Prevent Potential Hazards Caused by Medical Device Time Differences in Integrated Clinical Environments

As technology advances, many medical devices are used to assist patient care. Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) is developed to provide seamless communications among medical devices and Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. However, time differences among different ICE devices can introduce serious medical hazards and even cause patient death. Unfortunately, medical device clock synchronization issues are not well-addressed, neither implemented in most ICE implementations including the well-known OpenICE implementation. In this paper, we present a design and an implementation of a time service module based on the OpenICE architecture to address the time inconsistency issue. We then experimentally validate the time service module's effectiveness in preventing potential hazards caused by medical device time differences. We also experimentally study the time service module's performance impact on the OpenICE platform and its scalability.