The Foreign Exam Management (FEM) use cases in this Guide relate to a subset Diagnostic Imaging related document sharing requirements which were addressed by the Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) Affinity domain and which are summarized in the XDS Affinity Domain Implementation Guide.
Foreign Exam Management (FEM) relates to those scenarios where a health care provider organization with local Radiology Information System (RIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) needs to allow users to retrieve and view an “imaging exam that was ordered, acquired, and reported on at some site external to the one where the study is currently being imported.” (IHE Import Reconciliation Workflow Supplement for Trial Implementation)
Although existing systems provide the means to import Foreign Exams from external sources manually, the integration of local systems with shared Diagnostic Imaging Repositories (DI-R) introduces new workflows and requirements in need of standardization, including:
- Automated import (fetching) of prior exams, and
- Rules for local management of content which is maintained within and readily available from alternate source systems.