MedRed Releases Emergency Response System
MedRed, LLC, a company that focuses on making medical knowledge accessible to patients and healthcare providers at the point of care, has launched EFR MedCom, an emergency first responder command and communications platform that enables faster and accurate analysis and response to complex emergencies.

Developed with support from the US Army’s Telemedicine Advanced Technology Research Center, EFR MedCom is a software application that allows emergency responders at local, state and federal levels to communicate and collaborate more effectively in emergency situations such as catastrophic accidents, natural disasters and terror attacks. The technology gives first responders the ability to download relevant health information from the National Health Information Network (NHIN) and Google Health and then communicate the data to key personnel, health centers and agencies nationwide to help formulate and activate response plans.  

The system will be available for piloting or purchase by national, state and local first responder organizations on June 1, 2009.

“Real-time communication and accurate information are critical to saving lives during an emergency,” said Dr. William K. Smith, founder of MedRed. “First responders on the ground need to be able to collect health information quickly and share the data broadly with others in order to formulate the best plan of action. And it all needs to happen in real time and on the go.”

EFR MedCom strengthens preparation, response and recovery capabilities by:

• Providing real-time credentialing and clinical decision support for emergency responders at the point of care
• Facilitating disaster awareness through immediate transmission of casualty data to command control center
• Delivering a unique ability to access information through collaboration with Google Health
• Facilitating data exchange and patient triage through the National Health Information Network

The EFR MedCom system enables an organization to achieve all seven priorities of the Homeland Security National Preparedness Goals. It directly supports the four capability-specific priorities to strengthen the following:

• Information sharing and collaboration
• Interoperable communication
• Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives detection, response and decontamination
• Medical surge and prophylaxis

New Virtual Health Assistant Introduced
Dynamed Solutions, a health information technologies company, has launched a pilot for the first commercial use of its HealtheTrax software service with Sleep Services of America, to monitor patients who have recently begun CPAP therapy in Maryland. HealtheTrax is the first multi-modal platform-independent service to allow remote monitoring of patients without the use of proprietary devices or smart monitoring equipment. The Software as a Service (SaaS) system allows patients to be assigned to numerous series of reminders aimed at managing chronic conditions, preventive services, medications and healthy lifestyles. Patients can receive reminders via email, text message, interactive voice response or live phone engagement and respond with messages aimed at tracking compliance and providing clinical values back to the provider.
 
Sleep Services of America, a provider of sleep-related health services in Maryland, will offer HealtheTrax to patients with obstructive sleep apnea who receive a new CPAP machine through any of Sleep Services of America’s Maryland locations. Patients will receive daily questions about how many hours they used the CPAP machine each night and how well they are adjusting to sleeping with CPAP. Problems that are reported will be routed to the appropriate personnel at Sleep Services to proactively intervene to ensure the best clinical outcome. In addition, patients will receive weekly mini-questionnaires to gauge progress, and a monthly sleep index and well being scoring tool to track clinical improvements.

HealtheTrax can be used as a direct-entry Web-based solution for individual consumers, or can be configured to accept feeds from electronic medical records, personal health records, health information exchanges, payer-based claims data or any other electronic form of data transfer.

inTouch·diabetes Cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration
The FDA has cleared the new SymCare Personalized Health Solutions, Inc. inTouch·diabetes program to support effective diabetes management. The new Web-based system uses a combination of objective biometric data, education and a rewards program to better engage patients in effective diabetes management.

inTouch·diabetes combines patient-centered decision making with health information technology. This FDA-cleared system offers patients a network of support and customized education and information while providing healthcare professionals with objective biometric data for more specific and personalized patient, healthcare professional interaction.

The individualized program goes beyond recording daily blood glucose levels by showing trends, providing diabetes education and supplying other relevant information. It automatically collects blood sugar readings from a glucose meter and wirelessly transmits them to a secure Web site, allowing patients and caregivers to identify trends. It also enables text messaging to cellphones for on the go management. Coaches offer live one-on-one discussions about information that patients can discuss with their healthcare providers. The personalized education aspect provides content from Johns Hopkins University and diet and exercise programs from e-Diets to encourage conversations between patient and their healthcare team.

Apollo Unifies All Patient Media with Enterprise Patient Media Manager
Apollo, a provider of clinical multimedia solutions, has released its Apollo Enterprise Patient Media Manager (Apollo EPMM), an enterprise solution that, for the first time, transforms distributed patient media into one unified record. Apollo EPMM is a multi-tiered, open-system software solution that helps healthcare institutions improve patient care and operational efficiency by enabling simple and secure management of, and access to, distributed clinical multimedia and data.

An evolutionary step past traditional Radiology PACS, Apollo EPMM is an interoperable solution that optimizes existing resources throughout the healthcare enterprise. By linking legacy systems across multiple departments and specialties, Apollo EPMM unifies all patient media without disruption, thereby transforming previously inaccessible multimedia files into a unified clinical information solution. The Apollo solution was developed in partnership with The Hospital for Sick Children, Canada's most research-intensive hospital and one of the world's largest and most respected pediatric academic health sciences centers.

"Our clinicians were capturing a significant number of images; however, they were stored in different ways, making it extremely difficult to access and retrieve the images when they were most needed," said Daniela Crivianu-Gaita, CIO, The Hospital for Sick Children. "When we recognized the challenge our clinicians were up against, we engaged Apollo for a centrally-managed, enterprise solution that would meet clinician workflow requirements, integrate with other clinical systems and ensure secure, easy and efficient access to patient images. We expect Apollo EPMM will help us further enhance patient safety and enable our clinicians to work more efficiently and effectively."

Apollo is a leader in the development of digital pathology management and telepathology solutions for clinical and research laboratories. Today, Apollo's open enterprise PACS for pathology, PathPACS, is being used in government and private hospitals, laboratories, and teaching institutions domestically and abroad. Apollo EPMM extends the power and benefits of PathPACS into the entire healthcare enterprise, providing hospitals with enterprise-level management of all clinical multimedia.

Apollo EPMM optimizes clinician workflow and efficiency by providing a single and secure interface for accessing patient multimedia across the enterprise. The solution is multi-tiered: integrating, managing, securing and sharing multimedia and data within departments, across the enterprise and between institutions. In addition, Apollo EPMM features comprehensive security including rules-based access and full audit trails, further ensuring patient safety and regulatory compliance.
record that is easily accessible, secure, compliant, and centrally managed."

Additional benefits of Apollo EPMM™ include easy, uniform multimedia access and management, integration and links multimedia with wide range of hospital solutions including information systems and electronic medical records, the ability to capture, manage and archive existing and future multimedia file types, device-agnostic, open-system approach enables institutions to leverage legacy resources and adapt to future software and hardware changes and adaptable to clinician workflows, department-to-department, institution-to-institution.

Motorola Study Shows 80 Percent of Global Healthcare IT Executives Placing Increased Reliance on Mobility
More than 80 percent of global Information Technology (IT) decision makers within the healthcare industry stated that mobile technologies are more important to their organizations today than they were in 2008, according to a recent research study commissioned by Motorola, Inc. Respondents cited key benefits such as increased order fulfillment accuracy, reduced manual errors and increased employee productivity due to the utilization of mobile technologies within various clinical settings.

The “Motorola Enterprise Mobility Healthcare Barometer” identified that the key applications driving investment in healthcare include electronic health records (EHR) driven by increasing regulations, computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and medication administration. Surveyed decision makers also noted investment growth in asset tracking and asset/inventory management, reflective of increasing financial pressures due to the weakening economic climate.

The Motorola Enterprise Mobility Healthcare Barometer found that respondents’ usage of key mobility applications attributed to a 31 percent reduction in manual errors. Medication mistakes are among the most common medical errors in the US, harming at least 1.5 million people every year. Additionally, the extra medical costs of treating drug-related injuries occurring in hospitals alone conservatively amount to $3.5 billion each year. Other commonly cited mobility benefits include increased employee productivity, increased compliance accuracy for quality reporting and increased order fulfillment accuracy.

“Doctors, nurses and orderlies in the healthcare industry are experiencing increased pressures from greater numbers of patients and the need to become more efficient while still providing exceptional patient care,” said Vivian Funkhouser, principal, Global Healthcare Solutions for Motorola Enterprise Mobility Solutions. “With a vast array of mobile computing and bar code scanning devices and RFID and wireless network technologies, Motorola is addressing the identified industry pain points by mobilizing applications to provide more efficient patient care without boundaries across the continuum of care.”

Respondents showed increasing interest in voice over wireless local area networks (VoWLAN), fixed mobile convergence (FMC) and data capture offerings as part of their mobility investment strategies. A larger percentage of decision makers within the Americas (70 percent) reported having a mobility strategy in place, European (46 percent) and Asia Pacific (41 percent) respondents.

Surveyed healthcare IT decision makers indicated that return on investment (ROI) was the most commonly given justification for mobile and wireless technology investment followed closely by compliance and total cost of ownership (TCO). The study revealed that mobile workers within a healthcare environment utilizing several key mobile applications were able to recover approximately 39 minutes per day, which can lead to greater patient care and/or reduced payroll costs.

The 180-bed Sands Point Center for Health & Rehabilitation in Port Washington, N.Y. went live with a mobile EMR system in October 2007 to increase the level of personal interaction between clinicians and patients. The Motorola-SigmaCare healthcare solution has significantly improved documentation, decision-making processes and patient care, resulting in increased workflow efficiencies and revenue.

“Our enterprise mobility solution provides all of the information that we need right at our fingertips allowing us to dedicate more time to delivering superior patient care,” said Fran Regan, director of nursing at Sands Point Center for Health & Rehabilitation. “The mobile EMR system has improved the productivity of our medical staff by almost one hour each, and Sands Point Center expects to realize a 450 percent return on investment (ROI) over five years.”

VivoMetrics Partners with OBS Medical to Develop Decision Assist Software for Remote Patient Monitoring
VivoMetrics, Inc., developer of LifeShirt, a continuous, integrated and wearable remote patient monitoring (RPM) system, has partnered with OBS Medical, innovators in automated early warning technology with the Visensia hospital patient safety suite, to create a new decision-assist software platform for use with VivoMetrics’ next generation LifeShirt. The two companies will develop a new tool to continuously integrate wirelessly collected vital sign data from remotely monitored patients into a dynamic index of health status. Changes in this index can serve as an early alert for telehealth providers of the need to intervene in patient care, ultimately helping to improve quality of care and to reduce cost outcomes.

RPM, a rapidly growing category of healthcare, enables medical professionals and caregivers to monitor and manage patients in real-time as they go about their daily lives. Drawing on more than 10 years as a leading innovator in continuous ambulatory monitoring, VivoMetrics is developing a next-generation LifeShirt for RPM, a comfortable and patient-friendly “smart garment” that continuously collects and wirelessly transmits vital sign data to healthcare providers regardless of a patient’s location or activity.

To assist healthcare providers using this data to make decisions regarding care or follow up, VivoMetrics is partnering with OBS Medical to adapt their automated hospital early warning technology for use with the next generation LifeShirt for RPM. Recognized by Frost and Sullivan as a 2008 North American Technology Innovation award winner, OBS Medical’s Visensia hospital patient safety suite fuses data from multiple vital signs into a numerical index of a patient’s wellness. When the index reaches or surpasses a set threshold, an alert is triggered, indicating a patient may be at greater risk of deterioration. By adapting and extending this technology to remote patient monitoring, the two companies aim to enable telehealth providers to proactively intervene in patient care to help reduce the rate of emergency room visits and hospital admissions.

Honeywell HomMed Receives Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) Approval for Genesis DM Telehealth Monitor
Honeywell HomMed has received approval for its Genesis DM telehealth monitor from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), Australia’s regulatory agency for medical drugs and devices. Honeywell HomMed’s telehealth solution enables patients to take a more active role in their health, improving the quality of patient care, increasing economic benefits for health care systems and providing patients with greater independence.

“The approval is an important step for us as we expand our international footprint to deliver the industry leading Genesis DM telehealth monitor and LifeStream Telehealth Ecosystem to the Australian healthcare market,” said Terry Duesterhoeft, president of Honeywell HomMed.

Patients with chronic conditions such as congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease use the Genesis DM telehealth monitor, a Gold winner of the 2008 Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA), from the comfort of their own homes to monitor vital signs such as blood pressure, heart rate and oxygen levels on a daily basis. The information is immediately transmitted to healthcare professionals, allowing them to quickly react to any changes or problems in patients’ health.

Honeywell HomMed’s Genesis DM telehealth monitors and LifeStream remote patient care system have been selected for the Telehealth Lifestyle Co-Ordination (TLC) Project in Ipswich, Australia. A selected group of community members with chronic conditions will participate in the 18-month clinical trial, which is supported by local community group Ipswich Community Aid and Tunstall Healthcare. The trial will focus on four patient groups: cardiac, respiratory, endocrine and individuals with other conditions.