Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS)
In the field of electronic health records (EHR), Cross Enterprise Document Sharing is a system of standards for cataloging and sharing patient records across health institutions. It provides a registry for querying which patient records are in an EHR repository and methods for retrieving the documents. Its system of registry and repository is termed an integration profile and was created by Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise*. XDS uses structured EHR standards such as Continuity of Care Record (CCR) and Clinical Data Architecture (CDA) to facilitate data exchange.
The registry stores metadata about each document stored in a repository, including its source or location. There may be multiple repositories of documents indexed, but only one registry per clinical domain. XDS provides a Patient Identity Service for cross-referencing patients across multiple domains.
Conceptually, patient health record data is classified as Longitudinal Records (EHR-LR) and Care Records (EHR-CR). Longitudinal records describe the basic patient health data across clinics and over the lifetime of the patient. Care records describe specific clinical data contained within a clinical domain. There have also been XDS standards XDS-I and XDS-b developed for electronic imaging records.
*Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is a non-profit organization based in the US state of Illinois. It sponsors an initiative by the healthcare industry to improve the way computer systems share information. IHE was established in 1998 by a consortium of radiologists and information technology (IT) experts.
