A Health Information Exchange Protocol Supporting Bluetooth-based Messages

A plethora of systems, platforms, and devices are daily producing and exchanging vast amounts of data towards better decision making and systems engineering. Their overall communication must follow a pre-specified set of rules, defined by different protocols, being surrounded by specific standards for more efficient transmission and interoperable communication. In the same direction, the healthcare domain defines several protocols and standardized approaches supporting the Health Information Exchange (HIE) paradigm, in which several challenges occur related with secure data management, explanation, interpretation, interoperability, and communication. The solution to these challenges is efficient, and well-designed HIE systems and protocols which can instantly improve the overall coordination and management of health-related data, information, and extracted knowledge. Current protocols supporting HIE lack of generality, being designed for specific sub-domains, scenarios, challenges, and assumptions, and that is why a more generic HIE approach is needed. This paper considers that the patients should be the ones managing their own healthcare data, having the ability to exchange them whenever or wherever it is needed, through the proposed HIE (Device-to-Device - D2D) Bluetooth-based protocol which can support the efficient exchange of healthcare data, considering cases where no Internet connection is available, fully supporting privacy, security, and interoperability related constraints. The D2D protocol and its related Bluetooth-based messages are fully specified in this paper, while a successful preliminary evaluation is being introduced, considering a medical visit scenario.