A Method for Physiological Data Transmission and Archiving to Support the Service of Critical Care Using DICOM and HL7

An increasing amount of physiological monitoring data is displayed on medical devices around the world every day. By and large, much of this data is lost beyond hand written annotations. Opportunities exist to utilize this data for improved care of those patients within the NICU and for clinical research. The service oriented architecture paradigm offers a way of thinking of critical care through the provision of services of critical care provided by clinicians where patients may be located within or outside their intensive care unit. A major inhibitor to this becoming reality is the lack of a standard for the representation of physiological data as HL7, for example, does not include definitions for time series data. This research proposes a method to represent, transmit and archive physiological data using DICOM and HL7. To enable this, a DICOM file writer and viewer for the physiological time-series data is proposed to specifically enable the storage requirement for these data. This research is then tested within the context of Neonatal Intensive Care.