VIENNA — The significance for product development of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise’s (IHE) new personal care devices (PCD) domain for interoperability among devices is that manufacturers who insist on building proprietary systems to force bundled sales of families of products increasingly will be squeezed out of a market moving to convergence.

“This domain is the nexus for vendors and customers to jointly define and demonstrate unambiguous interoperability specifications based on industry standards, and which can be brought to market,” said the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise PCD work group in a vision statement preceding the hundreds of pages of exquisitely detailed product profiles.

Among PCD vendors, less than 10% responded that they do not currently provide connectivity options outside of their own products and systems, while almost three-fourths said they were currently using IHE standards in products for product development or will apply such standards where possible to existing products.

Providers — who are the product customers — and vendors among the more than 100 members of the PCD group at IHE agree that the highest priorities among products currently are vital signs monitors, including ECG, PACS imaging, defibrillators and laboratory, as well as blood gas analyzers for point-of-care and infusion pumps.

While a wireless capability for data transmission was a purchase preference for half of medical centers, medical staffs were nearly unanimous, saying the preference moving forward for PCD purchase will be for devices that share common terminology, data structures and protocols, whatever the data transmission channel.

The highest-priority departments are ICU, emergency, OR/anesthesia and lab. While the current focus remains for in-hospital devices, the massive market emerging for in-home care devices is on the radar screen for IHE.

“Next year we are moving into the long-term care setting and progressively to the home care devices, right down to the weight scales,” said Didi Davis, director of IHE for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (Chicago), who was directing the Interoperability Showcase in Vienna.

“The hardware is less a concern,” she said, “But the moment any device starts sending data to another device or to an EHR, then interoperability comes into play.”

— John Brosky, European Editor