The wide use and proliferation of cell phones is very evident in recent years.  In fact, it has evolved from being a luxury item into a basic necessity because of   the convenience that it offers. Most important of all it is a very effective means of communication   and information is easily received and disseminated in just a short period of time.

Cell phones And Health Care

It is because of this that cell phones and mobile technology have been utilized to deliver basic human needs such as health care. For one,  health care and the  prompt delivery  of  its services  is indicative of  how and  to what  extent  countries and nations are  abreast with the  latest  developments toward  the sustenance of human life. The  use of  simple cell phones  is  one way  to  make  health care  available and  more reachable  even  in the most remote of  villages.

Cell Phones and Various Ways to Improve Health Care

The importance of cell phones in the pursuit and improvement of total health care has been widely acknowledged in   recent years.  Just some of the   ways that cell phones have become essential   in improving health care are the following:

• Saves the lives of  mothers during  childbirth by helping to summon medical care

• Patients are easily checked and their conditions easily monitored via cell phones with remote diagnostic devices.

• Record  keeping  becomes easier and hassle-free

• Improved diagnosis and consequent better treatment

• Referral of patients to  hospitals especially in emergency cases

These and a lot more  are just some of the  ways that  best  explain the  necessity and growing demand  of  cell phone usage  in the field of health care. In fact, more efforts  have  recently been undertaken to further enhance and  seek worldwide support towards the  indispensable advantage of  mobile technology  in health care. According to statistics  almost 90% of the  world’s  population  has access to  wireless phone signals   therefore it is not surprising at all  why  cell phones and  mobile technology has been  tapped to  its  full advantage.

Recent Developments in Health Care Improvement via Mobile Technology

Various undertakings are currently in full swing towards the delivery of improved health care services through the use of cell phones and mobile technology.  Here are just some of the recent developments:

• Effective data collection  on mother and child health  in  the countries of Bangladesh and Vietnam

• Consultation of patients  done regularly and   patients’ conditions monitored  better by midwives in Indonesia because of  simultaneous and easy communication

• Cell phones were  effectively used for remote fetal monitoring and  remote wireless ultrasound when attached to wireless diagnostics …click here to read more

I was extraordinarilly surprised when I saw this.  I knew that many Americans are providing home care for their elderly parents or disabled spouses, but I never dreamed it would be this wide spread. 

A new study by the AARP estimates that for the more than 40 million Americans caring for an elderly or disabled loved one, the value of their work is $450 billion a year.

That’s a good deal for society. But for the family members doing the work, the study finds they need a lot more help.

FULL STORY

 

 

The following article was written by a guest Physician writer. Even though the source is known, the physician has asked to submit anonymously.

Physicians like any other professionals, have to deal with record-keeping and other related responsibilities.  This is highly important to ensure that patients’ records are kept intact and in a secured manner. The conventional way of   keeping these records are in the form of paper records  which  are  filed  usually in  alphabetical order for easier  retrieval  and  neatly arranged in filing cabinets  and  other forms of  storage equipment.

Paper Records to Electronic Medical Record

With the  advent of  technology and  the pressing need for more advanced  ways  in  the medical field,  the  use of paper records  has  been  eventually  eradicated to give way to  electronic medical record or EMR.  Compared to paper records, EMR displays greater convenience, by way of systematic arrangement and recovery of patient records in a short span of time.

EMR and the Preliminary Response among Physicians

The introduction of EMR was initially received with mixed responses from physicians all over the world.  The ones  highly  affected with the  standardization of  patient records are the  veteran physicians and doctors who  have  been in the service for quite a while  and  have been serving the  people  for a span of  few decades.  This is because  these physicians  were accustomed to the  traditional  way  of  record-keeping  which  is done mainly  on paper.

Initial Views and Apprehensions on the Paper to EMR Transition

With the continuing need to upgrade the record system in the medical field there are also apprehensions that accompany this development especially on the part of the physicians. Here are just some of the views of physicians, with regard to the change   from paper to EMR:

• The initial difficulty at getting a full understanding of the operation of the electronic medical record   since it entailed intrinsic computer operations know-how and technical knowledge.  

• Some   physicians were initially hesitant to   change into  EMR  because  they have become highly accustomed  to the paper  record-keeping manner  which did not entail  any  complexities  as opposed to EMR.

• The   limited training and lack of prior orientation on the EMR among some physicians and their staff paved an opportunity to criticize the  new system.

Significant Physician Responses on EMR In Consideration of Patient Feedback

Along with the implementation and continued endorsement of the EMR a couple of responses from physicians were compiled, in addition to considerations of patient feedback. Here are some of these compiled physician views and responses:

1. Benefits  of  EMR implementation

• immediate and universal access to patient records as well as easier and quicker navigation through patient records

• standardization of care among  physicians

• accessing more readily available information about  the patients’ medications

• Ability to retrieve  patients’ information

• Ability to electronically transmit information by way of prescriptions to pharmacies

2. Concerns of Patients regarding EMR usage

• Patients  expressed positive feeling toward EMR

• Patients were excited  of the new development and highly interested about EMR

• Patients  were impressed   about the  new technology and  highly regarded their physicians as being able to keep up with the modern times

3. Issues  and concerns  

• Some physicians  had a difficulty with the start-up process

• Considerable  increase in patient volume due to the  increased efficiency

• Some physicians viewed the EMR process as a hard and complex task but were equally excited with the considerable and positive changes.  
  …click here to read more

Health care insurance is a core component of care in the US. We have heard a lot about health information exchanges, but we have heard very little about the health insurance exchanges.

Dan Schuyler, Director with Leavitt Partners explains the core components of a health insurance exchange.

1. The core components of an exchange
2. A point of sale portal
3. A true health insurance exchange
4. PPACA compliant exchange

If you are reading my blog, you probably don’t need to be convinced in the benefits of EHRs and EMRs.  That being said, it is always nice to have another tool in the bin to discuss benefits of electronic systems.

Healthcare has some awesome technology, but pagers aren’t one of them.  It still boggles my mind how many facilities I have seen that still have a text pager on the hip of their physicians and leadership.  This text pager is almost always right next to a smart phone too.  Uhg.

 The OnPage organization would like to help fix this issue for you.  With an application for Blackberry and iPhone that can sort your messages and give you higher flexibility than any pager, OnPage may have an app you want to look at. 

Enter OnPage— Advantages:

•              Maintains Advantages Gained with Pager Devices – As you know, pagers are still used by healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses and first responders, etc.) because they provide a direct funnel for critical, emergency messages that are prioritized over all the other email/text noise out there. OnPage ensures the same, making a unique sound no matter what audio settings your phone is on.

•              Eliminates the Need for a Separate Device – Rather than carrying a separate paging device, users can consolidate using OnPage.

•              Protects User Privacy/Identity – OnPage enables people to contact you on your phone without actually having to give out your personal phone number; something many doctors don’t want to do.

•              Enables Two-Way Communications – On classic paging devices, it is impossible to guarantee that your message went through without confirmation via follow-up phone call. OnPage creates an audit trail that shows when the page was sent, delivered and read.

•              Speeds Response Time in Emergencies – Pager networks are often slow, so using OnPage can actually shave seconds off of message delivery time which can be critical in emergency situations.

The application is now available in the Apple/RIM app stores on Tuesday, July 19th—here’s the press release: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110719005623/en

The University of Illinois Chicago has a Health Information Technology program (no, I didn’t get my degree from them) that has been drawing some attention.  In the video linked below Sanford Rose Associate Bonnie Siegel discusses what she sees the health care industry asking for when they go to hire HIT leaders.   

The University of Illinois at Chicago is proud to introduce the Expert Interview Series conducted by one of our UIC faculty members.  Get insight into thoughts on health care IT recruitment by viewing the interview titled Seeking the Health IT Professional.

IsansysLifecare Limited, the provider of complete real-time
physiological patient data services and systems, today announces the
launch of the LifeTouch HRV011 a radical new addition to its Lifecare
Platform. The LifeTouch is an intelligent cardiac monitor that adheres
to the patient’s body and analyses the ECG signal of every
heartbeat. Key physiological parameters, including heart rate,
respiration rate and high resolution QRS intervals are calculated and
uploaded from the LifeTouch to the secure HL7 compliant database in
the IsansysLifecare Platform – a multi layer, configurable, fully
scalable, wireless patient monitoring platform. IsansysLifecare’s
services, tailored to meet the individual requirements of the care
provider, are built on the Lifecare Platform, which is available now.

For more information read the full news release here:
http://www.neondrum.com/public/public_release.php?id=762

In an increasingly competitive world, using new technology smartly, customers can make or break the success of your company. Medical sectors are facing a lot of global challenges today. The use of newest technology greatly helps the physicians in a number of ways as clinical performance and patient safety goes hand in hand.

Business intelligence (BI) refers not only to analyzing of data, but also knowing how you relate the results from the data analysis to every day business decisions.

Clinical data and performance can be enhanced through the advent of new technologies such as Information Technology (I.T.). Business Intelligence is so important in healthcare industry which is full of modern challenges in data quality and its distribution. There is also a constant demand for accurate patient records that becomes more complex.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) helps the healthcare groups to think that extra security and administration of the data security carefully shape their security models. Only qualified individuals can look at patient private information.
The ability to evaluate operational and financial compliance provides a more complete analysis of performance at a time when patients are demanding more responsibility for clinical outcomes.

BI and Lowered Healthcare Cost

• One of the best ways to meet the rising demand for achieving competitive advantage to implement technology solutions using BI is to take an approach with full enthusiasm.
• Healthcare organizations improve patient care by driving better decision making throughout the organization.
• When insight into clinical data is sound, informed, and complete, clinical decisions will be evidence based.
• Because healthcare providers are experiencing a vital call for to obtain and supervise and endeavor over inflating costs and operational processes, hospitals and other providers are face to face with relentless pressures to perk up patient contentment, quality of care, and the financial health of the organization.
• The implementation of a business intelligence solution in any organization will directly improve patient safety and clinical quality by providing reports and analytics to give insights into business operations.

…click here to read more

After Lilli was born, it took 21 months of medical confusion and speculation for doctors to conclude Lilli had Smith-Magenis Syndrome (SMS), a developmental disorder that affects the 17th chromosome. SMS causes intellectual disability, delayed development, sleep disturbance, and extreme behavioral problems. At the time, Brandi was told that SMS was so rare, only 600 people worldwide had the disorder. There are very few support groups for SMS, none at all in Canada. The details of SMS are rather hellish.

Lilli was born with a heart defect that affects roughly 25% of kids with SMS. She wouldn’t learn to walk or talk like the other kids. In fact, at 6 months old Lilli still resembled a newborn.

FULL STORY

The area of health care is no longer contained between the four corners of   health and medical institutions and hospitals. Health and clinical issues as well as patient management are now more accessible even as persons are not physically present   for treatment, monitoring and check-up. This has become possible with telehealth as well as telemedicine and home patient monitoring technologies that promise to deliver great results and more efficiency in terms of health care.

The iPad has opened a lot of eyes in medical world towards the advantages of point of care technology. Quick and nimble, the iPad has been a great opening tool for many physicians.

Microsoft’s coming “Windows 8″ operating system may just bring those physicians back to the dark side. With immensely more flexibility, much more robust application bases, and an interface that is just as easy an Apple device, but with the power of a PC, this Windows 8 demo is very much worth a watch.

Mobile health (m-health) is coming a long way very quickly. This form of mobile health integrates diagnostic euipment into a Wii game console and uploads your data straight to a mobile phone. Presumably it can go from your mobile phone to a PHR, EHR, or HIE.

The FDA seems like an odd group to be monitoring and managing EHRs, but there is precedence in them taking on medical technology.  Concerns about patient safety related to electronic health records may be prompting the Food and Drug Administration to revisit its existing “enforcement discretion” approach to HIT, under the premise that EHR software can be considered Medical Device Data Systems (MDDS).

Thirteen states so far are paying Medicaid subsidies for health information technology. Jessica Kahn, technical director the CMS’ Center for Medicaid, CHIP and Survey and Certification, talks with Modern Healthcare reporter Joseph Conn about what states and providers need to do in order to take advantage of the program.

I have received a couple hundred emails asking where I disappeared to in May.  I only posted up until 5 May and then fell off the electronic Earth.  Well, simply put my personal life had a big change or two, my Internet provider decided to hate me, and ….. I got promoted again.

As for the personal life… well… ask my wife and kids… or don’t    Internet provider, well I use 3G for my home intertubes and had WAY too many complications when switching out my Cradlepoint routers. The promoted part… that I can talk about.

As part of the newly renamed Mayo Clinic Health System we are creating a new Information Technology organization.  The new Mayo Clinic Health System (pictured here):

… is changing from 12 decentralized IT structures to a single, centralized IT division.  This creates a comprehensive technology organization that covers 70 communities with a combination of 18 hospitals and 69 clinics.  This much larger, much stronger IT organization is partnered directly with the overall Mayo Clinic enterprise IT organization in what will be a much more cost effective, productive, and overall highly efficient team!

My part in this exciting new group is as the leader of the MCHS IT Information Management Office.  My new teams are responsible for a whole host of things that just start with strategy & planning, innovation, project management, and the overall convergence projects for the newly centralized IT org.

In short, I have a lot to do    Hopefully over the next few months I will be able to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities of this newly formed organization and how others in health care IT may be able to learn from our successes and mistakes.

Thank you all for sticking with Healthtechnica while I was away in May!

Shawn Riley

Information Technology has been rapidly taking over industry after industry and profession after profession. The medical profession is not an exception either. More and more patients are depending for both medical information and treatment through the internet, which is fast becoming an international occurrence. They are called e-patients who research and seek medical attention via internet for their illness and other medical condition. They use social networks to constantly share with everybody online who have the same health care interest.

Let us review 5 technologies that have favored ePatients world wide.

Interactive Patient System

Patient education is an essential component of successful medical practice. The Internet can be a good source of medical information, advice, and assistance for people with personal computers.

Physicians purposefully educate their patients online. They give graphs and examples so that the patients would understand their particular condition better. Through internet education, patients can learn additional information. Patient-doctor relationship is also important so that the patients would gain confidence and think about positive outcome for their condition.

This technology also helps the completion of patient surveys, the articulation of messages based on educational materials to patients, and the patient’s ability to make comments or take notes in advance of a doctor’s check up. This way the patient knows what to expect when meeting his or her physician, and also helps the patient in asking relevant details and questions.

Wireless Patient Monitoring

• There is an essential interest in using wireless technologies in patient monitoring in various environments that includes the nursing homes.
• Patient monitoring has been emphasized due to increased need for effective healthcare management. It focuses on wireless technology.
• Progress and development in patient monitoring include new devices, real-time audio and video for “face-to-face” interaction between clinicians and patients and wireless communication.
• Sensors are integrated into the Patient’s bed and provide management and monitoring of parameters like the patient’s blood pressure, heart rate, and sleep movements.
• Monitoring helps the physicians to provide improved health care needs to the patients. Data that is acquired is transmitted to the system, recorded and analyzed.
• This is one way in reducing time to give patient fast and reliable care.

Online Pharmacy System

• Online Pharmacy is operated throu …click here to read more

• The critical steps involved in developing and executing a mobile strategy
• Essential tips on how to successfully implement and roll out smart phone technology
• How to bridge the gap between IT and clinical

The good folks over at SoftwareAdvice.com sent me a new article they wrote on the possibilities of Intuit Health.  Intuit is best known for the Quickbooks series of applications.  However, they are diving into health care with a few very interesting products. 

It’s helpful to understand Intuit’s current healthcare presence to see how an EMR and PM system would blow the doors open. Their back-door approach began in September of 2009, when they launched Intuit Health Bill Pay. This application lets patients view complete breakdowns of statements and pay them online. It is essentially credit card processing through Intuit Payment Solutions for physician practices with a bit more functionality.
Read the full story at: http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/medical/intuit-health-1042511/#ixzz1LD58yWBY

A government-sponsored study released yesterday compared Lucentis, a drug approved to treat a common form of blindness in the elderly called macular degeneration, to Avastin, a cancer drug eye doctors have been using to treat the eye disease for years.

It found that patients who got Avastin could read an average of 8 more letters on an eye chart after a year – while Lucentis patients were able to read 8.5 more letters after a year of treatment.

 ”Health care providers and payers worldwide will now have to justify the cost of using ranibizumab [Lucentis,]” said an editorial accompanying the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

FULL STORY

As tablets and smart phones evolve and make their way into hospitals, many health care executives are working to develop a successful mobile-integration strategy. St. Joseph, Mo.-based Heartland Regional Medical Center recently implemented Voalté’s iPhone solution, which leverages the hospital’s disparate systems onto a single communication platform.
 
Voalté enables caregivers at the medical center to make high-definition VoIP calls, receive critical alarms and send and receive presence-based text messages on the iPhone. This unique deployment includes integrations to the hospital’s Siemens PBX, GE Dukane nurse call system, and Cerner ADT alarms through Philips’ Emergin Enterprise Service Bus over its Cisco wireless network.
 
“Our nurses wanted iPhones because they can communicate faster using only one device and smart phones offer anywhere access,” said Dr. Joe Boyce, chief medical information officer at Heartland Regional Medical Center. “We evaluated handsets and voice badges and chose to implement Voalté’s iPhone solution because it works with our existing infrastructure and allows our clinical staff to provide a higher level of care. Replacing legacy phones with Voalté has been a smart decision.”
 
Health care organizations like Heartland Regional Medical Center need to find a communication solution that leverages their current investment and provides a platform for future expansion and functionality, according to Trey Lauderdale, vice president of innovation at Voalté.
 
“We are excited to have a partner like Heartland Health that is helping us drive the future of point-of-care communication,” he said.
 
Streamlined and simplified communications allows nurses to focus on providing care and service.
 
According to Julia Jacobs, a registered nurse at Heartland, texting another clinician is much easier for the nurses than roaming from room to room or having them paged overhead, which often disturbs patients who are resting.
 
“When I am in the room trying to comfort a patient or the patient’s family, I need to provide a peaceful environment for them,” said Jacobs.  ”It was hard to do that when my pager and phone would continue to go off.”
 
According to Boyce, nurses want to see the right information at the right time in the right form.
 
“Our nurses don’t care about all the integration that is happening behind the scenes,” said Boyce. “Voalté enables them to spend more time with their patients.”
 
Anything that relieves nurses of non-clinical duties frees them up for patient care, Lauderdale said.
 
“The time alone that we will save by being able to text message a group of people is priceless,” said Jacobs. “I love being there to hold my patient’s hand or provide support for my patient’s family. Now I have more time to do that.”
 

It seems that the unique fellows of a Polish architecture firm have come up with a zombie proof, all concrete, completely enclosed home for surviving the apocolypse or next tornado alley assault. 

See more pictures here