An open standard platform for interoperability of medical devices

Patient care in Intensive Care Units and Operating Rooms requires sophisticated instrumentation for monitoring, treatment and control. A major technical problem is the communication between devices, since the connection of medical devices from different manufacturers has similar problems to the communication between people from different countries who do not share a common language. Several proprietary solutions have been developed by initiatives from well-known international companies. These proprietary, non-open solutions have not gained general acceptability and have failed to draw upon the immense resources for instrumentation development which are available in the industry. Consequently, a set of open European standards for Medical Device Intercommunication has recently been created (ratified 1999) to provide the ability to connect devices to each other freely and to exchange data between them. The development of such standards has lead to the design and implementation of a network platform over which those standards could be tested and validated. At the same time guidelines have been defined for the development and deployment of open solutions for any kind of medical device, including existing legacy devices. The design and testing of this open standards implementation is described in this paper.