[colincsl]

They are implying that medical devices are notoriously bad at being proprietary/closed. Hospitals would be much better off if the devices could talk to each other but it isn't feasible as-is because device manufacturers want lock-in. The current situation leads to issues like alarm fatigue where nurses effectively ignore problems due to too many devices. If they were centralized then there could be one management system that intelligently alerts the nurse of any issues.

We have a major effort at Hopkins going on right now to get around this. See this article more info: http://hub.jhu.edu/2015/10/19/hopkins-microsoft-patient-safe...