What are IHE profiles?

IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) profiles are implementation guides that specify how existing standards (HL7, DICOM, FHIR) should be used together to solve real-world interoperability problems. Key profiles include XDS (cross-enterprise document sharing), PDQ (patient demographics query), PIX (patient identifier cross-referencing), and MHD (mobile document sharing). IHE Connectathons provide vendor-neutral testing events for conformance validation.