Hello medicollectors!  In today's post, I provide some useful tips for running MediCollector for long periods of times... like for weeks, months or years.  Some of these tips utilize little known features of MediCollector which are ideal for long-term sessions.  To view these tips, please click the READ MORE link below.

Do you need to get data from a patient monitor into your EMR? This is part of a challenge known as Medical Device Integration (MDI) in hospitals. 

Using HL7, MediCollector can now be your MDI solution by functioning as a "middleware" to transfer data from medical devices into hospital information systems (HIS) such as electronic medical records systems (EMR / EHR).
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Wow, that's a lot of buzzwords!  If you're looking to get data from your patient monitors into your EMR, MediCollector can now do this using HL7.

If you need help with MDI, please see our MDI solutions, or contact us.

MediCollector would like to congratulate the diverse team conducting the clinical study published recently in Pediatric Research titled "Pre-Vent: The Prematurity-Related Ventilatory Control Study".  This large multi-site team is using MediCollector to gather data for their research in premature infants.  Their publication can be accessed through the citation below. 

Many of our customers have been asking us if MediCollector can communicate with GE Marquette Dash or Solar or Unity patient monitors.  As of v1.1.11, all of our products can now communicate with this series of patient monitors.  The only drawback is that these devices can only export numerics at a speed of 1 datapoint every 2 seconds (0.5 Hz).  This means you can record/stream signals like HR and RR and SpO2 and NIBP, but you can't access waveforms like ECG and RESP.  This is due to the bandwidth limitations of the device.

To see exactly which devices are compatible with MediCollector, see our list of supported devices.

This product is designed for customers who want to continuously stream and/or record medical device data in the background.  By using MediCollector SERVICE, you don't need to worry about the complex communication protocols and cabling requirements for each individual device.  Simply embed MediCollector into your system, and let it run invisibly in the background.  It runs as a Windows Service, so it will launch when the computer starts up, run continuously, and automatically recover from errors for uninterrupted data streaming.

This command line interface is designed for software developers who want to quickly and easily query/poll a medical device for live data.  Data is immediately outputted to a simple text file.  It can be scripted or automated to run frequently (every 10 minutes?) to create a simple database of live data over time.  

MediCollector would like to congratulate the team of researchers from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and Monash University in Malaysia for their paper at the International Federation of Automatic Control's 10th IFAC Symposium on Biological and Medical Systems BMS 2018.  This team used MediCollector to gather data for their study of lung mechanics in preemies.  We wish them continued success in their work!  The full text of their publication is available using the link below.

ADInstruments is a company that provides a large suite of products, such as LabChart, for data acquisition, visualization and analysis... but they can't acquire data from your bedside patient monitors.

MediCollector's products are focused primarily on data acquisition... not analysis.  So to analyze your data, you will need 3rd party tools like LabChart.  I can think of one easy way to get your bedside data into LabChart:  Use MediCollector to record the data.  Then when finished recording, export the data to an EDF or EDF+ file and open it inside LabChart.  I just tested this using the free version of LabChart (LabChart Reader) and it works great!

MediCollector does stream live data out to 3rd party applications.  But even though Labchart has a bunch of "device enablers" and other add-ons,  I don't know of any way to get LabChart to unpack and receive that data in real-time.  So your best bet is to use MediCollector for recording, and then export to EDF for use in LabChart.

The MediCollector software applications were built because the interfaces to medical devices are waaaaay to complex.  We want to make it easy for you to access the data that is generated in these devices.  And now we have a new way to make this data available to you!

Our customers can now stream live data out to third party applications in real-time.  This is done by outputting the data to a TCP/IP port using a very simple protocol.  This allows customers to receive and process data or execute algorithms in real-time in external applications like Matlab or C++.  

For more information, please read our application note on streaming live data from medical devices.  This streaming functionality is already available in the latest version of MediCollector BEDSIDE and MediCollector SERVICE.  And we even provide you with very simple examples that shows you how to access the data stream using Matlab or LabVIEW. 

And as always, please don't hesitate to contact us.  We are experts in data acquisition and can help you.