Integrating medical instruments with medical information systems becomes more and more important in healthcare industry. To make medical instruments without standard communication interface possess the capability of interoperating and sharing information with medical information systems, we developed a medical instrument integration gateway based on Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise Patient Care Device (IHE PCD) integration profiles in this research. The core component is an integration engine which is implemented according to integration profiles and Health Level Seven (HL7) messages defined in IHE PCD. Working with instrument specific Javascripts, the engine transforms medical instrument data into HL7 ORU message. This research enables medical instruments to interoperate and exchange medical data with information systems in a standardized way, and is valuable for medical instrument integration, especially for traditional instruments.
The hospital information structure, which is made up of various medical business systems, is suffering from the problems of the "information isolated island". Medical business systems in the hospital are mutually isomerous and difficult to become a whole. How to realize the internal barrier-free interaction of the patients effective medical information in the hospital and further to complete the area sharing of patients longitudinal diagnosis and treatment information has become a question having to be solved urgently in the process of healthcare informatization. Based on the HL7 standard, this paper refers to the IHE technical framework, expounds the overall structure of the interaction in the hospital internal and area sharing of medical information with the medical information exchange platform. The paper also gives the details of the whole process of the complete display of the discrete patient health information using Portal technology, which is saved in the business systems in different hospitals. It interacts internally through the information exchange platform and at last stores the information in the regional cinical data repository (CDR).
Medical information exchange and integration is the effective method to solve the interoperability and medical information island, and is the basis of medical information sharing. In this paper, we take medical texts and medical images as the basic integrated objects, DICOM, HL7 messages and datasets as the integrated units, efficient DICOM, HL7 message construction and parsing methods as basis, design and realize a universal medical information integration and exchange service middleware. Experimental results show that the prototype system could perform medical information integration and exchange among relational database, HL7 and DICOM message, provide a feasible scheme to solve the medical information island and lay a good foundation for establishing the unified medical information integration and sharing platform. The middleware has been applied in the project named "development and demonstration of opened medical information integration system".