One of the biggest limitations holding back battery powered medical devices is the battery power. Most telemetry units are powered by batteries you buy at Walgreens - not very high tech. Other products, with rechargeable batteries use lithium-ion batteries, an improvement but not a big improvement.
Welch Allyn's Propaq LT and Draeger's TeleSmart (more here, scroll […]
Welcome to the twelfth edition of the Health Wonk Review. I'm the lucky host this time around, presenting the best of the blogosphere in health policy, infrastructure, insurance, technology, and managed care. So grab a fresh cup of coffee, and enjoy!
First up we have Julie Ferguson, from Workers Comp Insider. In this submission, Jon Coppleman […]
Last week the FCC issued a notice of proposed rulemaking whereby the FCC is proposing certain modifications to their rules to better support new wireless medical devices. The also gave “notice of inquiry,” seeking comment on new implanted and body-worn wireless medical devices (pdf press release). You can read the notice here (pdf).
This site gets […]
The use of cell phones in hospitals seems to be a controversy that just won't go away. Some hospitals ban all cellular phones and have signs to that effect prominently displayed. Other hospitals ban phones, but for some reason don't bother to post any notices to that effect. Some hospitals allow mobile phones everywhere but […]
Frost & Sullivan recently named Cardiopulmonary Corp. as the recipient of the 2006 Global
Excellence of the Year Award in centralized patient monitoring technology. Very few hospitals standardize on one vendor's ventilators. This multi vendor requirement, plus the increased ventilation of patients outside critical care areas, has created a need for a system that provides an […]
Here's an interesting bit of new enabling technology, the Memory Spot.
The experimental chip, developed by the “Memory Spot” research team
at HP Labs, is a memory device based on CMOS (a widely used, low-power
integrated circuit design) and about the size of a grain of rice or
smaller (2 mm to 4 mm square), with a built-in antenna. […]
GE Healthcare recently received FDA clearance for the Engström Carestation ventilator. There are lots of new advanced parameters, and quicker and easier ways to measure existing parameters on the new ventilator. A few things were missing from the press release. There was no mention of the clinical significance of the new capabilities, nor was there […]
According to Tom Blackadar, founder of FitSense Technology, “We're arrogant, selfish, and busy. We got on the technology train very
late. But we control the spending in our country, we don't want to die
early, and we need incredibly simple ways in which we can monitor our
own health, our kids' health, and our parents' health. We need […]
A small study, done by Dr. A Macario and team at Stanford University tested an RFID-based system for detecting sponges left the surgical cavity.
The study looked at how the new device worked for eight patients at
Stanford University Medical Center. Some tagged and non-tagged sponges
were ‘hidden' inside the patient during an operation by one surgeon,
who asked […]
The Billings Clinic, Billings, Montana, is participating in a three-year CMS demonstration project, trying to reduce
costs to Medicare. The project seeks to determine whether spending
more money on preventive care and disease management saves money
overall by preventing hospitalizations. The Billings Clinic project is focused on CHF (chronic heart failure) patients. For patients over 65, CHF is […]
