Some of them had started using some or the other IT products and were inching towards more advanced solutions. I am just sharing 6 excerpts from the discussion.

Computer education:  As usual the team felt that the inhibition for adopting IT systems is largely because of lack of computer education in medical fraternity however, they also felt that the newer generation is embracing it fast & cross industry partnerships could help in improving the situation.

System usability: No surprise!, usability was a major concern. You blame it to either their experience level in system usage or bad designs of the products in either case it was found to be an issue which is bothering them.  May be system designers should do bit more user analysis and come out with creative usable products which would provide them easy to use UIs.

Solutions in the market: Interesting to find that they still feel that they are not many products in the market which are path breaking and fit their purpose, there are many big players offering their global products with little variations which are actually too far from what they need and new startups seems to be underestimating their needs.

Affordability: No doubt it is a price sensitive market, They feel it is little expensive to go for IT solutions however, in my opinion certainly people have realized what IT can do to their practice but there is a need to justify the quantum of value addition & also providers should think of different billing models to increase adoption.

Pervasiveness: It’s not a desktop bound job! They need solutions which are pervasive enough to move around with them and assist as and when they want, may be mobile or tablet based solutions could be an answer for this.

Fear of losing data: Somewhere in the corner they also expressed concern towards data and its maintenance. The fear is quite apparent because they are used to records and reports which are in more tangible physical forms but I am sure that confidence building and demonstration of  technology usage in other industries and also in healthcare in other countries would bring in more confidence.

These points may be views from a small group of people but sure points to look further. Please feel free to add your feedback and experience in below comment box.

Promising to be the most successful year yet, Arab Health is truly at the heart of global healthcare. With the Middle East healthcare industry worth an estimated $80 billion per year, there is simply no other event for buyers, suppliers, manufacturers and distributors to meet and do business.

These we webcasts are

These webcast series on Oct 4, 5 & 6th are expected to cover

October 4, 19.00 UK | 20.00 CET  – The Healthcare IT Innovation Imperative

October 5, 14.00 UK | 15.00 CET – Enabling Collaborative Healthcare Delivery:  Care Coordination Strategies with 21st Century Technology

October 6, 14.00 UK | 15.00 CET – Where Information and Care Meet: Secure Mobile Healthcare Solutions that Drive Care Coordination

For More info and registration

I look forward for your support and feedback as usual.

The IBM Patient Empowerment System goes beyond simply allowing patients to schedule appointments online or access a personal health record. The portal is based on new technology developed by IBM Research in collaboration with physicians and administrators of the Gacheon University Gil Hospital in Korea. Among the largest medical centers in Korea with approximately one million patients, the hospital recently decided to provide physicians and patients with access to the portal as part of a pilot project to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
The IBM Patient Empowerment System is a standards-based platform, enabling patients to integrate and manage their healthcare data for all medical needs, receive personalized recommendations or alerts for safer medical treatment, and immediately access data from a vast range of sources including: third-party health portals, hospital electronic medical record systems, sensors, home devices for monitoring health conditions, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) alerts, medical sites like PubMed, and more. IBM is previewing the system this week at CeBIT in Hanover Germany.
“Today, patients want to be more involved in managing their clinical data, and are eager to discover relevant and useful medical information for their benefit,” noted Dr. DongKyun Park from Gacheon University Gil Hospital in Korea. “By giving patients access to information that is relevant to them in an easy and understandable form, we can greatly improve patient safety during medical treatments.”
The system’s easy-to-use analytical services can reduce costs, increase safety and improve patient satisfaction. By integrating social and medical data from multiple sources, the system allows patients to take an active role in their treatment, bringing the interaction between patients and caregivers to a new level of collaborative teamwork.
The system is also designed to protect privacy at various levels of granularity, enabling members to exercise fine-grained control over the level of information in their profile that can be viewed by others and its usage.
“Most patients do not have the same access to information available to physicians, such as treatment updates or new warnings from the FDA,” said Joseph Jasinski, IBM Research. “And physicians are not always privy to ongoing patient updates, such as eating habits or long-term monitoring of vital signs. These partial pictures limit the level of care that physicians can provide, as well as the care patients can provide for themselves. The IBM Patient Empowerment System merges these realms, bringing important data to both parties.”
Although more public sources for medical information are becoming available on the Internet all the time, this onslaught often leaves patients more confused rather than more knowledgeable. Weeding out relevant and accurate information in this sea of data is difficult for the typical patient but the IBM Patient Empowerment System uses expert analytics to take into account a patient’s personal medical history and offer decision support information that is appropriate for them.
One example where public knowledge could improve patient safety involves personalized alerts for adverse drug events (ADE) — incidents where different medications could be dangerous when taken together. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that there are 7,000 deaths per year due to medication errors alone — about 16 percent more deaths than those attributable to work-related injuries.
ADE contributes greatly to added expenses in hospitalization and insurance costs every year. This service uses the platform’s knowledge-bases alongside public repositories for drug-drug, drug-disease, drug-food, and pharmacogenetics interactions; these are then analyzed together with the most current patient clinical and genetic data. The output is an alert that can be given at the point of care to avoid potential harm associated with various drug interactions.
For example, if a patient is already being treated with prescription medicines and wants to take an over-the-counter medication, she would log into the IBM Patient Empowerment System and add the name of the drug to her list of medications. The system immediately crawls through her medical data, performs deep analytics, and then issues a warning message with details about a potentially dangerous interaction between one of the drugs she’s already taking and the new one.
Because the system incorporates the patient’s genetic profile, it can also issue warnings to the patient and prescribing physician if certain dosages or drug combinations are problematic given her personal genetic variations. Such genetic variations can lead a person to metabolize certain drugs differently than the greater population, raising the risk of dangerous adverse drug reactions. This information might otherwise be unavailable or even unknown to her physician.
Other smart services developed as part of this healthcare portal include socio-medical search and personalized recommendation services. The system maintains a unique dataspace that represents social entities, such as patients and healthcare personnel, and their relationship with medical entities, such as medications, allergies and treatment plans. The IBM Patient Empowerment System also offers search capabilities and recommendations about patients who suffer from similar problems, potential treatment plans, expert physicians, and more. These features are built on IBM’s Big Data Analytics platform, which can process structured and unstructured data at scale and speed not possible with traditional data warehouse technologies, allowing the system to discover relations hidden in the data and correlate with external information.
Because the system is designed as a standards-based clinical data warehouse and supports standard interoperability profiles, it can also immediately incorporate any medical information from sensors, home medical devices, monitoring systems, labs, or hospital information systems. Moreover, this interoperability makes it possible to add new data sources or services at any time.
This solution is just one example of how IBM researchers are helping transform the healthcare industry. IBM is also focused on the area of health analytics, which uses sophisticated software to analyze vast amounts of medical data from many different sources at once to quickly help doctors make more informed decisions. For example, IBM’s Watson computing system has the ability to analyze the meaning and context of human language to provide physicians with helpful information for diagnosing and treating patients. Helping doctors unlock important knowledge buried within huge volumes of information, technologies like Watson pave the way for a more evidence-based healthcare system that offers more informed diagnosis and treatment for patients – at lower costs for providers, insurers and patients.
The IBM Patient Empowerment System is the result of collaboration among three IBM centers around the world: the IBM Ubiquitous Computing Laboratory in Korea, IBM Research – Haifa and IBM Research – China.

Source: PR Newswire

Next-generation wrist-worn pulse oximeter provides SpO2 monitoring flexibility and accuracy in ambulatory, sleep-study settings.

The WristOx2, Model 3150 is a compact, wireless wrist-worn monitoring device that accurately monitors blood-oxygen saturation (SpO2) levels and pulse rate in patients undergoing ambulatory monitoring to screen for breathing disorders such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or sleep disorders such as obstructive sleep apnea. Engineered with Nonin’s PureSAT® SpO2 technology, the WristOx2, Model 3150 is proven clinically accurate in the widest range of clinical settings and challenging patient conditions such as motion and low perfusion. Featuring Bluetooth® wireless technology, a new ergonomic design and larger screen size, the WristOx2, Model 3150 is designed to increase patient comfort and ease of use.
“Nonin Medical’s goal is to help clinicians improve patient outcomes through reliable noninvasive monitoring solutions,” said Kevin McGowan, vice president of sales for Nonin Medical. “The WristOx2, Model 3150 delivers proven accuracy in the widest range of patient populations and clinical settings. For Nonin’s OEM partners, numerous enhancements such as increased connectivity options provide easy integration for expedited time to market and reduced integration costs. For health care professionals, the simple design enables increased ambulatory monitoring capabilities while the advanced technology ensures reliable data collection on the first try.”
The WristOx2, Model 3150 is built on a single platform to serve both stand-alone and OEM applications—replacing the WristOx® 3100 and 4100 modules. Performance upgrades to the WristOx2, Model 3150 include increased connectivity with USB and Continua™-certified Bluetooth technologies for real-time data transmission, enhanced non-volatile memory to ensure data won’t be lost during battery change, and up to 48 hours of battery life on two AAA batteries for greater efficiency. Additionally, the WristOx2, Model 3150 comes standard with an exclusive new soft sensor for improved patient comfort during long-term use.

Source : Source: PR Newswire

Practice Fusion has been awarded as the No. 1 EHR vendor in customer satisfaction for primary care specialties by Brown-Wilson’s annual Black Book Rankings.  The free, web-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) system earned top marks across criteria including overall performance, innovation, reliability, security and best of breed technology.  Practice Fusion is the fastest growing EHR community in the US with 65,000 users serving 7 million patients. 

Practice Fusion earned top EHR awards for General Practice, Family Practice, and Geriatric specialties over vendors NextGen, Greenway, eClinicalWorks and Allscripts.  The free EHR also received 31 #1 recognitions across 18 different scoring criteria for each of the four specialties, more top honors than any other EHR vendor, including:
No. 1 for Vendor Overall Preference/Vertical Industry Recommendations (GP, FP, Pediatrics, Geriatrics)
No. 1 for Breadth of Offerings, Client Types, Delivery Excellence (GP, FP, Geriatrics)
No. 1 Reliability (GP, FP, Pediatrics, Geriatrics)
No. 1 for Data Security and Backup Services (GP, FP, Pediatrics, Geriatrics)
No. 1 for Support and Customer Care (GP, FP, Geriatrics)
No. 1 For Best of Breed Technology and Process Improvement (GP, FP, Geriatrics)

“This report proves that a free EHR absolutely can be the best EHR on the market. To be ranked No. 1 is an incredible honor and reflects the strength of our community and our team,” said Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion. “Now, there is conclusively no reason for a doctor to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an EHR system when they can get the highest levels of customer satisfaction from Practice Fusion absolutely free.”
In the three years since the launch of the free, web-based EHR system, Practice Fusion has grown to become a leading force in the health IT sector. The company is focused on delivering easy-to-use technology to medical providers in small and mid-sized practices across the country, especially among primary care specialties. Practice Fusion’s EHR system includes charting, scheduling, e-prescribing, lab integrations and other key features to replace paper processes in the medical practice.
Practice Fusion’s Electronic Health Record system is available free to any medical provider in the country with no installation or downtime required. Medical providers can sign-up for Practice Fusion online at www.practicefusion.com/go in less than five minutes.

Know more about the the company http://www.practicefusion.com

Source: PR newswire

The themes expected are:

• Making health care cheaper
• The evolution of research
• Prevention, wellness, exercise & food

For each theme there will be showcasing new technologies, new services, and new partnerships, as well as catching up with leaders in health care, and Health 2.0. And all of these themes will be critical to the Health 2.0 community helping the heath care system evolve in a positive direction.

For more details and booking visit 2011 Health 2.0 Spring Fling