This document specifies how medical waveforms, such as electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, spirometry waveform, etc., are described for interoperability among healthcare information systems.

This document can be used with other relevant protocols, such as HL7, DICOM®, the ISO/IEEE 11073 series, and database management systems for each purpose.

This is a general specification, so specifications for particular waveform types and for harmonization with DICOM®, SCP-ECG, X73, etc. are not given.

This document does not include lower layer protocols for message exchange. For example, a critical real-time application such as a patient monitoring system is out of scope and this is an implementation issue.