Health information exchange through a Device-to-Device protocol supporting lossless encoding and decoding

Abstract

Despite the availability of secure electronic data transfers, most medical information is still stored on paper, and it is usually shared by mail, fax or the patients themselves. Today’s technologies aim to the challenge of sharing healthcare information, since exchanging inaccurate data leads to inefficiency and errors. Currently, there exist numerous techniques for exchanging data, which however require continuous internet connection, thus lacking generic applicability in healthcare, in the cases where no internet connection is available. In this paper, a new Device-to-Device (D2D) protocol is proposed, specifying a series of Bluetooth messages regarding the healthcare information that is being exchanged in short-range distances, between a healthcare-practitioner and a citizen. This information refers to structured and unstructured data, which can be directly exchanged through a globally used communication protocol, extending it for the permission of exchanging HL7 FHIR Bluetooth structured messages. Moreover, for high volume data, the D2D protocol can support lossless compression and decompression, improving its overall efficiency. The protocol is firstly evaluated through exchanging sample data in a real-world scenario, whereas an overall comparison of exchanging multiple sized data either using lossless compression or not is being provided. According to the evaluation results, the D2D protocol specification was strictly followed, successfully providing the ability to exchange healthcare-related data, with Bluetooth being considered the most suitable technology for current needs. For small-sized data, the D2D protocol performs better without the provided lossless compression mechanism, whereas in the case of large-sized data lossless compression is considered as the only option.