The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center can now provide
employees with remote access to high-performance computing, data
analysis, and administrative resources thanks to NoMachine software.
NoMachine allows Center researchers to maintain rigorous research
schedules, no matter where they are located. The Center consists of
more than 3,000 staff, including world-renowned scientists and Nobel
Laureates, who are dedicated to understanding, treating, and
preventing cancer, HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening diseases.
Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, researchers are also spread out
at remote sites across North America and Europe. With NoMachine, the
Center can connect 250-300 researchers to the high-performance
computing (HPC) cluster, with up to 25 users connecting at the same
time.
For more information read the full news release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=1226

 PerfectServe, the leading platform for intelligent clinical communication services, today announced it has been included in the list of “Cool Vendors” in the Cool Vendors in Healthcare, 2012ⁱ report by Gartner, Inc. Cool Vendors are selected for being innovative, impactful and intriguing.

According to the Gartner report, Cool Vendors in Healthcare, 2012, written by Wes Rishel, Thomas J. Handler, M.D., Vi Shaffer, Barry Runyon, and Steven Lefebure, “It’s easy to slap a few healthcare terms on a snazzy new technology and call it innovation. Our Cool Vendors this year are true innovators that have found nuanced ways to apply technology to practical administrative, clinical and social problems of delivering healthcare.”

“We believe being identified by Gartner as a “Cool Vendor” in healthcare confirms that PerfectServe is leading the clinical communications industry,” said Terry Edwards, chief executive officer of PerfectServe. “PerfectServe is proud of the work we are doing with leading health systems to help clinicians streamline communications and coordinate care. With a solid platform that gives doctors the opportunity to selectively filter and control how they receive clinical communications, PerfectServe makes the practice of medicine more efficient while improving patient safety and care coordination.”

About PerfectServe
Advancing care coordination across the continuum, PerfectServe’s intelligent clinical communication platform makes it easy to connect clinicians — and push relevant clinical information — to the right physician at the right time, in the precise way each physician wishes to be reached. Based in Knoxville, Tenn., PerfectServe processes more than 35 million transactions annually, connecting more than 20,000 physicians in health systems and medical practices across 154 markets in the United States. For more information go to www.perfectserve.com, visit Twitter, or call 877-844-7728.

The nations which constitute the 3rd world group are not in a very comfortable position with regard to many basic facilities including health care and medical technology.

Many of the ordinary facilities that are considered to be common place and even considered to be a necessity in the developed nations are still considered to be a luxury in the 3rd world nations.

Things have definitely changed and improved for the better over the years. Yet basic facilities and necessities like health care, vaccination and medical technology are all still in the very nascent stage, even while the rest of the developed world is heralding the 11th year of the 21st century.

Year 2005 and an open invitation by Bill Gates:

In the year 2005, Bill Gates did make an odd proposal to the scientists and researchers of the world.  He offered an open invitation to these highly qualified and reputed folks to put their brains together and work towards a common aim. This common aim was to create or invent or discover effective methods of vaccination for many of the diseases that were yet not preventable. The major diseases topping this list were the much dreaded killer disease- Acquired Immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and malaria.

Issues with current method of vaccine administration:

He also requested them to find some viable solution to deal with the fact that the majority of the vaccines had to be administered via needles and syringes; which is obviously a painful process and deters many people from getting themselves or their children vaccinated.

Issues with current method of vaccine storage:

Many of the vaccines require being stored in refrigerators and ice packs. This is another hazard waiting to happen, because most of the developing and 3rd world nations experience frequent power outages and also may not have the proper refrigeration facilities. 

Outcome of these issues: …click here to read more

Joining today is Silvia Fazekas, Clinical Information Systems Manager at St Vincent’s Public Hospital. Silvia will be speaking at IIR’s Electronic Medication Management conference on 21-22 June 2012 in Melbourne.

Questions:

1. St Vincent’s have been using electronic medication management systems for some time now. Where are you in terms of full roll out across the hospital and what have been some of the key challenges faced?

2. What has the clinician uptake of electronic medication management systems been like at St Vincent’s?

3. Where do you see the future of electronic medication management systems?

Kickoff for the 16th Annual future of heatlh technology summit ( www.fhti.org )

Take a gander at the video series:  http://youtu.be/INr578ao06o

Let’s face it, ICD-10 is a HUGE impact to medical facilities.  You need to keep working on improving process and deploying software to be ready for this massive impact to your clinical business.

ACOs have received a lot of attention as the new model to improve quality and tie payment to healthy outcomes. States have been exploring the model to varying degrees and looking at what is required to be successful.

Join this lively panel discussion at the 2012 State Healthcare IT Connect Summit (June 19-21) to learn what an ACO is, what it will take to implement the model, and how states are using the ACO concept to tie quality and cost together, address quality measurement, and ensuring enhanced care coordination for society’s most vulnerable citizens.

Who: Join over 250 State HIT leaders from State Government, HIEs, Payers, Providers and Solution Providers
Where: Hyatt Dulles, Washington International Airport
When: Day 2 (June 19) 10.00 a.m. – 11.00 a.m. as part of the 3-day 2012 State Healthcare IT Connect Summit (June 19-21)

Panelists:
Ross Owen, Manager Care Delivery Reform, Minnesota Department of Human Services
Jed Ziegenhagen, Director Rates and Analysis Division, Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing
Natalie Ellertson, VP, Optum Government Solutions
 

>>Learn More 

>>View Full Agenda

Many older adults lose their independence as their health declines and they are compelled to move into assisted care facilities. Researchers at the University of Missouri and TigerPlace, an independent living community, have been using motion-sensing technology to monitor changes in residents’ health for several years. Now, researchers have found that two devices commonly used for video gaming and security systems are effective in detecting the early onset of illness and fall risk in seniors.

The folks who are hearing impaired are already suffering from a handicap. To add salt to injury; comes in the difficulty experienced in recognizing and interpreting what other people are trying to communicate to them. Most of these individuals rely only upon the art of reading the lips of the speaker to understand what is being said to them.

Problems associated with lip reading:

 The problem with lip reading is that, many of the consonants of English language; for instance consonants like p and b, may be quite tough to read accurately through watching of the lip movements. Striking up casual conversation with someone who is communicating through his or her lip movement alone, can be very much stressful; and call for a lot of concentration and paying of attention by the person who is hearing impaired.

Moreover a large chunk of the hearing impaired population may not even be able to afford other effective and less stressful options like cochlear implants, and this is truer in the lesser developed and under developed nations.

Now new technologies for the hearing impaired are being developed in order to relive these individuals of their woes. Let us have a look at some of these latest additions to health technology.

Tactile devices for the hearing impaired:

These devices do exactly what they signify. That means to say that these devices are capable of converting the audible sound vibrations in to tactile vibrations. When simply put, it denotes that the auditory sound waves get altered in to touch sensations that can be experienced by the skin. Though these tactile devices cannot be considered as a new invention, the latest development is aimed at making them more sophisticated and more competent in boosting the lip reading performance.

…click here to read more

Dr. Jelle Barentsz demonstrated this week how modern
technology, including NoMachine’s remote access software, can improve
physician collaboration and lead to better patient care at the
TEDxMaastricht “The Future of Health” event. Prostate cancer is the
second most common cancer in men worldwide. Dr. Barentsz, a professor
of Radiology and Chair of the Prostate MR-Center of Excellence at the
Radboud University Nijmgen Medical Center, and his team use advanced
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans as a critical step to more
accurate patient diagnoses. During his TEDx session, Dr. Barentsz also
proved how the sharing of these images between specialists is integral
to faster, better diagnosis and treatment of tumors.
For more information read the full news release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=1192

 PerfectServe, the leading platform for intelligent clinical communication services, has strengthened its national sales force with the addition of Jean Schat as regional vice president of sales for the northeast region.

In her new role, Schat will be responsible for growing PerfectServe’s hospital clients and health care partnerships within the northeastern United States. 

A registered respiratory therapist with more than 15 years of health care expertise, Schat has a proven history of record-breaking sales. She comes to PerfectServe from Curaspan Health Group where she served as northeast general manager and senior regional director.

Prior to her tenure at Curaspan Health Group, Schat was a northeast regional executive at CareScience, Inc.  She was also the northeast regional vice president at MediServe Information Systems from 2001-2005, and has held positions at Mallinckrodt/Tyco Healthcare, CliniComp, Intl., and Naval Medical Center.

Schat holds a bachelor’s degree in business information systems from the University of Phoenix.

DNA Electronics Ltd. a developer of semiconductor solutions
for real-time DNA and RNA detection, today announces that it has
licensed its ground-breaking Genalysis® technology platform for
rapid, lab-free DNA detection to geneOnyx, a company that is
delivering on-the-spot genetic analytics services for cosmetics and
skincare applications.
For more information read the full news release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=1161

PerfectServe, the leading platform for intelligent clinical communication services, recently expanded its suite of mobile access applications with full versions for BlackBerry® and Android™ smartphone devices.

The smartphone apps enable physicians to easily and securely contact any colleague, call patients without divulging personal information, easily manage on-call schedules on the fly, change call routing to different devices based on situation, like going into surgery, and keep track of and easily respond to all their inbound and outbound communications.

More than 20,000 physicians already use PerfectServe to customize their entire communications process according to their practice workflow and individual contact preferences. The enhanced mobile apps, in addition to PerfectServe’s iPhone app launched last year, give doctors another convenient way — beyond voice and web interfaces—to access the advanced communications platform.

PerfectServe was developed to address the communication breakdowns that can occur when nurses and clinicians need to connect with on-call physicians. PerfectServe solves the key issues of communication breakdown, which The Joint Commission has cited as the single greatest contributing factor to sentinel events and delays in care in U.S. hospitals. In a recent article published in Executive Insight, timely communication between clinicians was noted as essential for care coordination to improve patient safety.

Based on proprietary integrated messaging technology that is fully HIPAA-compliant, PerfectServe is the industry’s first clinical communication tool that eliminates unnecessary steps, hand-offs and decision points, which not only slow down or halt the process but also increase the likelihood of miscommunications. It gives doctors complete access and control over their professional communications with colleagues, hospitals and patients using any telephone, Internet-enabled PC or wireless device.

PerfectServe uses clinician- and hospital-provided information to integrate call schedules, contact preferences and workflow rules to create fail-safe, error-free algorithms that ensure each call, text, voice, email message, or page is sent to the right physician for that particular moment in time. It also gives physicians complete control over the inbound communications they receive and allows them to view and change schedules, status and contact information, all in real time.

PerfectServe’s iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry apps are increasingly popular with physicians who are turning to smartphones as their preferred device to manage work flow and save time.

“Reaching colleagues has been much easier with PerfectServe,” said Dr. Alan Kawaguchi, an orthopaedic surgeon at Alpine Orthopaedic Medical Group, Inc. “They respond faster, and I have the app, so I don’t have to go looking for colleague phone numbers.”

Health care is one of the basic requirements for any human society. Proper health and medical care, appropriate use of vaccination techniques to prevent diseases, and knowledge of other hygienic and safety procedures that help protect humans against disability, disease and death; should definitely be amongst the topmost priorities of any nation.

Pathetic health care situation in the 3rd world nations:

This should be the common criteria for every nation of the world; be it completely developed, developing or still underdeveloped and grouped under the mortifying tag of 3rd world nations. But sadly enough; this is not the situation that greets us in the actual and practical world.

Leave alone advanced technologies and innovations; even simple and rudimentary health care facilities like timely availability of medical attention or presence of a basic primary health care unit etc are being denied to the unfortunate members belonging to many 3rd world nations.

What has changed in the past decade?

But things seem to be improving a tad bit for the better, in the past decade. Yet, the most pathetic fact remains that any medical or health care technology if at all being applied in 3rd world nations, costs more than an arm and a leg for the government and thus tends to end up eating dust on the back of the shelves.

So this post is aimed at describing some of the technologies or innovations that work fine for these so called 3rd world nations, and do not cost much and hence are both applicable for practical use and affordable too.

1) Birth mat: …click here to read more

Microsoft Health has a very innovative idea, quit sticking your finger to get a blood sugar reading.  In this cross between really terrifying and just drop your pants cool, Microsoft is working on a contact lense with augmented realty that can also give you medical information.

Health care delivery has evolved in the past few years along with the demand of new medical technologies and more sophisticated treatment options. However, lapses in quality as well as skyrocketing costs have resulted to a number of negative responses from the general public. This in turn paved the way for an increase in new health care organizational models whose aim is towards the improvement of coordination as well as efficiency of health care delivery. It led the way towards the inception of accountable care organizations.

The Accountable Care Organization (ACO): Its Goals And Significance

The ACO has the ultimate goal of improving coordination among physicians, nurse practitioners, hospitals and other health care providers. An integrated medical group is identified as an organization within an ACO which is held accountable for care coordination, quality and efficiency.

There are at least 3 characteristics of an ACO and these are:

• Ability towards patient management and provision as well as care continuity across various institutional settings. This includes ambulatory and in patient hospital care and post acute care.

• Capability of planning budgets and resource needs.

• Sufficient size to support comprehensive, valid and reliable performance measurement (Berenson).

Owing to this the ACO can act as a reform tool for incentivizing more efficient and effective health care. The ACO can also help combat overutilization and overbuilding of health care facilities and technology.

Accountable Care Organization Models

Some types of practice arrangements which can serve as ACO models are the following:

1.  Integrated delivery systems – These involves common ownership of hospitals, physician practices and even an insurance plan. It is characterized to have aligned financial incentives, electronic health records and resources to support cost effective care.

2. Multispecialty group practices- These usually own or have affiliations with hospitals such as the Mayo Clinic. They do not have health plans but have contracts with multiple health plans in their area and are identified to have strong physician leadership and developed mechanisms that provide coordinated clinical care.

3. Physician-Hospital Organizations – These are subsets of a hospital’s medical staff. Some function like multi specialty group practices that focus on reorganization of care delivery to achieve cost effective coordination.

4. Independent practice associations – These are individual physician practices that come together for the purpose of contracting with health plans. Most of these evolve to network of practices that engage in practice redesign and implementation of electronic health records among others.

5. Virtual Physician Organizations- These are small, independent physician practices mostly in rural areas which come together to form virtual physician organizations such as the Community Care of North Carolina. They can provide resources, leadership and infrastructure to aid practices in developing disease registries, implement electronic health records and provide better coordinated health care among others.

The Need for Accountable Care Organizations (ACO’s) …click here to read more

Five new technology businesses walked away
as winners at last night’s finals of the Cambridge Wireless
Discovering Start-Ups 2011 competition. Advanced Balance Systems,
Blu-Wireless Technology, Mindings, Proxama and Qiqqa were selected
from 20 start-ups invited to pitch their innovative wireless
technologies and business plans to 25 leading venture capitalists,
angels and industry investors. Senior representatives from companies
including Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, Qualcomm Ventures, Innovacom,
Broadcom, Orange, O2 Telefonica and ARM were there to judge the
finalists and provide expert advice.
For more information read the full news release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=1043

MacMall has announced a Medical Office Makeover Contest that has a benefit of $23,000 if you are the winning practice,

The Medical Office Makeover Contest features a prize for larger offices with 11 or more employees

valued at nearly $17,000, and a prize for offices with 1-10 employees valued at over $6,000. The highly

sought after products featured in the contest include Ergotron carts; HP workstations, monitors and

digital signs; Fujitsu scanners; Wasp time and attendance tracking; Nuance medical dictation, and other

high-value hardware and software from Xerox, Plantronics, Fellowes, ioSafe, Meraki, and Dymo.

More info at:  www.macmall.com/medicalmakeover.

5 Monkeys experiment:

I really really wish to the pastafarian Gods that this was not true in humans, but I can’t even count the number of times I have heard “but we have always done it this way”. 

This type of mindset gets in the way of progress.  We all need to battle this mindset (in ourselves and others) everyday.  Methods like LEAN, Six Sigma, Performance Improvement, and others all try to help us concuer our “inner monkey”. 

Battle on! 

The “most wired” assessment is a great way to obtain an assessment of where you are on your mission of building towards an electronic medial center and meaningful use. 

I have completed the Most Wired assessment several times over the last few years.  I find that the feedback is very valuable.  The feedback includes the averages of medical systems in your size and area range and how you compare to them in clinical system deployment, FTEs employed for IT / Informatics use, and the overall cost of your system in comparison to others. 

The whole survey typically takes my teams ~16 hours of time to complete.  The time is well worth the comparitive information. 

Survey Opens January 17, 2012. Discover more at:  www.hhnmostwired.com

Prince Andrew last week visited DocCom to find out how its
healthcare communications model for the Facebook generation will save
countless lives. On a tour of the company’s Bristol offices, the Duke
of York met the team of medics and software developers behind the UK’s
first secure and private social networking platform exclusively for
healthcare professionals. He learned how the highly mobile frontline
NHS workforce, in particular, was still heavily reliant on outdated
media such as fax machines, bleeps and legacy email systems. The
result, he was told, was increasingly poor and inefficient internal
communications which jeopardised patient safety and quality of care.
For more information read the full news release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=965

Ireland, homeland of my last name, has some great ideas to improve health technology.  The following three videos are from the “big ideas” showcase 2011. 

First up, Dr. Padraig McAuliffe, with a splint for your teeth.  His splint idea should decrease tooth grinding, mouth pain, and recurring dental costs:

 
Second, Dr. Gerard Lacey with an improved endoscopy tool for colon cancer screening:

 

And finally, Dr. Dominic Murphy with a highly improved optical measurement system. Dr. Murphy isn’t exactly thrilling to watch in this video, but his new concepts certainly have some excitement:

 Isansys Lifecare Limited, the provider of complete real-time
physiological patient data services and systems, today announces the
opening of Isansys Lifecare Systems Pvt Ltd., a new venture that
offers access to Isansys’ real-time vital signs data solutions to
the fast-growing Indian healthcare market. Located in Bangalore –
the high technology capital of India and a rapidly growing centre of
medical equipment and biotechnology – the new company was formally
incorporated in July this year and is now fully operational. Earlier
this year Isansys debuted its Lifecare Platform, a secure web-based
framework for intelligent vital signs data collation and
interpretation and, in May, Isansys announced full availability of the
first wireless body-worn monitor to run on the platform – the
LifeTouch HRV011, a multi-function, unobstrusive body-worn cardiac
monitor that adheres to the patient’s body and analyses the ECG
signal of every heartbeat. For more information read the full news
release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=960