A platform for real-time acquisition and analysis of physiological data in hospital emergency departments.

An opportunity exists for automated clinical decision support, in which raw source data from a conventional physiological monitoring system are continuously streamed to an independent analysis platform. Such a system would enable a wider range of functionality than offered by the source monitoring system. Although vendor solutions for this purpose are emerging, we developed our own system in order to control the expense and to permit forensic analysis of the internal core functionality of the system. In this report, we describe a platform that can provide decision support for trauma patients in an Emergency Department (ED). System evaluation spanned 39 days, and included a total of 2200 patient session hrs of real-time monitoring. We highlight the technical issues that we confronted, including protection of the core monitoring network, the real-time communication of electronic medical data, and the reliability of the real-time analysis. Detailing these nuanced technical issues may be valuable to other software developers or for those interested in investing in a vendor solution for similar functionality.

Safety evaluation of a Medical Device Data System.

Our hospital became interested in the extraction of electronic data from our bedside monitor network to enrich clinical care, and enable various quality improvement projects, research projects, and future applications involving advanced decision-support. We conducted a range of tests to confirm the safety of deploying BedMaster (Excel Medical Electronics, Jupiter FL, USA), which is third-party software sold expressly to provide electronic data extraction and storage from networked General Electric Healthcare bedside patient monitors. We conducted a series of tests examining the changes in network performance when the BedMaster system was on our isolated patient monitor network. We found that use of BedMaster led to measurable, but trivial increases in network traffic and latency. We did not identify any failure scenarios in our analysis and testing. The major value of this report is to highlight potential challenges inherent in data and electronic device integration within the healthcare setting. In describing our strategy for testing the BedMaster system, it is our intention to present one testing protocol and to generate thought and discussion in the broader community about what types of problems can arise with inter-operability, and what types of testing are necessary to mitigate against these risks. Standards for inter-operability would surely reduce the inherent risks.