The Grapevine Orchestration Engine (GOE) is a manufacturer-independent IT solution that unites private and public sector healthcare and research institutions, as well as technology companies with the dual aims of establishing a global standardization for the exchange of healthcare data and of facilitating the interoperability of a vast array of different IT systems. This enables data barriers to be overcome and a new and improved healthcare economy to be established.

The GOE is a Microsoft Azure based software solution that simplifies the implementation of IHE standard transactions. This allows easy integration to combine different providers and their transactions to communicate with an EHR back-end system. The GOE easily “translates” proprietary transactions into IHE-compliant, standard transactions and vice versa. It allows a non-IHE-compliant EMR to interact with an IHE infrastructure. This means that existing systems can be federated with ease. The GOE reduces the development effort needed to be able to connect to an IHE EHR system.

This approach not only allows existing systems to remain in place, but adds value by allowing systems to utilize our software and accreditations (Anything we can do, YOU can do too!).

Clinical data is usually stored in the datacenters of healthcare providers (HCP) or healthcare organizations (HPO) in either proprietary format (Electronic Medical Record, EMR), or ready to be shared (EHR), or even in paper-format. EMRs are system-internal representation of clinical data, and they are not usually interoperable. When a record needs to cross the border of a Healthcare Information System (HIS) becomes an EHR and typical formats are Clinical Document Architecture (CDA, or FHIR Resources). Depending on the granularity of the semantics chosen to represent the data, clinical documents vary from scanned documents, to normal text in prosa (CDA L1), or fully coded in a vocabulary/ontology (CDA L2, L3). Such data flows following such IHE standards as XDS, or XCA, or FHIR across the boundaries of the organizations. The access to clinical data is made using those IHE transactions seamlessly entering in the domain of the hospital and keeping and enhancing the existing security procedures. For those HCPs and HPOs who do not have yet a IHE-based infrastructure, the GOE and the Façade will perform the EMR-to-EHR translation. The GOE and the Façade have its roots in the national connector of the National Contact Point for eHealth (NCPeH) , the SDK based on Web-Service and RESTFul APIs that connects clinics and hospitals across the European Union.