Several very innovative healthcare applications were shown last week at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2009.One was from a company called Air Touch
Here's the description from their website:
“The development of the AirStrip Technologies platform was driven by the desire to improve the speed and quality of communication in healthcare.
The AirStrip Technologies platform securely delivers critical patient information, including virtual real-time waveform data, directly from hospital monitoring systems to a doctor or nurse’s smart phone, laptop or desktop. The platform is completely reusable, scalable and data independent, and can be employed throughout the healthcare enterprise. The AirStrip service is provided to physicians by the hospital.
AirStrip Technologies offers mobile, medical software applications that deliver this vital data directly to mobile devices, including smart phones. The applications are powered over wired and wireless networks. Patient information is available anytime, anywhere, on virtually any carrier, with any device on any platform.”
Their iPhone offering includes
Critical Care
OB
Cardiology
Imaging
Lab
The iPhone is quickly turning into a major resource for accessing mobile health applications.
Although I find the iPhone a challenging device for data entry, it's a great device for data viewing. Realtime viewing of waveform, imaging and text data via a handheld mobile device. That's cool!
Mobile Data Visualization (like a portable "dashboard") is certainly the direction that many fields that need to react to real-time data are headed.
ReplyDeleteThis, of course, speaks to the interoperability challenge that you're being faced with: How do you get the data THERE? The systems don't talk to each other and there's unified export mechanisms.
Airstrip provides an interface that essentially "exports" the data from the actual medical device. That's a good solution, but the world would be a great place if we just said, "oh that heart monitor speaks in ProtocolX. My hospital has a standard server that picks up those universally understood transmissions and makes them available to authenticated devices."
Once we have an established standard for communication (and security), we'll see many more of these devices, middleware and other enabling technologies.
Dr. H,
ReplyDeleteI've been following this feature on your blog with great interest for a few months -- waiting for mobile phones to get the "Cool Technology of the Week" hat-tip.
Your point about the iPhone being a challenging device for data entry vs. its ease of use for consumption is a key insight -- Forrester analyst Ian Fogg recently penned a report on that very topic. Smartphones categorized based on whether they shine at data consumption or data creation -- iPhone was squarely in the first camp up until the latest version, anyway.
I follow mobile technology's growing role in healthcare and wellness over at mobihealthnews.com. Glad to hear we're finally cool!
Brian Dolan
Editor, www.mobihealthnews.com
John, I would be interested in your views of the open source Osirix on the iPhone. Naturally, HIPAA would require encryption if any non-anonymized patient data were transmitted or stored on the device.
ReplyDeleteWhat I like about Airstrip is that it is server-based and uses secure connection. This is a tool that many institution could learn to love.
I believe that this post is an excellent example that despite once considered an outdated industry using outdated technologies, healthcare information systems and solutions are quickly becoming modernized and closing the gap with other similar sectors. However, the combination of complex systems (some based on “not so modern” technology along with sensitive healthcare information being transported across several communications channels, so it becomes clear that businesses in this industry have their work cut out for them.
ReplyDeleteThe above mentioned technologies are the main enablers of today’s situation where healthcare professionals access electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) via a breadth of new devices. However, management sees HIPAA as yet another risk to be managed which is neither life threatening nor legally dangerous. As a result, the level of risk tolerance is well above what is needed to make ePrivacy or ePHI truly work.