Tagungsband der eHealth2009 und eHealth Benchmarking 2009 – Wien, 7.-8. Mai 2009 1 COMMUNICATION AND INTEGRATION OF HEALTH RELATED DATA IN ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS USING INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL STANDARDS Burgsteiner H 1 , Sabutsch S 1 , Kollmann A 2 , Morak J 2 Abstract Electronic Health Records can be seen as a pool for various health related data, where also different types of structured data can be stored. International standards serve as a unified framework for data communication and storage. We take different types of data sources as examples: a pulse oximeter, blood pressure monitor and a simple weighing scale. The data is collected at a single mobile device, where they are converted to corresponding ISO/IEEE 11073 profiles respectively and then communicated to a central EHR server via HL7 messages. The whole communication and storage is done without the classical media break fully electronically. 1. Introduction Nowadays possibilities in patient care show a variety of different medical devices in use in parallel. Many health relevant parameters are available to a doctor or a nurse to assist them making their decisions. When these parameters have to be stored in an electronic health record (EHR) for documentation, the processes become complicated, because most of the medical devices do not share a common transfer protocol and also lack a common underlying standard for the data structure. Typically, vital parameters are only shown on embedded displays in the medical device itself and have to be read by a user and entered in an (electronic) form by hand in order to be saved in an EHR. And this has to be repeated for all different devices needed for a certain monitoring of a patient. A better integration of device data and interoperability between various medical systems is suspected to lead to a significantly more secure and efficient patient care and can therefore also help to save costs [6]. Meanwhile, most of the modern medical devices offer a kind of electronic data exchange interface. Commonly one can find simple serial ports like RS-232, more advanced manufacturers embed USB or Ethernet interfaces. To avoid “cable spaghetti”, also devices with wireless communication possibilities are available. The most common wireless technologies in use are WLAN (IEEE 802.11), ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) and Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1). The latter is widely embedded into consumer devices and offers some advantages in terms of master/slave relationships which 1 Department for eHealth and Health Care Engineering, Graz University of Applied Sciences 2 eHealth systems, Austrian Research Centers GmbH – ARC, Graz