Reference Architecture
HealthOS ICU is a vendor-neutral supervisory layer that sits between bedside medical devices and the clinical team. This brief describes the architecture from the edge inward.
System overview
Edge layer
The device protocol gateway receives inbound device streams — primarily HL7 v2/MLLP from existing installations, with IHE PCD adapter slots for structured device data. All processing happens locally at the bedside; no real-time cloud dependency exists in the critical path.
The stateful rule-based analyzer and stateless rule-based analyzer wrap the Compute core, handling live stream and loaded-file inputs respectively. Both services use the same Runtime library and release-bound compiled bundle.
Knowledge plane
Clinical rules are maintained as a formal graph in the medical knowledge graph store, validated with SHACL constraints. The knowledge compiler transforms an approved snapshot of the graph into a compiled bundle — a deterministic, versioned artifact.
The bundle is deployed to the edge without network I/O at runtime. It does not update itself; updates go through the governed release process.
Record plane
The clinical-data facade exposes FHIR R4 resources to clinical information systems: Observation, Device, DeviceMetric, GuidanceResponse, Provenance, AuditEvent. This is a projection of the canonical audit event log — not the source of truth.
The evidence-of-fact receipt is a cryptographic chain from the approved knowledge graph snapshot through compilation to runtime execution, enabling full traceability of every recommendation.
Scalability and deployment
- Single-institution deployment: device protocol gateway + services on local hardware; FHIR facade on-premise
- Multi-site: one compiled bundle per version deployed identically across all sites; governance centralised, data sovereign at each site
- Offline-capable: critical path (analysis, command issuance) has no cloud dependency
Documents
HealthOS ICU: Full Concept → · Standards & Interoperability →
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