About the Framework
The Framework is an architecture for interoperable medical imaging exchange in Australia, designed to align with the Australian Digital Health Agency's HealthConnect strategy. The framework aims to enable safe, standards-based sharing of diagnostic imaging data between healthcare providers, patients, and systems, regardless of vendor or legacy infrastructure.
The IEF bridges DICOM and FHIR ecosystems by defining a set of roles, capabilities, and protocols that allow legacy imaging systems to participate in modern, API-driven health information exchange. It supports use cases such as referral-based imaging access, shared care imaging retrieval, and specialist second opinions, with an emphasis on real-time discoverability and access, rather than historical, centralised storage.
In its current form, the IEF is a discussion paper, designed to inform the direction of policy and practice. However, care has been taken to ensure that all recommendations are practical, achievable, and evidence-based. Where gaps exist in current technology, the authors have proposed new, open source solutions.
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