Interoperability of ECG standards

Abstract

The increased demand for interoperability of electronic health records leads to the need for establishing reliable standards for storing and retrieving electrocardiogram data. Multiple medical record data standards were created in response to medical organization initiatives, based on binary and XML formats. These standards raise the need to maximize interoperability between systems that share ECG datasets. HL7 aECG, SCP-ECG, DICOM, and ISHNE are among the most popular ECG standards, which are compared within this paper. We have implemented an adapter system — ECGConvert, which provides interoperability on raw ECG to HL7 aECG and SCP-ECG, while also supporting ISHNE format to HL7 aECG conversion. We provide a discussion for the interoperability of these standards in the healthcare, the problems we have faced and solution to improve the process of sharing ECG datasets between organizations. Our interoperability platform can support the wearable ECG devices that provide single-channel ECG streaming data. The metadata raw ECG record can be converted to any of currently used ECG standards by the built prototype.