New Frost Report on Wireless Applictions in Healthcare
Interesting new report from Frost. The report provides an analysis that provides manufacturers, end users, and other industry participants with an overview of the latest challenges and activities in Emerging Wireless Technologies for Healthcare Applications.
The report looks very long term, and casts a wide net, looking at ultra wide band (UWB) WLANs, and CDMA2000 (a “broadband” mobile phone technology used by Verizon and Sprint), and other far-out technologies. There are so many business model hurdles and technology development issues for a lot of this that it will be 5 to 10 years (or more) before the market sees meaningful adoption of these technologies. No discussion of WMTS is apparent from the abstract or table of contents.
What do hospital buyers want? Solutions that are faster, easier to use, cheaper, and more effective. You can get the report for $4,550.
Siemens Continues RFID Push Into Hospitals
Siemens, Intel and Fujitsu Siemens Computers announces a pilot installation in a German hospital focused on patient identification. Details are virtually nonexistent.
2005 IT Salary Survey
This is a good overview on current IT salaries and carreer issues. Note, this survey covers IT as a whole with no special focus on health care.
HIMSS Analytics Annual Report of the US Hospital IT Market
For a mere $60 you too can view the Executive Summary of this report. (Press release here.) Key findings:
- The under investment in IT continues (yawn)
- EMR adoption will significantly impact current legacy applications
- Interoperability concerns, driven by increasing EMR implementation, are impacting ancillary and clinical departments
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP) has just begun to penetrate the market–fewer than one in five hospitals use this technology
It finally hit me a few weeks ago, EMRs are the new HIS. Traditional patient accounting focused hospital information systems, long the foundation enterprise application in hospitals are being displaced by electronic medical records. The traditional HIS becomes a super sized departmental system that must integrate with the new center of the hospital HIT universe, the EMR. I'm sure this has already occurred to all of you, but hey, I'm a connectologist not a HIT guru.
Both EMR adoption and meds delivery apps are the two biggest drivers for medical device connectivity, with the variable acuity care model (aka, universal beds, house-wide monitoring, flexible monitoring, etc) running third.
I've seen a recent up tick in demand for medical device integration that's driven by EMR adoption. Unfortunately, what I've seen showed little understanding of the big picture, or planning. Everyone seems to be driving to meet immediate needs with point solutions, an approach that is not sustainable for very long.
Selfishly, it is more fun to help people develop a strategy up front to avoid problems than to come in and have to clean up a big expensive mess. Effective prior planning is also considerably less expensive. For just a few days of my time, you can have an assessment and strategic plan to guide broad device integration throughout your hospital. (Hint: the best solutions may not come from your main device vendors.)
You can read recent posts on this topic here and here. Vendors should read this.
New Point of Care Documentation Study
This paper ($30 for full text) looks at how current clinical documentation practices impact inefficiency and poor patient care, and suggests a new framework for designing better software products.
