Is the SCP-ECG format suitable for inpatient ECG management?

SCP-ECG (Standard Communications Protocol for computer-assisted electrocardiography) is a signal-specific format drawn by the European Committee for Standardization with the goal to be widely used in the ECG field. According to it, a software prototype has been developed and tested in a complex clinical setting. The program extracts information related to the patient, the global measurements, the ECG interpretative statements and the binary data of the ECG. The first information is visualized in a clear textual format while the latter is used to reconstruct the ECG recordings. The validity of the decoding algorithm was analytically tested using the ECG reference records supplied by the SCP-ECG standard. The differences between the original data and the reconstructed data were always below the limits set by the standard. The software prototype seems suitable for inpatient ECG management, as part of a large conventional clinical database system.