Medical Device Connectivity A look into the Future

What should we expect in the future?

Quite possibly we should start with a standard for interoperability for devices.  A standard that works for the small ambulatory practice as well as the enterprise would be a great start. Trends to look forward to are: device interoperability which will improve clinical efficiency by allowing devices to talk to each other. Today, devices typically operate independently. There is no direct connection, for example, between a stress test and an Echo. There is no connection between simple office based blood pressure devices and the at home blood pressure devices.  An ECG done in the physician’s office should be able to be seen at the emergency room.

Medical Device Manufactures must look forward and develop open architecture software solutions that include device agnostic viewers.  Device agnostic viewers would allow a physician the opportunity to view diagnostic tests in a singular common GUI. Imagine seeing all your ECG’s, spirometry, vitals, etc. the same way without being concerned about which device was used to acquire the information. Direct connection and interoperability could offer great benefits.

There is a Meaningful Use roadmap milestone for medical device interoperability in 2015. In order to really achieve this deadline we must act aggressively now, and we must push device vendors to give us solutions that not only work, but are cost effective and smart!

In the future the data derived from the device must be accessible; it will probably not be a PDF. We will receive discreet data elements which we can then mine from our EMR to develop decision support through leveraging device data. A good clinician or caregiver can aggregate data from many devices, observe trends and potentially determine that a patient is trending towards a chronic condition.

The medical device of the future will be Smart and be able to send the data and aggregate that same information and send it to the caregiver wherever he/she needs it. This is the premise of decision support. The device of the future could gather the full set of data and apply evidence-based algorithms. If it determined that a patient was trending towards a given condition, it could alert the caregivers, allowing them to perform their own assessment and begin treatment.

One of the trends to look forward to is keeping the device information on separate servers or clouds.  We must protect the data; I have been concerned for some time now that some manufactures that use integrated solutions for test results they might very well have a problem if the provider switches from one EMR solution to another.  How will the test results be transferred? What will be the result saved? What will be the cost to the provider? If integrated device solutions are used what will the issues be if a device is recalled?

The best part of device connectivity will be when vendors start cross pollinating certain test results with algorithm’s that are smart and that can suggest next steps and or next tests that lead to beneficial clinical outcomes.