Personal Health Device Implementation Guide
1.1.0 - STU 1.1 International flag

Personal Health Device Implementation Guide, published by HL7 International / Health Care Devices. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 1.1.0 built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/HL7/phd/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions

Non IEEE 11073 PHD Devices

Not all PHDs are using a protocol such as GHS that is based upon the 11073-10206 standard. This IG also supports Bluetooth devices that follow various Bluetooth SIG defined personal health device profiles and services. However, this requires that the information provided by the device can be mapped to IEEE 11073-10206 System Information, Power, Clock, and Observation objects by the PHG as specified in the transcoding white paper (the latest version can be found here) when the generated observations are going to be uploaded to a FHIR server. The requirement does not mandate that the PHG actually create these objects, but the resulting FHIR resources have to be composed as if they had come from a compliant IEEE 11073-10206 PHD device supporting the same type of observations.

The transcoding requirements put further demands on the Bluetooth PHD device over and above that specified in the Bluetooth SIG PHD specifications. For example, the Bluetooth Health Thermometer Profile does not require that a thermometer is able to report its sense of current time even though it may report time stamps in the measurements. This IG requires that PHDs that generate measurements that have time stamps also be able to report their sense of current time. The reason is that PHDs often have unreliably set clocks that for which the PHG can correct if the PHG is able to obtain the PHD's sense of current time.

In addition to PHDs implementing GHS or another Bluetooth PHD profile, there are numerous proprietary medical devices on the market. It may be possible to map the measurements coming from these devices to the PHD profiles from this IG, but that mapping would require that the resulting FHIR resources be created and populated as if they had come from a compliant IEEE 11073-10206 device. The writers of this guide have performed this task for a number of proprietary Serial Port Protocol (SPP) and Bluetooth SIG PHD devices.

In this Implementation Guide, the PHD is treated as a IEEE 11073-10206 compliant device. When working with other device types, it is the responsibility of the FHIR encoder to 'virtually' map the data from the non-IEEE 11073-10206 device to the IEEE 11073-10206 model when generating the PHD FHIR resources.

In general, if a PHD provides timestamps with its measurements, it needs to provide a means for the PHG to get its sense of current time. If it does, one can likely use this implementation guide with that device.