Relationship to Other Projects & Guides

This Implementation Guide covers material related to work in other projects and guides including the Personal Health Device Implementation Guide, and IHE Patient Care Device (PCD) profiles.

Personal Health Device IG

The Personal Health Device Implementation guide treats wellness and chronic disease management devices used mainly by nonprofessionals in home and exercise settings. This Guide is focused on acute-care devices for professional use mainly in healthcare delivery facilities. The Personal Health Device and Point-of-Care Device guides both use information models and nomenclature from the IEEE 11073 Medical Device Communications series of standards and the guides for these two kinds of devices are being developed cooperatively in the Devices On FHIR project with a goal of consistency and ease of use by use by receiving systems.

Editor: UDI Pattern IG and any other IGs.

Unique Device Identifier (UDI) IG(s)

IHE Patient Care Device (PCD) Profiles

The IHE PCD domain has developed profiles for conveying acute care device data with context using HL7 V2. The base information system and nomenclature are based on the IEEE 11073 Medical Device Communications standards, also used in this FHIR Implementation Guide.

These profiles cover Device Enterprise Communications (DEC), reporting device observations to enterprise systems including near-real-time charting to electronic medical records, clinical decision support systems and patient data archive systems. That is similar to the scope of this FHIR Implementation Guide.

A planned future FHIR use case for the Devices on FHIR group is the near-real-time communication of physiological and technical alerts to clinicians, and internal device status and state transition information for systems designed to process such information. This is similar to IHE PCD Alert Communication Management and Infusion Pump Event Communication profiles.

Other PCD profiles include Implantable Device Cardiac Observations, Point-of-Care Infusion Verification.

Vital Signs Profile

The Observation resource is used to record data that is retrieved from a device (see Observation Profiles). Some values that are formalized in this resource are required to conform to the Vital Signs Profile. For example, heart rate or respiratory rate, many of which are often provided by a PoCD patient-connected device.

This requirement is a challenge, though, for devices that only communicate ISO/IEEE 11073 terminology (the Vital Signs Profile requires LOINC and UCUM). As a result, provisions must be made to correctly make the mapping for these terms from 11073 to LOINC and to ensure that they are done at the earliest possible point.

This is an area of coordination between this IG and the Vital Signs Profile.