First dental informatics related connectathon this January!

Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is an initiative which promotes the use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7. Basically, they provide a testing framework against which developers can test their DICOM and HL7 implementations to see if it works. And then, they organize these big LAN (i.e. geek) parties in basements of hotels, where different companies (minimum 3) send 2-3 of their developers with a bunch of laptops and network cables to connect with each other and send files to each other to see if it all works. It's an awesome initiative, and it really shows how medical software standards are becoming always more requested and used!

IHE has already hosted a bunch of these LAN parties (Connectathons) around the world. However, in January 2014, they will hold the first one with the theme "Dentistry", or, more precisely SEDI: Secure Exchange of Dental Information.