From Your Heart to Your iPhone

After reviewing the twitter homework a came across with this new application and I just want to share. A new application created by University of Southern California in collaboration with medical device maker St. Jude Medical This is an application for patients with congestive heart failure. This application will help patients with heart diseases to keep track of the blood pressure inside the heart.  The pressure can be measure after the implantation of a sensor. The reason is to keep a daily monitoring of their conditions in order to adjust their medications for heart conditions.


Available at: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/38673/

The Eatery

The Eatery is a phone application that allows you to take pictures about the food you are consuming. The idea under this application is to keep like a catalog of the food you consume in order to see if you are making healthy options. For me is great since it can help with the large amount of obese people we have this days.

If you want to read more: http://mobihealthnews.com/14345/massive-healths-first-experiment-the-eatery-app/

Telehealth services make business sense

This is article is written by Eric Wicklund, it indicates the perception of patients of a new form of receiving treatment, telemedicine. Telemedicine is a new form and easier way to deal with every day health conditions. The telemedicine can be done online or by phone calls.  Jason Gorevic states that  “There’s a huge market out there for very convenient and timely access to doctors,” said Jason Gorevic. The telemedicine began with simple phone calls but now it has emerged to more complex connections such as virtual onsite clinics.  Telemedicine offers a lot of advantages such as improving the patient flow in the emergencies room, and the time that employee must take from jobs to visit doctors.

The articles indicates that one company specialized in telemedicine Teladoc, has launched a program called Atena, which is insured by medical plans. Atena Provides 24 hour services by phone or online for a cost of $38. The physicians provide services within 30 minutes request. The physicians offer services such as diagnosis, recommending treatment and prescriptions; in addition they enter the information through the patient electronic medical record. The service is so proficient that they have a resolution rate the cases of 91%.

 After reading this article I once again am surprise by how well the internet and online services are being use. It offers resolution to many medical health conditions. The government should give incentives to companies such as Teladoc, in order to create more sites that offer sites similars but also specialized to different diseases states and conditions. What do you think?

Available at: http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/telehealth-services-make-business-sense

The EndoGoddess App

The app contains some similar concepts to other diabetes apps – you can record your glucose levels and insulin doses and keep track of your various types of insulin.  This application has the advantage of record medical appointments and set blood glucose testing reminders.
EndoGoddess is a social media for patients with diabetes.  This is created by Dr. Dryer an endocrinologist.  In this app people earn points as a reward of tracking their blood sugar four times a day. And the point are cash out for songs in itunes.

What is WebPT?

Web-PT translates to  web-based physical therapy software. Especially is a web based physical therapy electronic medical record and documentation software. It is a simple tool that the staff  can get the hang of it in 90 minutes. It does not require an IT staff or servers and it can be accessed from anywhere using a smartphone or a computer.  

WebPT allows a variety of tools to improve the work flow of the therapist with alternatives such as:

a-      Documentation - improving the workflow of therapist.

b-      Scheduling

c-      Practice Management – this consist in automatic alerts, helps visualize the real time business and improve the decision making process.

d-     Billing

e-      EMR security - it requires only a web browser and internet connection it does not requires a IT. It complies with HIPAA regulations and strict security guidelines to secure patient information and All WebPT information areas are password protected

This can be find at: http://www.webpt.com/features/pt-emr

What is a ZOHO Notebook?

This is an online application that has been use for students, professors and other profession for different activities such as projects for university or school. You can add text to it, calculations, files with an audio, videos and many other things. This is an application that the students should create books and design pages for text or web.

I think for me this is similar to the RSS since allow us to utilize all the advantages of the internet to our best. For us we can use this application to develop pharmacy related books for our patients or other health care professionals.


If you are interested in this new creation you can find a short video explaining it at: http://www.newmediamedicine.com/blog/2007/01/31/zoho-notebook





The link to create your own Zoho Notebook is at: https://notebook.zoho.com/

Good Shepherd Medical Center

                            


Good Shepherd Medical Center is a regional medical center and the only level II Trauma Center in Texas. The majority of the patients this hospital receives are through the emergency department. The hospital administration wanted to implement a system that allows the hospital staff including doctors, nurses and pharmacy personal to review the patients records form all the areas. In order to increase the safety to the patients, improve the system flow and enhance satisfaction. They implemented an Emergency Department Information System (EDIS) from medical software provider MEDHOST. This software provides the opportunity to track the patient orders, charts through a touch screen interface.  The administration wanted to improve the communication cross discipline, in order to minimize human errors.

The software MEDHOST, specifically the issues that addresses in the hospital are two:  patient flow and bed management. Since they had a large number of patients trap in the emergency room since the hospital did not knew the amount of bed available for inpatients.

After the implementation of the MEDHOST software the hospital has improve the patient flow and safety. In addition MEDHOST implemented a new feature called OpCenter. OpCenter gives a signal to the main user when a new bed is needed.

After reading this article I found it very interesting since here at Puerto Rico, one of the main issues the hospital has is the availability of bed. Here in the south we have four hospital that provide services to more than six municipalizes, which implies a large  number of patients that require medical health services daily. So the addition of systems such as the MEDHOST offers will be a good alternative to deal with the large demands for hospital bed.