By Christoph Pedain

We have heard about clinical issues for years, but the leading source for many of these challenges may surprise you: disjointed patient data. With most healthcare leaders (66%) reporting increased burnout, stress, and mental health issues in their workforce, finding effective ways to reduce clinicians’ burdens must be of chief importance for health technology providers. Consider this, 38% of clinicians believe that pulling together patient data takes time away from patient care. Disparate data not only slows clinical workflows, but the lack of interoperability between medical devices may also impact clinical decision-making, hindering care delivery.

While providing high-quality care is paramount for every hospital and health system, clinicians need the right tools to support them to make this possible. When care teams are unable to gather a holistic view of a patient’s condition, they may request treatments and resources that the patient does not need – which could be known if they had the full picture. This causes a clinician to unnecessarily waste time and resources, delaying care for a patient and adding to their worry and frustrations.
I believe that the future of a more positive hospital experience lies in interoperability. Through increased connectivity between medical devices that allows patient data to be accessible in one place, the entire healthcare ecosystem benefits: clinicians can have confidence to make accurate care-related decisions, care teams experience workflow efficiencies, and patients receive higher-quality care. However, it is up to us as an industry to make this powerful technology a daily driver of acute care delivery.

Delivering the next generation of acute care through SDC
In 2025, we can anticipate continued progress in healthcare innovation as Service-Oriented Device Connectivity (SDC) becomes more widely adopted across health systems. A family of standards that enables interoperability across medical devices and platforms, SDC securely exchanges patient data between devices and platforms in near real-time. The SDC standards also support a common language between SDC-ready medical devices so clinicians can see and act upon data derived from these technologies (e.g., patient monitors, sensors, and infusion pumps) regardless of the manufacturer.

Although not yet widely adopted, SDC will soon become the industry standard across hospitals and health systems as they seek to replace proprietary networks and support data integration across devices. In the interim, health technology vendors need to work together as partners to expedite the adoption of SDC. Collaboration is essential, as we cannot do this alone. Writing these standards requires cooperation across the industry so all our devices can communicate more effectively to drive better patient care.

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