This page is part of the Personal Health Device FHIR IG (v0.3.0: STU 1 Ballot 3) based on FHIR R4. The current version which supercedes this version is 1.0.0. For a full list of available versions, see the Directory of published versions

Personal Health Device Implementation Guide Home Page

This Implementation Guide defines the use of FHIR resources to convey measurements and supporting data from communicating Personal Health Devices (PHDs) to receiving systems for electronic medical records, clinical decision support, and medical data archiving for aggregate quality measurement and research purposes. In most cases there is a Personal Health Gateway (PHG) that handles the PHD communications. The PHG translates the PHD data to the appropriate form and uploads it to the receiving systems. Uploads generated by Continua compliant PHGs shall use this implementation guide when transforming the PHD data to FHIR resources. (Reference: the Continua Design Guidelines which can be found here).

It should be noted that this implementation guide bases its mapping algorithm on the IEEE 11073 20601 model and standard (IEEE 11073-20601 Personal health device communication - Optimized Exchange Protocol). The reason for this approach is that the IEEE standard provides a generic and extensible model for measurements and a means to assure a consistent time stamp. The phrase ‘Continua Compliance’ is shorthand for saying the same thing (Reference: Continua Conformity Assessment Scheme Process found here).

However, this choice does not mean that this guide is only of use for Continua compliant PHDs that follow the IEEE 11073 20601 standard. Any PHD that provides a means to establish a PHG-validated consistent time stamp can use this guide. The mapping in this guide is currently used with many existing proprietary SPP devices and Bluetooth Low Energy devices, both proprietary and those following one of the Bluetooth Low Energy Health Device Profiles. See Non-11073 20601 Devices for more information.

PHDs are typically consumer devices designed to be used by people without any medical background. These devices are often used in the home and/or on the patient’s person and are a key element in any remote patient monitoring program.

Other related implementation guides focus on acute care point-of-care medical devices (PoCD) and physiological and technical alerts from medical devices.

It is anticipated that most readers of this guide will be familiar with FHIR but not with IEEE 11073 20601 and related standards upon which the PHDs are based. The Technical Implementation Guidance section gives an overview of the essential components of the IEEE 11073 20601 model and how its concepts are related to FHIR. The Profiles section gives the details of the mapping between 11073 20601 concepts and FHIR resources, making several references to sub-sections in the Technical Implementation Guidance section.

The IEEE 11073 20601 to FHIR mapping details are primarily of interest to implementers of PHG FHIR uploaders. Since only one extension is used in this guide, consumers of the uploaded data need only familiarize themselves with the coding systems. Each of the profiles described has a sub-section aimed at the consumer of the uploaded data. For the most part, these sub-sections and any sections describing the coding systems and value sets are all the consumer needs to be concerned with.

HL7 GitHub location