Networking and plug-and-play of bedside medical instruments

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.