Medical device interoperability and the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative.

Yet, a variety of parameters—vital signs; settings; infusion rates; alarm events, settings and configuration; and other data obtained from and sent to medical devices—are a critical part of tracking the patient’s state and planning and evaluating treatment in all clinical contexts, ranging from the home to the hospital operating rooms and care areas. This lack of data flow is a serious problem, potentially preventing clinicians from having timely access, or possibly any access at all, to observational data that would help them give the safest and most effective patient care. Various government, standards and vendor alliance organizations are at work on general, vendor-neutral solutions to different aspects of the medical device communications problem. There is hope that these efforts are gathering momentum and beginning to link up with one another in a way suggesting a sustainable “critical mass.” This article looks at one such effort, the patient care devices domain of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative. It presents the work this group is engaged in now and describes how it is reaching out to other organizations with similar goals to further energize progress toward the barrier-free flow of device data.