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.
Trapeze Partners with Nortel on Mesh Networking
Now that Cisco's acquired AireSpace, Nortel Networks is partnering with Trapeze Networks to offer mesh networks and asset tracking. AireSpace was Nortel's OEM partner until acquired by Cisco. Nortel has also kicked in some cash for Trapeze's latest VC funding round.
For the near future, Trapeze will focus on mesh networking, Vogt said, making Trapeze access points work in mesh networks as well as letting the company's RingMaster management software detect and manage meshes—including the mesh equipment Nortel already offers. Mesh networks dynamically route packets from node to node. Only one access point needs to be connected directly to the wired network, with the rest sharing a connection over the air, though in large mesh environments several access points may be connected.
You can read about Cisco's mesh network plans here.
By year's end, Trapeze plans to add more client location capabilities into its management software, Vogt said. This is a growing industry trend, serving customers who need to track anything from notebooks to IV pumps. Recently, market leader Cisco introduced the 2700 Series Wireless Location Appliance, which can track thousands of Wi-Fi clients on a corporate network.
I've written on 802.11 asset tracking before. While it may seem intuitively obvious that a system that uses existing 802.11 access points is better than a system using different tag/receiver technology, that's not necessarily so.
