French hospital group builds NetBox plugin to unify biomedical device data with IT infrastructure

A French public healthcare group has developed an open-source NetBox plugin called netbox-biomed to integrate biomedical equipment data into its central IT source of truth. The project was triggered by a gap in visibility: connected medical devices such as ultrasound machines, MRI scanners, and infusion pumps held IP addresses, VLANs, and network flows that NetBox could not see. The data source was three Excel exports from Mercator, the ANSSI-recommended mapping tool used by biomedical teams, where staff had embedded up to 18 structured fields inside single spreadsheet cells. Parsing those cells revealed that over a third of the roughly 290 objects were not medical devices at all, but middleware servers, DICOM printers, and VPN gateways, which shaped the plugin's unified Equipment model. The effort demonstrated that a usable data model already existed within the teams' informal practices and needed to be listened to rather than invented from scratch.