Medical Software and device connectivity

It is not a new phenomenon that software in the medical device industry lags behind other markets, but as the world becomes more connected and information is becoming increasingly valuable this will have to change.  The sheer amount of data that is produced from medical devices in a clinical setting is phenomenal.   A major problem, that I see,  is the data remains in silos or resident on medical devices with no correlation to patients and outcomes.  The vision of the comprehensive EMR has the promise of gathering this data, but with an ever increasing product and vendor pool the rationalizing and connecting raw physiologic data with a patient file will be problematic for the foreseeable future.

A very positive advancement in the recent months and years is that we are seeing more devices that are “networked,”  this  is the first crucial step towards a pervasive change in the way we look at data.   Examples of this are WIFI enabled Oximeters.  Currently this technology is generally being used for alarm purposes only and not for detailed analysis in case specific, data mining, or neural network type  scenarios.   To make the later scenarios reasonable in a clinical setting the raw data needs to be organized and stored in relationship to the patients master health record.

Once the raw data and patient file reside in a relational database(s) the ability to derive correlations never imagined before are only limited to the completeness of data, strength of algorithms and/or neural network design, and the number of patient records  in the system.

Here at eTrending we are working diligently to gather the raw data, present it in a clinically useful nature, and store/format the raw data for future integration into a more robust patient record system.