Consolidating and serving live data from medical devices

Tim at Medical Connectivity talks about the state of the market of medical device connectivity providers. It seems lots of folks have forgotten about the IEEE 1073 standard since it’s not getting a whole lot of press these days, but perhaps discussion about the standard needs to get resurrected so that it starts to show up in proposals and RFQs more often than it does. For a more detailed overview of the state of medical connectivity see Tim’s earlier article.

Almost all the major HIS vendors will need to communicate with the myriad of medical devices that are available today, including remote sensors that are coming into the home and places like surgery centers. Everybody’s talking about “patient-centric architecture” but we can’t really get there until we know how to aggregate all patient data and not just demographics and administrative information. In fact, information from devices like vitals monitors and IV pumps are very important to consolidate and aggregate from a clinical and care perspective but because it’s difficult to do, we seem to have given up.

Tim reminded us that it will take companies like Cain Medical, HEI, and Capsule to make the device data aggregation happen.