Friday, June 4, 2010

Cool Technology of the Week

BIDMC has been working hard to define its mobile device strategy over the past 4 weeks and we've learned a great deal from the work of our Intern, Ankur Seth. I'll post his findings soon.

One of the devices we considered was the iPod Touch with an integrated Barcode Scanner/Magstrip reader from Linea-Pro.

We have many varied use cases for laboratory and medication management workflow. All involve scanning patient wrist bands, scanning medications/tubes of blood and scanning/swiping employee badges.

Having a development platform with a graphic user interface, long battery life and WiFi capability gives us significant flexibility without investing in an expensive, limited dedicated device.

The iPod Touch is easy to purchase, support, and use. It's a consumer friendly device.

Adding a laser scanning bar code reader makes it an impressive clinical tool.


An Apple consumer device improving clinical care workflow - that's cool!

4 comments:

Mattpenning said...

That is one slick bit of kit for the clinical setting and integration with HIT. Great find, kudos to the developers.

Anonymous said...

I recall your post about the iPod Touch from almost 2 yrs ago. http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2008/09/cool-technology-of-week_12.html

I've been a big proponent of this device and even commented on the above post. Not sure why its taken this long for hospitals/vendors to start seeing the potential of this device. Regardless, I'm glad they are.

Chris Anthony said...

Hmm...Another thought would be to go with one of the native barcode scanner applications on iphone and add Square...https://squareup.com/

GreenLeaves said...

I really like Apple and have been peripherally affiliated with Osirix. I always wonder if Apple also has/will offer the trusted platform for hardware based encryption or whether will stick with software.

Could you talk to some of security aspects of portable devices in hospital environments?