SCP-ECG in an ISO/IEEE 11073-PHD world: Store-and-Forward transmission and messaging part

The storage and retrieval of digital ECGs in a standard-compliant way has been a key issue during the last decades. The SCP-ECG standard, one of the top efforts in this area, has been recently approved as part of the ISO/IEEE 11073 (x73) family of standards, a reference standard for medical device interoperability. For the Personal Health Device (PHD) version of the x73 standard several devices have been defined, but an ECG device specialization is not yet available. In this paper, the relationships between the SCP-ECG fields and messages and the particular way of the x73-PHD standard to deal with stored data are investigated and discussed. A proof-of-concept implementation of the x73-PHD storage and retrieval method applied to ECGs is also presented, identifying open issues and potential modifications to be considered for the wider interoperability adoption of x73-PHD standards.