A revolution in device interoperability

We, as industry, have a responsibility to our customers to make care less complex for clinicians. That’s why Philips is building on 40 years’ experience advocating for interoperability standards by embracing SDC and an open ecosystem approach that will truly be interoperable for the benefit of clinicians and patients – and so vendors and their hospital customers don’t get shut out of the device connectivity revolution.

As a leading member of the SDC consortium, we:

Philips envisions a future where a clinician can bi-directionally command and control all devices and act on clinical data more easily. A future that enables closed-loop therapy enabled by open standards and a common infrastructure that can be centrally managed, maintained, serviced and secured.

The SDC family of standards is the future basis for communication between medical devices. It can replace proprietary networks by giving devices a common language to speak and will enable interoperability and data exchange, so patient information can be shared bi-directionally and securely in near real-time. SDC medical device interoperability

As a company monitoring more than half a billion patients each year, we’re leveraging our position as a leading patient monitoring vendor and our long-term partnerships with hospitals to advocate for all vendors to embrace SDC. And Philips is uniquely positioned to lead the charge.

We have vast experience and leadership in handling streaming patient data. Philips is unique in that ours is the only system that communicates bedside patient data to the EMR, and we’re able to communicate it to mobile devices, which allow clinicians to take action remotely. Within our monitoring ecosystem, data already flows both ways so that clinicians can remotely acknowledge alarms, start vital sign measurements and change alarm limits. SDC in an open ecosystem can allow us to massively expand this functionality by including third-party devices, too.

Philips provides an end-to-end patient monitoring solution that includes monitoring at the bedside, monitoring at the central station and mobile applications on caregivers’ smartphones. When ICUs become fully SDC-ready, this will require management across bedside, systems and mobile devices, and we’re prepared for our monitoring systems to act as the hub for managing aggregated device data.