A Week in Review

Five Hot Trends in Healthcare Technologies

[ZDNet] The pace at which medicine and technology are converging is faster than most people realze. Today, point-of-care health technologies like tele-medicine and medical robots performing surgery in hospitals are common place. Apple iPads and other mobile devices have made their way into the exam room, and electronic medical record (EMR) vendors are following suit with compatible applications. Read full story here.


RealMed Facilitates Faster Payments by Embedding Claims Reconciliation Capabilities

[EMR and EHR News] RealMed, a leading provider of revenue cycle management solutions for health care industry, announced integration of its awarding winning capabilities with Epic. The integration provides Epic billing software clients with seamless access to RealMed’s powerful claims editing and error management tools from within the same interface used for processing claims today. Read full story here.


GlobalSign BIOWRAP Provides Healthcare, Pharmaceutical Industries with Security, Privacy and Compliance over all Digital Information

[SFGate] GlobalSign, one of the longest established Certification Authorities (CA) and specialists in online security, announced that its BIOWRAP Encrypted File system is now available to healthcare and pharmaceutical industry customers. Read full story here.

Whimsical Friday: My Favorite App

[Whimsical Friday is a light-hearted note on any technology that impacts our lives in some form or fashion.]

I’ve always been considered a music junkie (a termed coined by a fellow blogger, Chris Harris), and a self-proclaimed audiophile (albeit, an audiophile on a beer budget).  So I guess it comes as no surprise my favorite app is related to my passion of music and audio equipment, Apple’s Remote app.  Apple describes their app as “a free, fun, and easy-to-use app that turns your iPhone, iPad,or iPod touch into a remote control.  So wherever you are in your house, you can control your computer’s iTunes library....” 

What makes this app really cool is that I’m able to stream my iTunes library to my home audio system via Apple’s AirPort Express.   Of course the audiophile in me has my iTunes library digitize in a lossless format; a wired connection from my home server to the AirPort Express, none of that wireless stuff because I don’t want one bit dropping from the signal on its way to the AVR; and of course, the output from the AirPort Express to my Rotel Processor is via an optical digital cable. 

What does all of this means, at the touch of a screen I have access to my entire music library to play through my carefully crafted audio system from any location in my home and it sounds exactly as if I was playing the actual CD.  Audio nirvana!! Except for those days when I relax with my virgin vinyl pressing of Stevie Wonder’s Innervision LP on my B&O turntable with its ortofon cartridge and a Discwasher vinyl record cleaner.  What can I say, sometimes nostalgia trumps technological advances.

Rapid Integration

Apple’s iPad has made tablet computing a reality, easy and cool. The list of touch-screen tablets is constantly evolving and growing, i.e. Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, BlackBerry Playbook, etc.

Not only have they become the must gadget to have, there’s a good collection of useful applications that are making life easier for both physicians and patients. Knowledge Networks reported in March 2011 that 27% of physicians in the United States had a tablet-style computer which is about 5 times the general public’s adoption rate.

This rapid adoption rate by physicians requires for healthcare IT professionals to be able to integrate these devices rapidly with their enterprise IT landscape. Long gone are the days where corporate infrastructure groups could take years before allowing new platforms into the enterprise. For instance, in 2006 a Fortune 100 company initially only allowed RIM’s BlackBerry mobile devices onto their corporate platform. As the iPhone grew in popularity, and apps, more employees and executives begin requesting to have the iPhone as part of the IT enterprise. Almost 4 years later, the infrastructure group finally granted approval to allow Apple’s iPhone and OS as part of the IT enterprise landscape. The problem is that Google’s Android mobile devices are now growing at an outlandish rate, so as you would probably guess, a significant amount of employees, and executives, are now clamoring to have Android devices approved. So not only is the company playing catch up with developing and integrating Apple OS apps with enterprise applications, they are also behind with Android development and integration.

In a healthcare IT setting, this slow speed of integration could very well be life or death for a patient. Particularly in the case of physicians in remote areas, where a significant amount of mobile apps have been developed to assist with providing more efficient and timely care. The bottom line, tablets and similar mobile devices have enough processing power to rival that of desktop computers. Because of open development, new apps are literally released everyday and are being developed to do what was once unimaginable. The impact and benefit of apps, and the high rate of adoption of tablet devices by physicians, requires healthcare IT organizations to make streamlining and integrating these new mobile technologies at a much more rapid pace than most other industries a top priority..

Whimsical Friday: Death of the Wristwatch

[Whimsical Friday is a light-hearted note on any technology that impacts our lives in some form or fashion.]

While out and about Saturday afternoon I asked my teenage son to tell me what time it was because I had forgotten to put on my watch. Instead of him looking at a wristwatch he pulled out his phone to give me the time. Just like my daughter, 7 years his elder, who told me 6 years ago she didn't need a wristwatch because she could always get the time from her phone and/or iPod, one of which will be in her possession at all times. For the next few days when I dropped off my son at school, I noticed there were only a few students actually wearing watches. Heck, on some days I would see no students with a wristwatch on. Do you think Timex, Swatch, and Rolex know that Generation Z aren’t wearing watches? When did this happen?

It’s easy to understand cell phones replacing pagers, two-way communication devices, and land line phones; and iPods replacing portable cassette and CD players, and even CD’s for that matter, but wristwatches? I should have realized this sooner when I was in NYC about 7 years ago, I remember making the observation that there were more street vendors selling DVD’s versus watches. However, I didn’t make the correlation that the wristwatch was actually being replaced by an emerging technology. I thought the street vendors had a higher profit margin in hawking bootleg DVD’s versus bootleg wristwatches, hence the change in products.

In any case, the wristwatch has been terminated seemingly from an unlikely technology, cell phones and portable music players, and the street vendors of NYC were the first to realize it.

The ONC Wants Your Feedback

Let your voice be heard, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Health IT Standards committee is requesting public comment about the temporary electronic health record certification for Stage 1 of the meaningful use program. One of the specific areas they are seeking input on is should it be required to test and certify that any EHR Module presented for testing and certification properly integrates with another EHR Module by a different vendor.

On some level, this debate boils down to a closed proprietary ecosystem-think Adobe’s Flash platform versus a more open ecosystem-think Apple’s app for their iPhone platform, basically, will interoperability among vendors be forced for certification? Even today with the examples I gave-which by the way is Apple’s point of view-there’s healthy dialogue among informational technology professionals on which system, Apple or Adobe is closed and/or more opened. These platforms have been out for decades with millions of users, and they still do not interact with each other.

EHR is too important and critical to let permanently defining the certification program of meaningful use drag on for decades. Take the discussion about EHR certification out of the break room, cubicle pod and conference room, and let the ONC officially hear your opinion by June 17.