Bang & Olufsen Medicom's Bluetooth Pillbox
Bang & Olufsen's medical division, Medicom, has announced that they will develop a meds compliance product with AstraZeneca (press release). Designed to improve compliance with complex drug regimens, the Helping Hand will be sold through pharmaceutical companies. While reimbursement for such products remains forthcoming, the need is well known:
patients who were prescribed regular medication reported that they have
simply forgotten to take their medication, with 11 percent saying that
this has happened “often” or “very often”. This non-compliance is said to cost an estimated $30 billion (€24.9bn) annual cost to pharmaceutical companies
from prescriptions and repeat prescriptions that are never filled,
there are also additional costs related to Healthcare providers, the
government and society in general. Health-wise, non compliance has
serious consequences for the patient themselves, including
hospitalization and in some severe cases, death.
The feature set for this new device is typical:
- Acoustic and/or visual reminder function adjusted to dosing regime.
- Patented feed-back to patient in terms of medication taken. The
feedback is relayed to the patient with a visual signal (red is poor
compliance, yellow is average and green is good). - Discreet, portable storage and protection of medication.
What sets this device apart is the size, and of course the typical B&D eye-candy appeal (pictured right).
[Hat tip: Medgadget]
Datascope Releases Panorama Gateway
Yesterday Datascope launched an HL7 gateway for their Panorama wireless patient monitoring system. The gateway includes an ADT interface to download patient demographics, and the export of vital signs. From the press release:
configuration tools and options, resulting in broad compatibility with
most vendors' HIS/CIS using HL7 version 2.x messaging, the industry
standard format for interfacing with HIS/CIS.
Support for multiple 2.x versions of HL7 is a plus. It would be interesting to know just what the phrase, “unique design incorporates flexible configuration tools and options” really means. Does it include the ability to shoot patient data to a remote ICU system at 60 second intervals, with a full patient load? That's something not everyone can do.
The Panorama Gateway comes on the heels of Datascope's AccuNet wireless connectivity solution for spot vital sign monitors. Pictured right is the Panorama system.
New Patent Website
Patent attorney Peter K. Johnson and accountant Kevin N. Hermansen have started the WikiPatents web site. The current beta version of the site is based on a Wiki content management system intended to facilitate the combined brain power many people. The site includes a database of patents (currently all US Patents from 3,930,271 to over 7,000,000). Published patent
applications are currently not included, but will be in the very near
future. The site home page also sports some patent news. A tailored search with RSS feed would be a nice addition, allowing users to track specific patents, companies, industries or other areas of interest. The following excerpt from the FAQ describes their mission:
system by adding greater clarity to the public's grant of a limited
patent monopoly in exchange for the inventor's advancement of
technology. Public patent review through WikiPatents addresses many of
today’s concerns of the USPTO and intellectual property experts,
clarifying for the public the extent to which a patent has genuinely
advanced technology. WikiPatents is intended to be the crossroads at
which inventors, engineers, scientists, patent owners, competitors,
litigants, the open source community, IP attorneys, patent Examiners,
and other concerned members of the patent community openly share
relevant and valuable information about specific patents and patent
applications. For example, independent inventors can advertise offers
to license their patent. Litigants can find crucial prior art
overlooked by a patent Examiner during examination of the patent
application. Patent owners seeking to cut costs in maintaining
expensive patent portfolios can obtain valuable information regarding
the perceived validity and value of their patents. And researchers,
engineers, and scientists will be enriched by the dialog surrounding
their technologies of interest.
Like many Wikis, WikiPatents is counting on you and I to get involved and contribute to the patent process. After years of reading stories on the most obvious or seemingly trivial things receiving a patent – the Amazon “one click” button comes to mind – WikiPatents could make a real difference.
To use WikiPatents you need to have the patent number. You can use another patents web site, FreePatentsOnline to find patents and patent numbers. I will add WikiPatents to the Important Reference Web Links page under the Resources tab at the top of this web page.
Good luck to Johnson and Hermansen in their new project – keep us informed as things progress.
ED Outpatient Visits – They Cost More Than You Might Think
Medical Care, the journal of the American Public Health Association published a paper this month on the incremental cost to treat non-urgent outpatients in an emergency department setting versus an outpatient clinic. Using California hospital data submitted to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) between 1990 and 1998 the data were used to estimate hospital cost functions, which were then used to test for
economies of scale and to derive estimates of both short- and long-run
marginal costs (excluding the physician expense component).. Hospitals without EDs, or hospitals designated as trauma centers, were excluded from the analysis.
Principal Findings: We found only weak evidence in favor of scale
economies and, in that context, we argue that long-run marginal costs
should be the preferred metric for judging the cost of treating
outpatient ED visitors. We estimate these long-run costs (in 1998
dollars) to be roughly $348 per visit for large urban hospitals, $288
for other urban hospitals, $203 for rural hospitals, and $314 overall.
Conclusions:
Our results suggest that the marginal cost of an outpatient ED visit is
larger than is commonly believed. A key implication of this finding is
that hospital administrators need to think more carefully about their
nonurgent care policies, especially as they pertain to ED operations.
Not included in the study is news that early innovator hospitals are starting to implement lower cost urgent care clinics to treat out patients who present at the ER. These outpatient clinics are typically located in near by professional buildings, outside of the higher cost hospital.
Pictured right is an emergency room shot from Englehart and District Hospital in Ontario, Canada.
Another Smart Shirt Presented at World Congress of Cardiology
Another “smart shirt” was presented yesterday at the World Congress of Cardiology, in Barcelona.
developed by European scientists to monitor heart patients on the move.
The shirt is capable of recording an electrocardiogram—a test of
electrical activity of the heart—which is then transmitted over the
mobile phone network to a central monitoring center, researchers told
the World Congress of Cardiology on Monday.
The target market for this prototype is remote patient monitoring at home. A key problem with ECG monitoring is the need to properly place and attach electrodes to patients. If researchers can replace electrodes with a snug fitting undershirt, the problems of placement and the biocompatibility and patient tolerance of adhesives go away.
Pictured right is another smart shirt – this one from Georgia Tech.
