Enhancing interoperability of ECG machine to support ECG telediagnosis service

Now many remote or underserved areas have brought forward a high demand for improving the quality of ECG interpretation. Telediagnosis can provide a feasible solution. However, even communities already equipped with ECG machines cannot communicate with a remote diagnostic center, because these machines lack interoperability. It can be predicted that the applicability and popularization of ECG telediagnosis could be greatly improved via developing high interoperable ECG machines and realizing a direct interaction between the machines and a remote diagnostic center. In this paper, a detail analysis on the flow of ECG telediagnosis is represented first. Several interactive transactions and a complete and reasonable interaction workflow of ECG machine are designed on the base of the analysis. The design has realized an automatic acquisition of patient information and the transmission of a complete ECG record as well as a diagnostic report. We have created an ECG machine based on the design presented and developed a Web Service named TeleECGService, through which a direct interaction between an ECG machine and a remote diagnostic center can be achieved. An ECG remote diagnosis system based such high interoperable ECG machines has been put into use in a hospital in Shanxi Province of China.