The BBC reports that the NHS wait list for hospital admission dropped 17,000 in February. That sounds really good, right? Sure, until you hear how many prospective patients are still on the list waiting to be admitted. Care to guess? 875,200. Yup, almost a million people are waiting to be admitted into NHS hospitals.
Just imagine the impact Universal […]
Here's an interesting paper on observation units (OUs). In this study, they compare OU utilization and resulting hospital admissions between an OU that's part of the ED (an EDOU patient) and an “inhospital” OU (an IHOU). They looked at a total of 2,594 patients presenting with chest pain, 1190 during the EDOU trial, and 1404 during […]
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a puff piece on GE Healthcare. This story describes how GE is leveraging its acquisition of Amersham with its existing medical device business to target “personalized” medicine. Personalized medicine is the selection (and eventually the formulation) of drug therapies based on the patients DNA.
The RFID news from last week prompted some thoughts on this important enabling technology for improved patient flow. One way to differentiate indoor positioning systems (IPS) is whether they use dedicated (and proprietary0 receivers or garden variety 802.11 access points (APs).
There are some fine 802.11-based indoor positioning systems on the market, but they frequently make […]
Ekahau announces sale at Palmetto Health for campus-wide asset tracking. This is the second publicly announced hospital sale for Ekahau (Heartlands Hospital was the first in late 2004). Ekahau has a smokin' site survey tool (vendors take note) — AireSpace liked is so much, they incorprated it into their product line. AireSpace has since been […]
Surgical Information Systems sells surgery scheduling system to UNMC for scheculing, charge capture and remote access for physicians.
Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s technical evangelist, wrote recently about a recent hospital visit. In this post, he describes what he saw at Overlake Hospital (he does not mention the hospital, Overlake’s just a guess). He’s got some great observations. One is the need for medical device connectivity, another is the highly mobile nature of patients and […]
When it comes to medical device connectivity and workflow automation, who would have thought this trend would impact cart vendors? Faced with the inevitable integration of computers on wheels (COWs) and vital signs monitors, Stinger was the first company to embrace that change by acquiring Washington-based Integriti Systems. Integriti developed a vital signs monitor that […]
Grand Rounds is up, hosted by Scott at Polite Dissent. You can see it here.
Orac, a previous host of Grand Rounds, is hosting a compendium of web posts on science called the Tangled Bank You can visit the Tangled Bank here.
