Study: Handheld Computer Adoption in Healthcare
This study ($30 for full text) looks into the factors impacting PDA adoption in health care.
Major barriers to adoption were identified as usability, security concerns, and lack of technical and organizational support. PDAs offer health care practitioners advantages to enhance their clinical practice. However, better designed PDA hardware and software applications, more institutional support, seamless integration of PDA technology with hospital information systems, and satisfactory security measures are necessary to increase acceptance and wide use of PDAs in healthcare.
The best study I've seen on this is Mobile Computing in Nursing, by Spyglass Consulting. At $1,495 its a bit pricier than the study above, but if you're a vendor looking to develop a product, its a steal.
New AHRQ Study Reveals Trick of Patient Safety
This is another great example that demonstrates the total absence of a silver bullet for realizing patient safety improvements (or patient flow improvements).
“The trick is not to talk about safety but to incorporate it into our daily lives,” said Scott Jones, M.D., professor of surgery at UVMC. Described at the executive briefing by Jones and UVMC President and CEO Edward Howell, the program involves collecting data submitted by specially trained nurses to measure risk as determined by a database of preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative variables. “If you prevent one bad case the program pays for itself,” said Howell of the $35,000 participation fee.
OSI Announces Stock Buyback
OSI has announced that they've repurchased 157,000 shares of stock at an average $14.25 per share. The board of directors has authorized the buyback of an additional 1.3 million shares. They must think this is a good investment.
Hospital Guest Internet Access via WiFi
As hospitals struggle with developing wireless networking strategies that span the full range of current and future requirements (you know, like medical devices), some hospitals are offering WiFi Internet access to patients and other hospital visitors. Here's a great post to get you started thinking about the HIPAA implications.
