Design and implementation of a hospital wide waveform capture system

The use of telemetry and invasive monitoring is exceptionally common in modern healthcare. To date the vast majority of this information is not stored for more than a brief duration on the local monitor. This prohibits extensive investigation into waveform data. We describe a system to collect such data in a quaternary care facility. Using standardized “packet sniffing” technology along with routine manual documentation, we reverse engineered the Unity network protocol used to transmit waveform data across the University of Michigan mission critical monitor network. Data was subsequently captured using a proprietary piece of software writing waveform data to local disks. Nightly, this data is post-processed using data from the admit-discharge-transfer system into individual patient waveforms for the day regardless of location. Over a 10 month period, over 2,785 individual patients had a total of 65,112 waveforms captured 15,978 from the operating rooms and 49,134 from the ICUs. The average OR case collected over 11 MB of data. The average single day data collection consisted of 8.6 GB of data. Entire hospital waveform data collection is possible using internally developed software enabling research on waveform data with minimal technical burden. Further research is required to determine the long-term storage and processing of such data.