Refining DICOM for pathology--progress from the IHE and DICOM pathology working groups

For making medical decisions, healthcare professionals require that all necessary information is both correct and easily available. We address the issue of integrating anatomical pathology department information into the electronic healthcare enterprise. The pathology workflow from order to report, including specimen processing and image acquisition was modelled. An integration profile - pathology general workflow- was created in the framework of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). This Integration Profile relies on 8 transactions based on HL7 or DICOM standards. An important issue was to define information entities (order, imaging study and report) and real-world objects (specimen, tissue sample, slide, etc.). Joint efforts between IHE and DICOM WG26 has resulted in a proposed common model for "specimen" usable for both HL7 and DICOM transactions related to anatomic pathology.