Addressing connectivity issues: The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise-Radiation Oncology (IHE-RO) initiative

In today's world, treating a patient successfully with radiation requires the integration of complex data from a variety of systems. In a typical radiation oncology clinic, data move from the treatment management system to treatment planning system to treatment delivery system. When there is a lack of interconnectivity between the systems, the potential for medical error is increased. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise-Radiation Oncology (IHE-RO) is dedicated to the identification of connectivity problems encountered in the modern day radiation oncology clinic and the development of solutions to these problems. These solutions are then integrated and made available to the radiation oncology community. This article introduces the IHE-RO initiative, outlines the relevance of IHE-RO for the radiation oncology community, and provides a resource so that therapists, physicists, dosimetrists, administrators, and physicians alike can best understand which vendor equipment can effectively communicate between platforms because it has been deemed IHE-RO compliant through a series of connectivity tests.