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.

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN AND ASSESSMENT

Penick, T. 2007. INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN AND ASSESSMENT: An Interdisciplinary Online Course in Health Care Informatics. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 2007; 71 (3) Article 43.
This is an article about an online course of health care informatics design by the University of North Carolina. They strive to develop an online interdisciplinary course in health care informatics. The provision of this course was to incorporate and provide students the require tools for them to incorporate the technology to find effective evidence based health care information.  This was provided as an online interdisciplinary online course elective. The method of teaching was through interactive and multimedia lectures using Internet communication software. It was concluded that this teaching method was effecting in teaching students about health informatics.  The students when completed the online course in health informatics the students demonstrated their competencies in identifying and applying informatics in health care settings.

If you would like to read about this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1913289/

Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center Regional Medical Group Virtualizes Electronic Health Records with Windows Embedded

Hillcrest Family Health System from Texas, consists of: Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center, a fully-accredited acute care facility, and Hillcrest Family Health Center a series of specialty medicine clinics. The situation this clinics were confronting were that the electronic health record they use constantly needed to be fixed, which resulted in two things very important loss of time and money. Since once a month they had to close all the clinics for a weekend to install and arrange their software’s.  The electronic health records are a collection of the health information of patients.

They consider Microsoft Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based server virtualization technology. This technology provided the tools the clinics needed in a cost effective manner through Windows Server 2008 R2.

The Hillcrest administration concluded that the use of Microsoft Virtualization allows the management of the clinics more simple and cost effective. This system allows the administration to integrate   160,000 patient records electronically and a hospital system a legacy 16-bit application. In addition they also included the Microsoft Office suite, Java, Adobe Flash, and a Virtual Machine.”

In conclusion the Microsoft Virtualization provided Hillcrest administration which includes: personalized desktop, built in connectivity and is ecofriendly. In addition the utilization allows easier HIPPA audits, reduced costs, and new service options for patients. The company invested $600,000 the EHR system but received the economical benefits in three years with a 35% reduction in cost in new technologies.

I think it is a nice thing to have systems such as the Microsoft that help the different clinics with the incorporation of technologies that will improve their services in a cost effective manner.

Integrating Informatics to Pharmacy Curricula

This is an article about the implementation of informatics awareness to pharmacy. Since informatics has increase in the last years many organizations has committed to increase the awareness of use in informatics. Pharmacy is not left behind in the use of informatics, since many universities has integrated courses of informatics to their curriculum in a way to educate students the importance of technology and the different ways to use it in our profession.
Domain one: student exit competencies in informatics – expertise in informatics is one of the require competencies for pharmacy graduates.
Domain two: informatics as an aid to student learning -  is for students to learn to appreciate the importance of technology.

Domain three: support for individual faculty efforts in promoting informatics -  all the faculty and administration need to know how to handle and work with technology in order to provide the knowledge to students.

Domain four: academic leadership within healthcare pharmacy informatics - within the pharmacy informatics area, we are not the experts in software design

Domain five: graduate programs in pharmacy informatics given the necessity for pharmacy academic -  provide students with  research, training, development, and implementation of pharmacy

informatics by the profession and disciplines within pharmacy

This quote was from the article Implementing Pharmacy Informatics in College Curricula: The AACP Technology in Pharmacy Education and Learning Special Interest Group.


Reference: Vanderbush, R, 2007. Implementing Pharmacy Informatics in College Curricula: The AACP Technology in Pharmacy Education and Learning Special Interest Group. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 2007; 71 (6) Article 117

If you want to read the article complete the article can be find at:  

http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article

What is Revolution Health Group?

Hello to you all, I hope you are doing great. This week I bring a new database I just found is called Revolution Health Group. ENJOY! Revolution Health Group was cofounded by America Online. Their mission quote: “is to is to change healthcare by giving people the tools, information and support to manage their health and wellness actively.”
Revolution Health is a health-related portal site and social network in which they can ask question related to health, rate their doctors and participate in online discussions. In addition offers blogs in which users can express their opinions about health related problems.
This is a great tool for us to tell patients to use since it gives information in a variety of themes.  The page provides information of some diseases, techniques to improve the quality of life and information about drugs.  Also provides a link in which patients can ask questions to pharmacist in a live chat with a pharmacist.
This page can be found at: http://www.revolutionhealth.com/

My first Blog and IPad options for EMR

Good Morning. I am Vivian Hernandez a third year pharmacy student at NSU from Ponce Site. This is the first time I actually try to do something related to web or social networking; but I think it will be kind of fun, so I am thankful. This blog is for the purpose of a course and hopefully I will get all the knowledge to do a great job at this. I am positive that I will get on track real soon with this blog and bring interesting subjects that will acquire your attention. 

Let start with the new it thing the IPad.

The new it thing for our generation is the I Pad. This new technology has utility in many areas of our daily lives. So the medical aspect is not left behind. I was searching through the internet and find a piece very interesting about the options that Ipad provides for EMR. This was written by Houston Neal Director of Marketing, Software Advice. Here I provide a summary of the different things stated in the article. The three Electronic Medical Records options:

Number 1:Web-based EMRs. This allows the physicians utilized or review the EMR through the web browser. The physicians can use the Ipad Safari browser to review their patient’s profiles when needed. An example can be the WebPT for physical therapist.

Number 2: Remote access EMRs. The iPad allow access to review the EMR from remote systems such as Citrix.  For those of us who doesn’t know what Citrix is, is a corporation that provides server, desktop virtualization and networking technologies. The basis of remote access allows the physician to review application as if the physician was using a desktop or laptop. Using this technology can be accessed Allscripts, GE Centricity, or any other EMR systems.

Number 3: Native iPad EMRs. This has to be purchase. Includes; Nimble, Mediforms, MediMobile, IQMax, and Capzule EMR. Nimble allows physicians to mark up images such as X Rays through the application called “Medical Art.” Dr. Chrono - ePrescribing feature, the physician can view the patient’s prescriptions.

After reviewing this I find it very useful to see all the different advantages that the IPad provides to the science and medicine area.

This can be find at: http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/medical/guide-to-ipad-electronic-medical-records-1052611/