What is a Gateway in a clinical setting?

In medical technology, a gateway (also known as an edge device) refers to a specialized hardware and software solution that intelligently connects medical devices with clinical IT systems. These devices serve as a digital bridge between on-site medical technology and the hospital’s IT infrastructure—locally, securely, and often in real time.

Gateways perform key tasks in everyday hospital life:

• Integration of medical devices with proprietary interfaces into hospital information systems (HIS)
• Acquisition, preprocessing and standardization of device date – e. g., in HL7 or FHIR
• Encrypted data transfer to local servers, cloud platforms or analysis tools
• Visualization and contextualization of device data for medical staff

Whithout integration of the hospital´s primary systems – HIS, PACS, EMR and others– it does not work. These systems typically communicate via DICOM, HL7 and/or FHIR.

Interfaces following HL7®, DICOM, FHIR, and similar standards run on a central gateway that enables your devices to communicate with the primary systems. Through the gateway (which can run on a physical edge device or a virtual machine), your devices can share their data in a standardized way with all other systems in the hospital or the cloud.

Based on our certified and field-proven libraries, DICOMconnect and 7connect, we maintain a continuously growing code platform as part of our implementation projects, that solves typical gateway tasks (e.g., updates of patients/cases/orders via HL7 ADT). This gives us a starting point where the majority of your individual gateway solution is already taken care of.