HL7 to Establish Device Interoperability FHIR Accelerator
The nonprofit healthcare interoperability standards organization HL7 is seeking help to define and establish a new FHIR Accelerator implementation community focusing on health device interoperability.
The new community will address use cases involving the highest acuity, most complex clinical care areas such as hospital operating rooms and intensive care units, as well as personal health and wellness devices and applications that are used by individuals in their homes.
“For many years, the lack of consensus standards for the exchange of device data has been a tremendous burden on the delivery of patient care,” said Charles Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D., HL7 International chief executive officer, in a statement. “With the formation of this newest device interoperability implementation community, it will join the eight existing HL7 FHIR Accelerators on the journey to seamless interoperability and ultimately to better care for our patients."
The HL7 Device Interoperability FHIR Accelerator community will not only leverage the nearly 10 years of progress achieved by the HL7 Devices on FHIR initiative and the more than 20-year activities of the HL7 Devices Working Group, but it will also continue to collaborate and coordinate with device informatics standards development organizations including the IEEE, ISO, CEN, IEC, IHE and others.
Today, HL7 Version 2 messaging with ISO/IEEE/CEN 11073 device content standards, embodied in the IHE Devices profile specifications, provides the primary way of communicating medical device information to hospital enterprise applications, such as EHRs. Additionally, over the last five years, the joint HL7-IHE Gemini Device Interoperability program has advanced the implementation and use of the ISO/IEEE 11073 Service-oriented Device Connectivity (SDC) standards to realize a new generation of D2D plug-and-trust medical device products.
HL7 said that FHIR not only provides the means for integrating these existing and emerging device technologies but also opens the door to address other healthcare use cases. Innovative clinical algorithms, decision support, predictive analytics, and AI/ML-enabled personalized care solutions will all benefit from the work of this emerging accelerator program.
Organizations that have already expressed a strong interest in this accelerator include American College of Clinical Engineering (ACCE), B.Braun, BD, Dräger, Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS), IHE Catalyst, U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), OR.NET, Philips Healthcare and Vector Informatik.
