The Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) Integration Profile is part if the IHE IT Infrastructure technical framework.

This profile enables a number of healthcare delivery organizations belonging to an XDS affinity domain (e.g. a community of care) to cooperate in the care of a patient by sharing clinical records in the form of documents as they proceed with their patients' care delivery activities. Federated document repositories and a document registry create a longitudinal record of information about a patient within a given XDS Affinity Domain. This profile is based upon ebXML Registry standards, SOAP, HTTP and SMTP. It describes the configuration of an ebXML Registry in sufficient detail to support Cross Enterprise Document Sharing.

This profile is often called "XDS.a" in other IHE documents to distinguish it from the new implementation choice for the Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing Integration Profile (XDS.b). New implementers of XDS are encouraged to review the XDS.b Supplement at www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/index.cfm#IT.

Source: IHE IT Infrastructure Technical Framework rev 5.1