The critical care data exchange format: a proposed flexible data standard for combining clinical and high-frequency physiologic data in critical care.

To develop a standardized format for exchanging clinical and physiologic data generated in the intensive care unit. Our goal was to develop a format that would accommodate the data collection pipelines of various sites but would not require dataset-specific schemas or ad-hoc tools for decoding and analysis.A number of centers had independently developed solutions for storing clinical and physiologic data using Hierarchical Data Format-Version 5 (HDF5), a well-supported standard already in use in multiple other fields.