The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards Association said it has published a draft set of standards intended to provide safe and secure medical device interoperability.

IEEE 11073-20701-2018, also known as IEEE Approved Draft Standard for Service-Oriented Medical Device Exchange Architecture & Protocol Binding, completes the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/IEEE 11073 family of standards for point-of-care (PoC) medical device communication and defines an architecture for service-oriented, distributed PoC medical devices and medical IT systems. The standard defines a binding of the participant and communication model defined in IEEE 11073-10207 to the profile for transport over Web services defined in IEEE 11073-20702. IEEE 11073-20701 also defines a binding to network time protocol (NTP) and five differentiated services for time synchronization and to meet transport quality-of-service requirements.

“IEEE 11073-20701 culminates our efforts to develop a standards family that assures reliable data exchange between medical devices within an open IP-based system focused on safe and secure interoperability to ensure patient safety,” said Stefan Schlichting, chair of the IEEE 11073 service-oriented device connectivity standard family subgroup, in a prepared statement. “In fulfilling the need for this unifying family standard, we now can better support the exchange of real-time information between medical devices and external systems to enhance functionality and interoperability in changing ad-hoc networks.”

IEEE 11073-20701-2018 is available for purchase at the IEEE Standards Store.