Personal Health Device Observation Upload

Personal Health Device Observation Upload moves observations generated by Personal Health Device to FHIR servers on enterprise health systems.

Summary

Health care is increasingly being delivered outside of a clinical setting. Personal Health devices are often used in non clinical settings. This profile prescribes a framework for moving the health information generated by personal health devices into the enterprise in an interoperable manner. The profile addresses concerns associated with representation and translation of personal health device information fostering usability and trust of the personal health device data.

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Benefits

The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the value of being able to provide more care in the home, especially as it relates to disease transmission. Effective care in the home requires medical devices that can collect health data to be in the home. This profile provides the following benefits that support home health monitoring:

• It provides a framework for the creation of an interoperable ecosystem for simple medical sensors. This, in turn, leads to lower costs for manufacturers, system integrators, and others in the supply chain. The end result being more choice and lower prices for patients.
• It requires the use of well established mechanisms for representing medical information bringing consistency and clarity to the nature of the data being reported to enterprise health systems.
• It uses FHIR resources and documents how these resources are delivered to a FHIR server, reducing the domain specific knowledge required to work with health information.
• It provides a detailed mapping between IEEE and FHIR which helps ensure that data arrives at the enterprise health service without transcription errors, fostering confidence and usage of the data from home monitoring. The willingness of the medical community to use this data enables doctors to see patient vitals over a broader period of time and in the setting of their daily ives.

A simple example of cost reduction that this profile allows is for a company developing a thermometer. The developer can focus simply on the thermometer. There is no need to create an application to read the data. Regulatory processes are simplified as the device follows a well known model, and the device can be deployed for a wide range of monitoring programs as there is no need to integrate it into these programs.

Details

The Personal Health Device Observation Upload profile makes normative references to a range of PCHAlliance, Bluetooth Special Interest Group, and HL7 documents that address different issues associated with collecting and communication health data in a home setting. In particular it requires the use of IEEE 11073 nomenclature to describe the medical observation. It then outlines how the medical observations are to be communicated from the health device through a Gateway, which may be internal to the health device itself, and then translated into FHIR and delivered to a FHIR server. The profile addresses the movement of the data over a number of commonly used communication systems, including Bluetooth Low Energy and Universal Serial Bus providing the basis for interoperability between the health device and the gateway. The profile references the ITU/Continua H.810, and H.811 series of documents. Finally the profile uses the HL7 PHD IG, via the Continua H.812.5 Guidelines document, to describe how to map the IEEE based information into the FHIR resources that are presented to the FHIR server.

Systems Affected

The following systems are candidates which may implement the behaviors specified in this profile

• Home sensor devices such as blood glucose meters, thermometers, blood oxygen sensors, weight scales, and blood pressure meters.
• Personal Health Gateways, which may come in the form of software applications of mobile phones, or in the form of specific devices provided by remote monitoring services
• FHIR servers embedded in enterprise health care systems

Specification

Profile Status: Trial Implementation

Documents:

This profile is part of the [IT Infrastructure Technical Framework]:https://www.ihe.net/resources/technical_frameworks/

       Vol. I - Profiles [TBD]
       Vol. 2n - Transactions [TBD]
       Vol. 3 - Content Modules [TBD]

Underlying Standards:

       HL7 FHIR PHD Implementation Guide http://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7/PHD/ 
       PCHAlliance/ITU Guideline H.812 http://www.pchalliance.org/continua-design-guidelines
       PCHAlliance/ITU Guideline H.812.3 http://www.pchalliance.org/continua-design-guidelines
       PCHAlliance/ITU Guideline H.812.5 http://www.pchalliance.org/continua-design-guidelines

See Also

Related Profiles

IHE Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) Profile: https://www.ihe.net/uploadedFiles/Documents/PCC/IHE_PCC_Suppl_RPM.pdf

Consumer Information

Software implementing this profile can be obtained via the PCHAlliance: [TBD]

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