Medical Device Interoperability Demonstration to Be Featured at AAMI 2013

The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI), a sponsor of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise’s (IHE’s) Patient Care Device (PCD) Domain, will cohost an interoperability demonstration at its 2013 Conference & Expo, June 1-3 in Long Beach, CA. Several companies—including Accent on Integration, Amcom Software, Awarepoint, B. Braun, Capsule, Cerner, Covidien, EQ2, Hospira, and Philips Healthcare—will show how their enterprise applications and medical devices share information using industry-standard integration protocols.

IHE is an initiative to create a standards-based framework for passing vital health information seamlessly within and across multiple healthcare enterprises— from application to application, system to system, and setting to setting.  Systems that support IHE integration profiles work together better, are easier to implement, and help healthcare providers use information more effectively. The demonstration will take place throughout the AAMI conference in booth #837. The demonstration is also sponsored by the American College of Clinical Engineering (ACCE) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

Conference attendees will see working demonstrations of the following standards-based profile messages:

• Device enterprise communication for physiologic and operational data
• Point-of-care infusion verification , which provides programming information from a bedside computer-assisted medication administration  system to an intravenous pump
• Infusion pump event communication , which provides operational data (e.g., start and stop, transition to keep vein open)
• Alert communication management , enabling interoperable communication of alarms and alerts (e.g., heart rate, IV  line occlusion, bed rail position)

“I’m very pleased with the committee’s progress in creating interoperability specifications based on industry standards,” said Steve Merritt, co-chair of the IHE PCD Planning Committee. “We have seen great participation from medical device companies and the clinical engineering community, and we’ve made significant progress in delivering domain profiles. It’s truly rewarding to see the device community come together and demonstrate the fruits of our labor at AAMI, so that we can continue to improve patient safety and clinical efficiency, while reducing healthcare delivery costs.”

About the IHE PCD Domain

The IHE PCD, cosponsored by AAMI, ACCE, and HIMSS, develops standards-based communication providing interoperability between various medical devices and the systems with which they communicate, such as electronic medical records. The PCD is concerned with use cases that involve at least one regulated patient care device, either sending or receiving data. 

Underlying all PCD profiles is the extensive Rosetta Terminology Mapping (RTM) Project that provides standards-based coding of parameters, parameter values, body sites, and other data to assure what is sent is correctly and unambiguously received, and, for almost all profiles, an IHE profile assuring consistent time stamps.
Learn more about the PCD at www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/index.cfm#pcd. To inquire about developing products that comply with PCD standards, learn more about specifications, or obtain a list of products that conform to IHE technical requirements, contact pcd@accenet.org.

IHE PCD Domain Contact
Manny Furst
Technical Project Manager, IHE PCD
pcd@accenet.org

AAMI, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, is a nonprofit organization founded in 1967. It is a diverse community of nearly 7,000 healthcare technology professionals united by one important mission—supporting the healthcare community in the development, management, and use of safe and effective medical technology.