Category Archives: Health & Medicine

Tech improves ER care

Posted on by

It’s the middle of the night and you’re just north of East Jesus, headed to the beach so the kids can play in an oil slick before they’re all gone, and gandma chokes on prune. How do you find the nearest emergency room? According to Telemedicine News, there’s an app for that:

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Emergency Medicine Network have launched FindER™, a free iPhone application to help users locate the closest emergency room, provide directions, along with additional information all with a touch of the screen.

FindER uses the iPhone’s GPS to quickly direct patients to emergency rooms anywhere in the U.S. FindER is also designed for quick phone calls to both the care center and if necessary used to contact 911 emergency services. Once the symptoms are determined, information is available on specific emergency rooms that can treat the symptoms and the wait times for ERs.

EliteCare 24 hour Emergency Center in Texas has partnered with Healthagen® to promote their emergency center through the iTriage® applications. If help in an emergency is needed, the consumer can download the iPhone or android application or go to www.iTriageHealth.com using any capable smart phone or computer to evaluate symptoms. At that point, iTriage will pinpoint the locations and provide turn-by-turn directions to the closest type of facility needed anywhere in the country.

Helping patients receive live ER wait times via text messages in the middle of an emergency is a new way to reach consumers. To do this, ERTexting in Miami manages a new free 4ER411 system. This new service available in hospitals all over the U.S. enables patients to text their zip code to 4ER411 and then receive their local participating hospital ER wait times.

To help deliver the patient’s medical information directly to a first responder or emergency room physician, Emerging Healthcare Solutions Inc. has a smartphone application under development called “e-911”. The “e-911” App automatically delivers the user’s medical information to first responders or to doctors when 911 is dialed from an iPhone. The “e-911” will first be made available for Apple’s iPhone and after assuring product quality, the e-911 will then be offered through Google’s Android and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry

One in five docs plan to buy an iPad

Posted on by

“The scenario sounds straight out of a sci-fi movie — the doctor pulls out her touch-screen tablet computer from the drawer of instruments. She calls up the patient’s chart with a few taps and proceeds to add a note to the page with her latest diagnosis. A visualization pops up, and she flips the screen over to give the patient an idea of what ails him.

Doctors are presuming the iPad could make this scene a reality as soon as next week. One in five doctors say they plan to buy an iPad, according to a survey of 350 clinicians by the San Mateo medical software vendor Epocrates.

Full story at LATimes.com

Why health care costs keep rising

Posted on by

It’s nearly impossible to separate the truth from the politics, bullshit and greed surrounding the debate on health care in the U.S. But This American Life brings it in to clear focus in this first of a two part series.

An hour explaining the American health care system, specifically, why it is that costs keep rising. One story looks at the doctors, one at the patients and one at the insurance industry.

Don’t even mention this subject to me until you’ve listened to this program.

What does it mean with the doctor tweets “oops?”

Posted on by

I got a call this morning from Matt Kelley, a reporter for Radio Iowa (one of Learfield’s news networks). He was working on a story involving Twitter and he wanted to check a couple of terms. Here’s the story (minus the audio):

A Cedar Rapids medical center plans to use the social media tool Twitter to broadcast a surgery to the world next week. Doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital will perform a hysterectomy, and other procedures, as people who’re interested follow along via web browser or mobile device. Hospital spokeswoman Sarah Rainey (RAY-nee) says it’s an educational opportunity.

Rainey says, “We have marketing consultants who will be in the operating rooms with the surgeons as the surgery takes place and as the physician communicates exactly what he’s doing, we will have our consultants tweeting, or typing in conversation to bring it to the outside world.” She says two doctors will be performing the operation on a 70-year-old woman using robotic surgery techniques. The play-by-play will be sent out over the micro-blogging service in messages of 140 characters or less.

“He’ll be talking about how the anesthesiologist is now placing the patient under sedation and here’s my first step, so he will be talking as he goes through the procedure,” Rainey says. “You’ll hear him say, ‘Scalpel, please,’ or whatever he may need to instruct the O-R team to help him with.” She expects a wide host of Iowans — and people around the globe — to follow the surgery, starting at 10 AM next Monday.

She says they’re targeting people in the Twitter audience, roughly between the ages of 25 and 45. “We’re looking for people that just might want the opportunity to go into an O-R suite and see what happens without visually seeing all of the stuff that maybe they don’t care to see,” Rainey says. The hospital recently featured a “webcast” of the same type of surgery so anyone in the world could watch it live over their computers.

“With the webcast, you actually got to see everything that was going on in the O-R suite,” Rainey says. “It might be cutting open the patient, it might be a little blood, it might be the suction part, so for some people it might’ve been too much. Tweeting, on the other hand, is communicating through emails and tweets so it’s a little gentler on the eyes.” She says St. Luke’s will be the first Iowa hospital to “Twitter-cast” a surgery. To follow it, go to the hospital’s website “www.stlukescr.org” and click on the Twitter icon.

My friend David insists this is a “gimmick” and nothing more. That nobody would have the slightest interest in following this procedure on Twitter. I’m not as convinced.