“It's an understatement to say plug and play doesn't exist,” Overbey said. “We had to do extensive research and create databases to pull data in such a way that the EMR could read it in a timely fashion. It was a new paradigm and there were no solutions we could go out and buy. We really had to push the vendors.”

Hays worked with Summit Healthcare (Braintree, Mass.), which provided middleware and consulting on the integration. With work on vital sign monitors done, the organization is turning its attention to other devices such as glucometers, ventilators and IV pumps.

Is there a pay-off?

Although patient safety and staff efficiencies are both goals of these types of projects, many organizations don't do detailed ROI studies.

Steve Merritt, an infrastructure engineer at the 653-bed Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., has worked on several projects over the last few years, linking devices such as patient monitors with the hospital's Cerner EMR.

“It's a challenge because you have to create customized interfaces to get HL7 messages to match correctly,” Merritt says. Baystate Healthcare has anecdotal evidence that the automation is paying off but has not done ROI studies yet, he adds.

Overbey says he didn't measure ROI on the integration project, because he knew it had to be done for the EMR to be successful.

“We get feedback and know the nurses are getting data in real time and it has improved their efficiency,” Rohleder says.

Some hospitals do measure efficiency gains from device integration, and St. John's Medical Center's Witton says the pay-off is clear. “We have seen a 60 percent time savings from importing rather than entering vital sign data,” he says, “as well as much more thorough documentation.” In other words, getting vital signs into the system every five minutes, as the current system does, would have been impossible when it was done manually. “There has been a huge improvement in nursing workflow,” he adds.

For CIOs considering the value of device integration projects, one issue to keep in mind is that they are changing from transferring mission critical information over their networks to transmitting life-critical information, says Jim Keller, vice president of technology evaluation at the nonprofit medical research firm ECRI Institute (Plymouth Meeting, Pa.)

“They may now be dealing with alarms about patient status, and there are major implications for a failure to transfer that data instantaneously,” he says.

So CIOs have to think about what risk management controls to put in place. “The important thing for IT departments is to start to familiarize themselves with medical devices that have IT components, and develop a good understanding of what it means to transmit data from them across their network.”