With the goal of improving patient safety and health care efficiency, AAMI and Underwriters Laboratories (UL) will join forces to develop a suite of standards on medical device interoperability.
According to AAMI, the collaboration, a first for AAMI and UL, comes at a time when many health care facilities and manufacturers are grappling with how to achieve interoperability, which has the potential to improve patient care by enabling clinicians to work with integrated systems of diagnostic and therapeutic devices and by sharing data with electronic health records.
AAMI and UL have signed a memorandum of understanding to develop the suite of consensus-based standards, which will be drafted to help manufacturers design safer interoperable products and aid health care facilities in implementation.
“This suite of standards is not intended to replace or supplant existing interoperability implementation standards or profiles,” said Terenzio Facchinetti, PhD, business development manager for UL life and health business unit. “This family of standards instead aims to map existing implementation practices into a risk management framework and to address further safety issues where applicable.”
