Moving Toward Semantic Interoperability of Medical Devices

NIST researchers are collaborating with medical device experts to facilitate the development and adoption of standards for medical device communications throughout the healthcare enterprise as well as integrating it into the electronic health record. NIST researchers have developed a tool and corresponding electronic representation of an international standard's information model that provides several important capabilities leading toward device semantic interoperability. We describe our XML schema and tool developed which is built upon the medical device communication standard ISO/IEEE 11073. Central to this approach is a capability of the tool to develop and produce implementation conformance statements (ICSs). Users execute the tool to produce statements disclosing details of a specific implementation and specifying features provided by a particular medical device. Device ICSs can subsequently be compared and utilized across device interfaces to help overcome the semantic interoperability problem that is so prevalent today and has prevented proliferation of plug-and-play interoperable solutions.