Health Informatics Blog

BBC has an article covering the use of technology in hospitals. It comments on PACS, Speech Recognition, Touch Screens and Wifi:

As Britain’s National Health Service celebrates its 60th birthday, new digital technology is revolutionising old working methods in a drive for greater efficiency.

The National Health Service has come a long way since its inception.

An x-ray is an old fashioned photograph which takes time to develop and then exists as an artefact that has to be physically passed around to everyone who needs it.

But having an x-ray taken at the Countess of Chester hospital in the north west of England no longer involves any film or photographic chemicals.

Instead a machine scans the image straight into a central database and makes it instantly available on the radiology ward and across the hospital in the consultant’s office.

At this hospital the images are scrutinised by expert eyes on high-resolution screens and, while other hospitals are doing the same thing, in Chester they have gone one step further.

Link

Interesting commentary on the New England Journal of Medicine article about new commercial PHRs published in the NYT:

In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, two leading researchers warn that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient records.

The authors, Dr. Kenneth D. Mandl and Dr. Isaac S. Kohane, are longtime proponents of the benefits of electronic patient records to improve care and help individuals make smarter health decisions.

But their concern, stated in the article published Wednesday and in an interview, is that the medical profession and policy makers have not begun to grapple with the implications of companies like Microsoft and Google becoming the hosts for vast stores of patient information.

The arrival of these new corporate entrants, the authors write, promises to bring “a seismic change” in the control and stewardship of patient information.

Link

For those who missed this report:

Following on from yesterday’s post, here’s a video about OpenMRS being used in Uganda:

My friend Dr Mo Al-Ubaydli has written a great piece for iHealthBeat about the rise of Smartphone use in Doctors’ offices:

More and more doctors are using smartphones — essentially PDAs that can make phone calls — in their daily lives, yet few of them are integrating the devices into their clinical practice. New clinical software designed specifically for smartphones is helping to overcome some barriers, yet there are other roadblocks preventing smartphones from becoming much more common in medicine than they are now.

Read the article

(Mo and I produced The Doctor’s PDA and Smartphone Handbook published by the RSM Press)

Congratulations to Map of Medicine’s founders Owen Epstein and Mike Stein and their team:

Hearst Corporation today announced the acquisition of U.K.-based Map of Medicine, a leading provider of evidence-based health-care resources designed to help health practitioners make sound decisions by following accessible clinical information on a range of relevant medical issues. The announcement was made by Victor F. Ganzi, president & CEO, Hearst Corporation, and Richard P. Malloch, president of Hearst Business Media. Map of Medicine, formerly owned by Informa plc, will be managed in London as a separate operating unit (Map of Medicine, a UK limited company) of Hearst Business Media.

Read more on CNN Money

Sir Muir Gray on the Map of Medicine:

Here’s a video that’s been doing the rounds recently:

I’m researching medical software for iPhones at the moment and Rob from the iPhone Developers Ning community pointed me at this:

http://www.planetdds.com/iphone.aspx

Anyone seen any other medical software for iPhones?