Grand Rounds 2:3

Grand Rounds is up, check it out! It seems that this whole health care blogging thing has captured the attention of Laura Landro of the Wall Street Journal.

Physicians, PDAs, Phones and Convergence

Physicians are the rock stars of health care (sorry John Halamka).
They get most of the press, and have the good fortune to dominate the
cross hairs of many health care IT vendors sales efforts. But
when considering the factors impacting patient safety and outcomes in
hospitals, it seems to me that the focus they receive is blown […]

More on GE Acquisition of IDX

A couple of the big analyst firms, Gartner and Frost, have published thoughts on what it all means. For a different perspective, here's another pithy quote from HIStalk on the acquisition:

From
Anonymous Reader:
“Scuttlebutt about GE/IDX quite interesting.
Big question seems to be do they understand integration requirements and
challenges and will they invest sufficiently  Noted your reader (and
others) […]

Wireless Carriers Not Interested in Wireless Data

This story caught my eye. It seems that nobody cares about mobile data, and that includes carriers.
When I was at AT&T Wireless (AWS), I was certainly skeptical of
many of the hair brained wireless data services for consumers — who really wants
to watch TV on their cell phone or receive location aware ads on your
phone from […]

The Ultimate Medical Device Battery Charger?

Care to guess what a medical device vendor spends developing a batter
charger for their wireless device? How does $200,000 to $400,000 grab
you? No wonder there are so many crappy batter chargers on the market,
and why so many vendors would rather just let you fill up landfills
with all those alkaline and NiCd batteries you burn through. […]

Real-Time Systems Integration in the Hospital

LiveData is an interesting company who's cut their teeth in
manufacturing and power generation, transmission and generation
markets. As a participant in CIMIT's Operating Room of the Future,
LiveData has taken a step into health care. Providing what they call,
“Smart Integration,” LiveData provides the following capabilities:

Establish real-time, bi-directional data flows between any intelligent device, application and IT system […]

ScImage and ProVation Medical Strike Co-Marketing Deal

ScImage, a PACS and CVIS vendor, will offer ProVation's documentation and coding compliance software to its customers and visa versa (press release).

ScImage's PicomEnterprise solution is a single database, single
archive imaging solution for multiple departments that can capture both
DICOM images and non-DICOM objects for any subspecialty in the
healthcare enterprise. In addition to being an […]

Grand Rounds 2:2

The latest Grand Rounds is up at The Haversian Canal (that's the small canal in bone that conducts blood and other substances). Niels did me a great honor with his comments on my entry:

Inspired by a reader, the connectologist struggles with the fundamental
problem in medical technology: so what's this data good for? [Ed: this
also comes […]

Cybernet Medical Gets 510k

Cybernet Medical has been beating the drum (warning, pdf file) on the 510k they got on their product, MedStar.
MedStar is an old school remote monitoring system for patients with
chronic diseases. They target asthma, COPD, CHF, diabetes and obesity.
Parameters include blood coagulation, temperature, NIBP, scales,
glucose monitors, spirometer, SpO2 and EKG. Nothing wireless so far,
but they connect […]

Nokia to Launch First VoWLAN Phones This Year

They're coming.
Regardless of where you stand on cell phones with voice service that
supports both cellular carrier networks and voice over WLANs, this will
make a quick-to-market wireless sensor gateway.