Microsoft Health Vault and Telehealth
Vince Kuraitus and I have a blog post up at the Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners HealthCare. Titled, What Will Microsoft's HealthVault Mean to the Telehealth Community?, the post explores the role Health Vault's Connection Center software may play in the commoditization of remote monitoring solutions.
Today, telehealth applications are based on point to point
relationships: home health agency to patient; disease management
company to patient; health system to patient.
Telehealth devices and their connectivity are similar. There is a
proprietary chain of key components for a remote patient monitoring
(RPM) solution: 1) the RPM device; 2) a gateway — which could be
mobile like the Biotronik Cardio Messenger
or static like a personal computer — to aggregate data from multiple
devices and move data to a server-based application; and 3) the server
application that stores and manages the data in accordance with the
application, e.g., glycemic control, medication compliance, etc.
Be sure to read the whole thing.
eVent Medical Ventilator Incorporates Web Server
The ventilator market is an interesting one – there are many more vendors than in most other product categories, and greater product differentiation between vendors. This is also a product category where hospitals have, for the most part, been unsuccessful in standardizing on a single vendor.
I came across an interesting ventilator vendor the other day, eVent Medical. Their adult and neonatal ventilators are pictured right. Key features include:
- Invasive and noninvasive ventilation
- 5 hour battery life
- Emergency backup compressor
- Integral nebulizer
- Heliox gas support
What intrigued me about their product is the optional web server. The product has both serial and Ethernet network connectivity – obviously, a network connection is require to serve web pages. Remote surveillance has become important as ventilated patients are increasingly placed outside of critical care areas where nurse to patient ratios are lower and the patients covered by a respiratory therapist could be sprinkled widely across a hospital.
This feature suggests certain product architectures that could perhaps support some truly innovative and compelling patient safety and workflow automation features. I hope to learn more soon.
Hospital Quality Reporting Reveals Stark Differences in Mortality
The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the latest HealthGrades Hospital Quality in America study shows that Medicare patients in the “highest-ranked U.S.
hospitals are 71% less likely to die than those who receive care in the
lowest-ranked facilities.”
decreased by 11.8% from 2004 to 2006. Mortality rates at the
highest-ranked hospitals decreased by 12.8%, compared with an 11.4%
decline at the lowest-ranked hospitals. Had all hospitals performed at
same level as the highest-ranked facilities, possibly 266,604 fewer
Medicare beneficiaries would have died during the study period, the
authors said.
The study is available on the HealthGrades home page under “research” – download your copy now.
