Medical device manufacturers continuously improve instruments with more capabilities at the point of care such as the bedside, operating room, intensive care unit, or emergency room. The instruments are in turn becoming more sophisticated; however, the operation of an instrument is still expected to be locally done by authorized medical personnel. The measurements from these instruments are stored using archaic methods such as a patient history record on a paper. The access to these records is cumbersome and not available unless the medical personnel is present at the point of care. Unfortunately, each medical instrument has its unique proprietary API (application programming interface - if any) to provide automated and electronic access to monitoring data. Integration of these APIs requires an agreement with the manufacturers towards realization of interoperable health care networking. As long as the interoperability of instruments with a network is not possible, ubiquitous access to patient status is limited only to manual entry based systems. Manual entry is being implemented to create electronic health records, HL7, and similar initiatives. However, they do not address a bottomup automation (i.e. from instrument and patient bed side up) to leverage the mature networking technologies in a health care setting. This paper demonstrates an attempt to realize an interoperable medical instrument interface for networking using MediCAN technology suite as an open standard. We will present the approach with a comparison study of a similar initiative led by ISO/IEEE 11073 standards.
Advances in medical devices and health care has been phenomenal during the recent years. Although medical device manufacturers have been improving their instruments, network connection of these instruments still rely on proprietary technologies. Even if the interface has been provided by the manufacturer (e.g., RS-232, USB, or Ethernet coupled with a proprietary API), there is no widely-accepted uniform data model to access data of various bedside instruments. There is a need for a common standard which allows for internetworking with the medical devices from different manufacturers. ISO/IEEE 11073 (X73) is a standard attempting to unify the interfaces of all medical devices. X73 defines a client access mechanism that would be implemented into the communication controllers (residing between an instrument and the network) in order to access/network patient data. On the other hand, MediCAN technology suite has been demonstrated with various medical instruments to achieve interfacing and networking with a similar goal in its open standardization approach. However, it provides a more generic definition for medical data to achieve flexibility for networking and client access mechanisms. In this paper, a comparison between the data model of X73 and MediCAN will be presented to encourage interoperability demonstrations of medical instruments.
MediCAN™ represents a network architecture that was designed as a vendor-independent technology for interfacing bedside medical instrumentation. It is compatible with almost all medical instrument technologies and data communications protocols. In contrast to IEEE X73, MediCAN TM sought to integrate the most suitable off-the-shelf technologies that were already proven and up-to-date with cost-effective availability. MediCAN™ is highly scalable in regards to interfacing with instruments on the lowest end of complexity level (i.e., thermometer) to pulse oximeter or higher complexity. In addition, a simple interface is going to connect a fiber-optic sensor to provide heart and body motion data for continuous monitoring of patients. MediCAN™ has been designed to utilize internet tools to track operations related to healthcare administration to decrease costs.
Advances in medical devices and health care has been phenomenal during the recent years. Although medical device manufacturers have been improving their instruments, network connection of these instruments still rely on proprietary technologies. Even if the interface has been provided by the manufacturer (e.g., RS-232, USB, or Ethernet coupled with a proprietary API), there is no widely-accepted uniform data model to access data of various bedside instruments. There is a need for a common standard which allows for internetworking with the medical devices from different manufacturers. ISO/IEEE 11073 (X73) is a standard attempting to unify the interfaces of all medical devices. X73 defines a client access mechanism that would be implemented into the communication controllers (residing between an instrument and the network) in order to access/network patient data. On the other hand, MediCAN™ technology suite has been demonstrated with various medical instruments to achieve interfacing and networking with a similar goal in its open standardization approach. However, it provides a more generic definition for medical data to achieve flexibility for networking and client access mechanisms. The instruments are in turn becoming more sophisticated; however, the operation of an instrument is still expected to be locally done by authorized medical personnel. Unfortunately, each medical instrument has its unique proprietary API (application programming interface - if any) to provide automated and electronic access to monitoring data. Integration of these APIs requires an agreement with the manufacturers towards realization of interoperable health care networking. As long as the interoperability of instruments with a network is not possible, ubiquitous access to patient status is limited only to manual entry based systems. This paper demonstrates an attempt to realize an interoperable medical instrument interface for networking using MediCAN technology suite as an open standard.
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