Analogic Releases Financial Results
Analogic Corp. announced revenues
and earnings from the fourth quarter and fiscal year ending July 31,
2005. Revenues were down slightly at $101,998,000 with profits up to
$4,287,000 for the forth quarter. Security systems, modalities (CT,
ultrasound, MRI) were up; cardiovascular information systems (CVIS), digital radiography (DR), and patient monitoring were down.
For the year, revenues were up 2.5% to $364,571,000, with net income
increasing a whopping 245% to $28,862,000. Most of this increase comes
from the sale of Analogic's stake in Cedara Software ($27,388,000).
OEM customer product emphasis, as were embedded multicomputing system
revenues. Sales of cardiac information and image management systems
were also substantially lower, as anticipated, in good part because of
market uncertainty following the need to restate Camtronics' revenues
during the prior fiscal year. A new management team was put in place at
Camtronics during the year and has produced continuous improvement in
revenue over the past two quarters.
PCTS Wins Gilbert Hospital
Just east of Phoenix in East Valley, Gilbert Hospital has purchased Patient Care Technology System's Amelior ED patient care system.
Study Reveals Factor in Significantly Reducing Emergency Room Visits
Boston Red Sox championship games. Yes, a paper
published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine found that emergency
department visits in Boston during last years championship games
declined substantially.
emergency room,” said Dr. Alasdair Conn, the ER chief at Massachusetts
General Hospital, which was included in the study.
[Hat tip: FierceHealthcare]
How Is a Clinician Different from an IT Person?
Much humor is based in fact. The following insights, from the anonymous author of the HIStalk blog,
certainly fall into both humor and truth categories. As an aside, the
author has worked in both clinical departments and in IT.
users can be frustrating, tunnel-vision paper-pushers unwilling to change and
mired in technophobia and their lack of process understanding. They don't like
to sit in long meetings and, free of the rigid bureacracy of the average IT
department, are startlingly willing to say what they think without worrying
about their career prospects or getting stabbed in the back by an MBA-sporting
CIO-wannabe. IT people hate when people call them, their projects, or their
applications stupid, especially when they are. Users are envied because, unlike
most IT department members, they are not expendable or interchangeable. IT systems
or not, they will be delivering care and don't have to worry about being discovered
as redundant or unnecessary. Patients thank them, even though adminstrators
treat them like massed sheep to be administered only as a group. They can work
at any of several places right in town, making at least equal money without
having to move or travel. They get paid for call, if they take it at all. They
get to wear white coats without feeling like imposters and have jobs more impressive
than being a ho-hum system administrator or DBA whose job could be offshored
or outsourced at any time. Once their work is done at the end of the day, someone
else takes over. They don't care about organizational strategy unless it affects
them personally. They can't name every VP and director because it's irrelevant
to them, they don't go on vendor-paid junkets or present at conferences, they
don't fear the CFO, and they have to eat lunch in the building instead of going
out to restaurants. On the other hand, IT people make more money and believe
that they've kept their self-assessed superior domain expertise while layering
on another rich stratum of technical knowledge, resulting in a Super-Clinician
who now travels comfortably and expertly in either the white coat or the white
shirt crowd.
Clinicians tolerate IT as a necessary evil. Every
policy they enforce is designed to allow users to do less and less with technology:
you can't load software, you can't get a decent PC, and your department is charged
ridiculous rates for poor IT products and unresponsive services whose only allowed
source is the IT fiefdom. The “helpless” desk performance tells
you all you need to know about IT's efficiency. IT people are out of touch,
forgetting that regardless what they once knew or once did, they no longer are
clinicians, they are computer geeks who are operating with questionable efficiency
on the fringes of the organization, hopelessly mired in office politics, executive
ass-kissing, and a self-confident need to talk endlessly (and often “down”
to users) without really getting to the point or knowing what they are pontificating
about. IT'ers are on the Dark Side, their native environment being cubicles
and conference rooms, overly driven by organization charts, job descriptions,
and future promotability instead of just pitching in to get the plainly
obvious work done. They are cautious about what they say, especially in writing,
because the programmer-turned-CIO fancies himself or herself as a decisive Person
of Action, possessing an envied wisdom destined for greater assignments that
results in constant organizational tinkering, firing and reorganizing, and office
jockeying of the tiny 9-to-5 squad, the main result of which is that good
people leave or go back into clinical practice, which doesn't worry the CIO
since they're angling for a new gig somewhere else anyway. Why would you want
to get into IT, the clinician wonders, when you stress out for months over a
single project, you risk getting fired because of poor vendor products or bad
planning even if you did your job, and you get hopelessly mired in detail in
an ugly marketbasket of sure-to-fail projects? You are judged by how many hours
you work, either in the cubicle jungle or dialed in from home. Worst of all,
you doom yourself to a career of hanging around really unsavory geeks who wear
odd clothes, stare at their shoes, and speak proudly in what sounds like a Klingon
dialect (and just may be).
Yablonka Describes the Comer Children's Hospital WLAN Experience
Healthcare’s Most Wired Magazine has published a story by Eric Yablonka, CIO of The University of Chicago Hospitals and Health System (UCHHS — gahzuntite!). Eric is at the forefront of the trend of taking enterprise approaches to what have to date been point solutions. This story describes his experience at Comer Children’s Hospital with InnerWireless and their “wireless utility.” Following are some of the especially good bits.
…wireless runs the risk of fragmented implementation, especially within large multi-department enterprises like hospitals. As was done with multiple wired network platforms years ago, individual departments deployed discrete networks without considering future integration. The result was that enterprise-wide communication was difficult, expensive and, in many cases, all but impossible.Today, wireless is emerging as a must-have information infrastructure, and because it supports mission- and life-critical applications, we can’t afford to repeat the wired network experience. Still, there’s a squeeze play of sorts as administrators and caregivers across all departments are calling for “wireless solutions.” Meanwhile, many vendors are happy to sell single-point solutions to individual departments to meet a specific need, but fail to create leverage for the rest of the hospital.
To avoid an inefficient rollout of wireless technologies, hospitals should think of wireless not as a specific technology or application, but rather as an entire ecosystem that profoundly impacts patient safety, patient experience and hospital workflow. Coordinating and communicating with this ecosystem’s many constituents to map services, applications and devices is critical to a successful enterprise wireless strategy. This means defining what wireless means for today’s hospital and what it will mean in the future. While each department will define it in different terms–telemetry, Wi-Fi, cellular, RFID, paging or CPOE–their focus will all be application-centric. UCHHS, however, takes a big-picture view, focusing on how the hospital will leverage wireless as an enterprise application rather than numerous discrete applications on a departmental basis.
The rapid convergence of medical equipment and IT continues, particularly around integration, networking and data sharing. To leverage the opportunities presented by wireless medical equipment manufacturers, hospitals must have an infrastructure robust enough to support the new equipment and applications. The alternative is to continue to build, maintain and update point solutions for each application. UCHHS views wireless as more than Wi-Fi; we already were planning paging and two-way radio networks. We knew we wanted to distribute cellular within the building, and we quickly understood that access points did not equal a wireless network utility. Installing network access points did not meet the requirement to unite these technologies on a single distribution system.
Now take this line of thinking and extend it to RFID, VoIP, wireless medical devices, alarm notification, and the point-of-care — it makes the mind spin, doesn’t it?
Great article Eric.
