Towards a Holistic Biomedical Information Platform for Primary and Secondary Use Settings.

BACKGROUND: Clinical information is often used for biomedical research. Data warehouses can help providing researchers with data and the opportunity to find eligible participants for clinical trials. OBJECTIVES: To define an information platform for healthcare and biomedical research based on requirements by clinicians and researchers. METHODS: Interviews with clinicians, researchers, data privacy officers, IT and hospital administration combined with a questionnaire sent to 60 medical departments at our hospital were conducted. RESULTS: Resulting requirements were grouped and a platform architecture was designed based on the requirements. CONCLUSION: Requirements lead to a single platform supporting both, patient care and biomedical research.

Micro- and Macrointegration Profiles for Medical Devices and Medical IT Systems.

Collecting, saving, and providing patient data are essential processes of documentation in a hospital. Many IT systems have evolved to provide solutions in this area. The automatic transfer of medical device data to these information systems is a new challenge for hospital IT systems. Some vendors are focused on the integration of medical IT systems and medical devices. They provide great solutions with magnificent features. Nevertheless, those integration solutions are proprietary and isolated, limiting the operator's selection of his medical devices and medical IT systems. Standardizing communication processes within the operating room and between medical devices and medical IT systems brings benefits for both patient and hospital staff. This work identifies and proposes micro- and macrointegration profiles as a basis for new IHE Integration Profiles for both medical IT systems and medical devices of the operating room.

Towards communication requirements in the operating room and clinic IT.

Today, connecting medical devices to the hospital network becomes a priority for many hospitals. User and operator requirements for communication must be considered in order to develop an adequate interoperable integration approach. This paper conducts a requirement study using questionnaires and working groups investigating 16 clinical communication requirements for connecting medical devices with each other and with clinical IT systems. Six German Hospitals order the communication requirements by their clinical relevance and categorize those into four main clusters. Communication requirements regarding accurate data transfer and processing for patients and devices have top priority, while communication requirements regarding remote manipulation of medical devices have low rank. Connecting medical devices to clinical IT systems improves clinical documentation and with it patient care processes.