) Profile from the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) organization. It provides both the “Initiating Gateway” as well as the “Responding Gateway” functionality. These gateway components are required to either initiate a query for clinical documents to a remote community, or to respond to such a request from another community.

Suitable for any cross-community access situation

ForBridge can be used in any situation where cross-community access is required. This may be in a network utilizing other Forcare components. It may as well be in a network that does use XDS based components from other vendors, or even an XCA Responding Gateway to a non-XDS network. When forBridge is in place, XDS-based clinical applications connect directly to forBridge. ForBridge will proxy XDS transactions from these applications to both local and remote registries.

Local and remote patient data in a single worklist

Upon receiving a “document query” transaction from a XDS document consumer application, forBridge will span the query to both the local XDS registry and one or more designated remote registries. The query results from both the local and remote registries are combined and returned to the document consumer application. As a result the user is presented with a document overview showing both local and remote information in a single worklist.

Clear handling of remote document requests

A remote community may connect to forBridge for document query and retrieve requests. ForBridge will forward document queries to the local XDS registry and “tunnel” document retrieve requests to the correct XDS repository inside the home community. Using forBridge XACML based access control policies the home community can determine which requests are blocked and which are allowed to go through.