journal of biomedical informatics
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Applying FHIR in an Integrated Health Monitoring System

Author(s): Barbara Franz, Andreas Schuler, Oliver Krauss

The continuous monitoring of vital signs has become an important supplement to traditional medical treatment to ensure the success of a therapy. Integrated health monitoring solutions based on existing health standards provide interoperability and enable healthcare providers and patients to exchange and access their data across institutional borders. This paper shows an integrated monitoring solution based on Continua and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, which has been tested by more than 130 patients and 14 healthcare institutions. According to user feedback, one recurring problem is the low battery life of smartphones due to high data traffic. Since the recently developed HL7 standard FHIR offers a resource efficient handling of web service connections, a possible approach to extend the monitoring solution to support FHIR. Comparing both solutions using data collected by 68 patients, it can be concluded that there is a significant decrease in data traffic when relying on a RESTful architecture in combination with FHIR. For productive use of the FHIR-based approach shown in this paper, security related concerns have to be taken into account in future work to ensure authenticity and authorization.


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