healthcare technology

Some leading hospitals are increasingly turning to tablets -- iPads and iPad-like devices -- as a way to improve access to patient health records for providers walking the hospital halls.

Such devices are seen as a way to work around clunky desktops and make greater use of an electronic medical record's (EMR) capabilities.

"Tablets, in our experience, are very effective if you need not the entire EMR, but a slice of information," Will Morris, MD, associate chief medical information officer at the Cleveland Clinic, told MedPage Today.

The hospital is piloting the use of tablets with a few sectors of its workforce, such as its rapid response teams. Clinicians can look up patient information on their way to a patient who is crashing and better know how to treat the patient when they arrive at their room.

Other hospital staff use them on rounds; data entered is synced with the hospital's full EMR.

"The more we can assist our providers in being more efficient, the better the value proposition," Morris said.

Hospitals are increasingly turning to mobile devices as a cost-effective extension of their EMRs, making them more usable and friendly, David Collins, senior director of mHIMSS, the mobile wing of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), in Chicago, said.

"You spend millions of dollars for EHR [electronic health record] implementation," Collins toldMedPage Today in a phone interview. "But if you can spend $300 on a tablet and issue these to providers so they're more mobile, it's really a minimal cost for the payoff."

At the Cleveland Clinic, officials don't have data on quality improvement just yet, but Morris said they have seen an improvement in how long it takes nurses to enter vital signs.

"It's not going to be the tablet that transforms practice," he said. "It's going to be 'How do you use the data coming out of your EMR, applied with clinical rules, to empower the clinical practice?' "

While smartphones still beat tablets in numbers and frequency of use, physicians generally prefer to do their reading and research on the bigger screen.

Industry observers like myself have often painted the competitive mHealth landscape with a brush that wages computer manufacturer Dell and software behemoth Microsoft versus Apple--the reigning mobile healthcare champion. However, the real battle for the heart, mind and soul of the still-emerging mHealth market places Apple and search engine giant Google squarely in the commercial trenches.

Apple's iPhone and iPad have set the standard for other mobile devices in healthcare. Doctors, in particular, simply love their iPhones and iPads. But, now, the mHealth war between Apple and Google appears to be entering a new battlefield, namely wearable devices. 

At the center of Apple's efforts in this area is its long-awaited iWatch, a wristwatch-like computing device with smartphone/tablet and health/activity tracking capabilities. Reportedly, iWatch includes a pedometer for counting steps and sensors for monitoring health-related data such as heart rate.

Apple is growing its team of medical sensor specialists by hiring some of the world's premiere experts in mobile medical technologies. Presumably, this expertise will be heavily leveraged by Apple in their development of the iWatch or some other device.    

Simultaneously, Google has been working on its much-heralded Google Glass, high-tech glasses which contain a heads-up display, camera and a microphone, and can ostensibly support mobile health apps directly on the device. Google Glass, developed by the company's secretive Google X lab, has strong potential for healthcare, particularly in the ER where physicians could use the glasses to scroll through lab and radiology results and in the OR providing surgeons with hands-free access to critical clinical information.

In addition, earlier this month, Google unveiled its contact lenses, which use a tiny sensor and wireless transmitter, to monitor and measure glucose levels in tears, potentially replacing the self-administered blood tests from finger pricks that diabetics must endure on a daily basis. Not surprisingly, Google employees recently met with U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials at FDA headquarters who regulate eye devices. 

Who will be first to market with these wearable devices--Apple or Google--remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that the two technology leaders with track records for building strong brands will no doubt dazzle the marketplace with innovative, leading-edge products that put sensor-based devices in the hands of consumers and medical professionals. That kind of competition in mHealth can only serve to benefit us all as this nascent industry moves forward

More at  http://www.fiercemobilehealthcare.com/story/apple-vs-google-mhealth-face/2014-01-27

The Mayo Clinic’s recent iPad trial for cardiac surgery patients, which MobiHealthNews first wrote about in February, has received a good deal of attention forusing Fitbit activity monitors in a clinical setting. But Dr. David J. Cook, who led the study, says the real innovation of the study is unprecedented levels of patient engagement — in patients he repeatedly described as “70-year-olds on morphine.”

“Patient participation is completely dependent on usability,” Cook said at a session at the mHealth Summit near Washington, DC. “Healthcare technology and tools are not meaningful unless they’re integrated with care plans and expectations, and that’s dependent on delivering knowledge to patients. Once you have a usable tool, you can help self-assessment and reporting, data acquisition and aggregation is meaningful, and clinically meaningful algorithms can impact patient outcomes.”

In the study, 149 cardiac patients were given iPads with a specially created app preloaded. The app, called My Care, interacted with patients bi-directionally, giving them a to-do list for the day and also assessing their mobility (both self-reported and via Fitbit data) and pain.

more at : http://mobihealthnews.com/28015/mayos-ipad-study-had-98-percent-engagement-among-seniors/