Lessons Learned from Applying Interoperability and Information Exchange Standards to a Wearable Point-Of-Care System

Interoperability at the device and system levels has the potential to improve ease of use for point-of-care systems while lowering the cost of these systems. To this end, we developed a prototype wearable monitoring system based on interoperability standards that demonstrates plug-and-play wireless connectivity between the system components. The system utilizes both device-level (IEEE 11073, Bluetooth) and system-level (Health Level (HL7), CORBA) standards. The wearable monitoring system stores data in a local database, and these data are then sent to a remote database via HL7 messages. The remote data can be viewed and processed with a graphical user interface created in Java that employs the CORBAmed PIDS and COAS services as implemented by OpenEMed. The lessons learned from this endeavor are summarized in this paper