Focus

This is just a brief observation …

It seems that there are so many great apps/software/devices coming out in the medical field.

All of them offer some sort of connectivity or paradigm shift in the way things have traditionally been done. The main trend, is that everyone is very focused … they focus on one or two key things and attempt to do those things to the best of their abilities.

While this is great, the biggest challenge moving forward for any large scale hospital IT department is going to be figuring out how all these separate parts can be combined, especially since no one single solution does everything well.

Is it acceptable to have 8 different applications do 8 different things, which leads to 8 different databases storing information on one person?

Is it up to the app/software/device vendors to create an all encompassing solution or is it up to the departments to figure out how these pieces all come together? Perhaps these vendors could agree on standards that should be incorporated into all devices/software/apps that would allow everything to communicate seamlessly …  just thinking out loud.

How Choice is Slowing Advancement in the Medical Industry

The new era of apps and technology have somehow slowed the technical progress of the medical industry … it sounds absurd, but please here me out.

For the purpose of this argument let’s just look at smart phones.

It seems that we can’t go anywhere today without hearing about the latest new mobile device, running the latest mobile operating system that promises to have thousands if not millions of apps. Even among the established two (being iOS and Android) the choice of applications is dizzying in its enormity. A quick search through the Android Market produced over 1600 results for “medical apps”, and the Android market is considered to be the least established of the two. Then you have the “other” mobile operating systems, each promising their own app stores (Microsoft, Blackberry, and HP/Palm). (That’s just smartphones, we haven’t even discussed all the newer wireless medical devices that transmit data through wifi, Bluetooth, cellular communication, or near field communication. Throw that on the pile and what we have are a lot of technical advancements with lots of choices to be made.)

With all these advancements and choices it has now become exceedingly difficult to actually choose. While there are a few medical apps that most users consider to be essential there are many others that people are either unaware of, or are being developed right now. Couple all this with IT departments trying to upgrade legacy systems, to enable digitized health records, telemedicine, etc. and what we have is slow forward progress.

IT departments have to first sift through all the available options, bearing in mind that in a few months a newer better option may exist. Then they have to determine how these options fit into their current architecture, or whether or not they fit at all. Also how do they migrate the existing data, into these new systems … Finally there is the “fear”. With the currently available platforms/software/apps, how does IT know which ones will last and advance? Which ones will become obsolete?

It’s endless and time consuming, and with the current speed of the development we have a lot of advancements with no choices being made.

It’s not that people don’t want to adopt these new technologies; it’s really just that there are too many choices, with no clear consensus on standards or how everything will work together. This is why a majority of the “popular” medical apps usually are reference applications that do not actually harness the full power of the mobile device.

That’s why although we are now designing and building tech, and medical tech at an accelerated rate the actual adoption and advancement of the industry has slowed.

How is one supposed to choose when there are so many choices?

The Proliferation of Medical Apps

Medical Applications or their slimmed down cousins known as apps are exploding all over the internet.

The ability of medical professionals to get together with app designers and build useful, clinical applications that can actually aid in the diagnosis and monitor the treatment of diseases, etc. is astounding. While there are still many general applications that simply list symptoms or act more as a resource; with the maturation and development of app markets, we are finally beginning to see complete software applications that behave like apps, yet provide more useful real life clinical functions.

Applications like AirStrip are showing that as we move forward doctors and hospitals both see the benefits of the app nature of software. The benefits of applications that reside on mobile devices or that are accessible via the cloud are finally beginning to crack the locked down and isolated silos of medical IT structures.

Easy to Deploy
Medical apps are incredibly easy to deploy … as a matter of fact since the apps reside on a physician’s mobile device, they can be easily managed and installed according to the user’s need. In the future perhaps each organization will have an approved list of apps, allowing the doctors to pick and choose which ones they require.

Mobile
Apps are meant to be smaller and more portable in the sense that you no longer need a full PC to run the application. This coupled with the fact that smartphones are becoming increasingly more powerful has allowed developers to isolate key functionality from software applications and apply them to a smaller package. This lets users receive and use their information on the go, from a device that everyone carries around, allowing doctors to be connected even when not at his/her office.

Always up to date
The final key benefit of apps and cloud based software is that it is always up to date. As new devices, functionality, or bug fixes are released, they become automatically available to the users. No longer do users have to wait for the IT department to download and install the update, instead the doctor is simply notified and can install the software themselves. In the case of cloud based software, most of the upgrades are on the backend letting the developers upload the changes eliminating the need for the user to carry out the update process.

As devices become more powerful, and as organizations begin to see and embrace the benefits of apps, I believe the functionality of the medical apps will become more and more advanced allowing for users to perform all their duties, monitor situations, or make diagnoses while remaining mobile.

(for a study that looks at the accuracy of apps in diagnosis click here)

Medical Software and device connectivity

It is not a new phenomenon that software in the medical device industry lags behind other markets, but as the world becomes more connected and information is becoming increasingly valuable this will have to change.  The sheer amount of data that is produced from medical devices in a clinical setting is phenomenal.   A major problem, that I see,  is the data remains in silos or resident on medical devices with no correlation to patients and outcomes.  The vision of the comprehensive EMR has the promise of gathering this data, but with an ever increasing product and vendor pool the rationalizing and connecting raw physiologic data with a patient file will be problematic for the foreseeable future.

A very positive advancement in the recent months and years is that we are seeing more devices that are “networked,”  this  is the first crucial step towards a pervasive change in the way we look at data.   Examples of this are WIFI enabled Oximeters.  Currently this technology is generally being used for alarm purposes only and not for detailed analysis in case specific, data mining, or neural network type  scenarios.   To make the later scenarios reasonable in a clinical setting the raw data needs to be organized and stored in relationship to the patients master health record.

Once the raw data and patient file reside in a relational database(s) the ability to derive correlations never imagined before are only limited to the completeness of data, strength of algorithms and/or neural network design, and the number of patient records  in the system.

Here at eTrending we are working diligently to gather the raw data, present it in a clinically useful nature, and store/format the raw data for future integration into a more robust patient record system.