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In today’s complex healthcare environment, Biomed and IT staff face growing challenges in supporting clinicians’ patient care information needs, with vast amounts of patient data generated from countless medical devices, including ventilators, dialysis machines, patient monitors and other devices for monitoring and treating patients.

In fact, more than two million different types of medical devices exist on the global market, according to the World Health Organization.[1] The volume, complexity and variety of patient data from these devices can feel overwhelming.

Add to this the steady influx of medical technologies available to providers, an evolving regulatory landscape of requirements, and the adoption of measurement devices used outside traditional healthcare settings, and you have a “perfect storm” in which healthcare organizations are struggling to deal with:

• new devices that are added regularly and generate tremendous amounts of additional data that must be captured for optimal patient care;
• lack of universal adherence to device connectivity and data communication industry protocols;
• and uncountable numbers of medical devices, including wearables, which are used daily for all types of monitoring, medical treatments and therapies.

The problem of unused data

Because of all these factors, 99% of data generated by healthcare devices goes unused, according to a report from the World Economic Forum.[2]

Medical device data continues to be siloed across various departments and care settings or even within the confines of a device manufacturer’s proprietary system, unable to flow freely across healthcare information systems where it could contribute to discovery of meaningful insights by clinicians.

In fact, 94% of healthcare leaders say their organization experiences at least one data integration challenge that impacts its ability to provide timely, high-quality care, according to the Philips Future Health Index (FHI) 2024 Global Report.[3]

All that unused data is a lost opportunity for improving care with insights that potentially could have led to better optimized treatment plans, faster diagnosis, and greater ability to predict and prevent adverse health events.

Having so much data generated, but unused, makes it impossible to harness the full potential of data-driven insights.

Challenges in meeting industry standards create data silos

Over the last 20+ years, industry organizations such as Health Level Seven (HL7) International, and various governments’ agencies such as the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in the U.S., have promoted standards and specifications to support interoperability and the secure integration, transfer and sharing of medical data between disparate devices and systems.

While there has been significant improvement in recent years, the percentage of hospitals routinely engaging in all four domains of interoperable exchange as defined by ONC (send, receive, find, and integrate) still remains at 43% — less than half. And, while most hospitals send health information electronically, only about three-quarters integrate the information they receive into their electronic health records (EHRs).[4]

Part of the problem is that most medical device manufacturers have proprietary protocols that make it difficult to convert to an industry-wide standards approach. In addition, hospitals are still using hundreds of older, legacy medical device models that might not be able to comply with new standards for interoperability.

Further, concerns about cyberattacks and data breaches have increased significantly within the healthcare industry over the past decade with the prevalence of electronic medical records (EMRs) and electronic health records (EHRs). To withstand today’s security challenges, each medical device and system may have specific IT requirements that ensure secure deployment, but those same requirements often prevent the data from being easily shared or transferred to other clinical systems.

Technology-agnostic integration solutions can boost data sharing

To overcome these data integration challenges, many health systems turn to a vendor-agnostic medical device connectivity solution. Medical device connectivity can help organizations bring together disparate data from myriad devices that have different protocols and integrate that data into a cohesive patient story that can help support timely, accurate care.

But what should health systems consider when investing in a solution to integrate their medical data?

Here are a few suggestions:

• Ability to connect data from virtually any medical device connected to the patient, whether in the operating room, at the bedside, or other care areas, along with the central station.
• Ability to capture all types of data available from medical devices, including vital signs, alarms and waveform data, then filter just the data needed and share that relevant, context-rich information to support clinicians with the care of their patients.
• A solution that can capture, parse, and normalize beyond the EMR (Electronic Medical Record), so that data can be shared with various other destination systems to power viewing, documentation, clinical surveillance, intelligent decision-making, and research.
• End-to-end security controls with encrypted data in transit and at rest.
• An extensive library of connected medical devices, plus a methodology and process for developing new medical device drivers, which is specialized software that allows the devices to communicate and share data with other systems.
• A track record of integration to numerous global, regional and homegrown backend receiving systems – both clinical and analytical.
• Ability to scale, not just in high-acuity care areas, but also in general care and outside the hospital in post-acute care facilities to support an enterprise-wide approach with an integrated product portfolio that meets the specific needs of these areas and supports their specific clinical workflows.
• A wide range of medical device physical connections that can capture the data from the available medical device serial, USB (Universal Serial Bus), Ethernet and gateway connections, and the ability to associate and authenticate between medical devices and the patient’s identity.
• A single, comprehensive medical device connectivity platform from a global vendor that provides a vendor-agnostic approach with the flexibility to scale for the future with medical device innovations and new device types such as wearables, as well as the ability to offer AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology to provide additional value from the data.

Health systems that implement a scalable, secure, vendor-agnostic medical device connectivity solution can solve the problem of siloed, unused, unstructured medical device data and provide clinicians with richer, more powerful insights, including comprehensive, high-fidelity and live-streaming data that can contribute to predictive analytics. In addition, medical device connectivity will help Biomed and IT staff achieve their clinical users’ medical device information demands.

Please let us know what you think about your current medical device connectivity – we want to hear about your experiences with medical device connectivity! Please reach out at MDIProdMgmt@philips.com to share your thoughts.

About the author

Libby Bucsi is a Product Management Leader for medical device integration at Philips Capsule.