Development of Healthcare System based on HL7 Standard

Abstract

The symptoms of a cardiovascular diseases are diverse, ranging from minor chest palpitations, chest pain, and fainting (syncope) to sudden heart attack. Thus, it is important for patients, who showing symptoms of cardiovascular diseases even if these symptoms are mild, to be diagnosed as early as possible. Many patients are unaware of their symptoms and want to avoid the hassle of visiting a hospital. Moreover, even those who seek diagnosis may show normal cardiac behavior when they are visiting hospitals. Although many medical examinations have been used in the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases, electrocardiography (ECG) which has many advantages, such as less expensive health care, simple examination, and more exact result, is more useful to observe the symptoms of patient. For these reasons, many researches have been conducted on the real-time ECG monitoring system. Along with the development of the systems, the research of HL7 standard which exchanges clinical information also has been performed. The HL7 standard is an application-layer data exchanging protocol in healthcare environments. The purpose of the HL7 standard is to guarantee the interoperability which is the ability of a device to provide data in a form that can be accessed by other devices and systems, as well as users. To exchange measured ECG data among HIS, HL7 standard is to apply real-time ECG monitoring systems. However, when generating HL7 ORU^R01 message that is usually in the response to an order and provides clinical observations, the partial duplication occurs in an OBX segment without OBX-5 field. Existing HL7 standard is not suitable for real-time ECG monitoring system because the duplication results in the growth of the creation time of message as well as message size. Beside, it is necessary to adjust the standardized format, since the range of values of raw data from ECG devices varies widely. In this thesis, we focus on the development of a tele-healthcare system based on the HL7 standard. To improve reliability, the ECG signals are extracted and processed using the ECG sensor which are available in the market. Also, to remotely monitor ECG signals and patients’ symptom in real-time, mobile devices and a web server are used. Additionally, to exchange a lightweight HL7 message among HIS, we apply the lightweight HL7 strategy which is an modified version of the HL7 standard for real-time ECG monitoring system for our systems. Thus, the proposed system is to provide an proper ECG monitoring service in remote locations. Furthermore, our system can exchange clinical information among HIS by sharing and storing a lightweight message.