A Look Back at Healthcare IT in 2008

A brief overview of the main healthcare IT issues from 2008. It looks like there is a lot of room for expanding this commentary and coming up with a comprehensive approach to reforming healthcare IT as Obama's economic stimulus plan may have as much as $25B to invest in improving our IT systems. An emphasis on interoperability, mobility and open-source would seem to make sense. (registration may be necessary to view content on Modern Healthcare)

New Palm Phone and Operating System Launched!

Finally! A new phone from Palm. The new Operating Systems is designed to be "web-centric" and enables running multiple applications at once. The launcher and touch screen are very similar to the iPhone's. The form factors is actually thinner than the iPhone. IN addition, it has a slide-down QWERTY keyboard. This might be the best thing from Palm in years. I will be blogging in the coming weeks on medical applications that can work on the new Operating System, but my guess is that it will run all of the old Palm applications, plus a lot of new applications that will emerge. You can read more and see videos here. The device is going to launch exclusively through Sprint in the first half of this year.

Physicians Practice Special Report on Handhelds

Use of handheld data devices by physicians has been steadily on the rise. According to AC Nielsen, 57 percent of physicians increased their use of handheld wireless devices in 2007. The same survey found that an average of 38 percent of physicians used handheld wireless devices for professional purposes. By specialty, emergency medicine led the field, with 58 percent of EM physicians using handheld devices. Read this informative report for more information on the use of handhelds for e-prescribing, charge capture and medical records as well as great buying guides just in time for Christmas!

Lexi-comp on-Hand released for iPhone and Apple Touch

Lexi-comp, a popular and powerful drug information database has just been released for these platforms. To read more, click here.

Transcription for iPhone

M*modal has just released a new speech recognition transcription product for the iPhone. This appears to be a promising technology that I will evaluate in the coming weeks and post back about it's usefulness.

New Mobile Dictation Software from PocketMed

My company, PocketMed, has just partnered with a premiere mobile dictation provider as well as an off-shore transcription company to provide affordable, reliable mobile dictation for physicians in small to medium-sized practices. For more information and to sign up for a free, no-obligation, 2-week trial, please contact: Fred Clark on 954-229-5050 ext. 77.

Top Technology Innovations in 2008

Health Data Management has a good supplement that talks about the top technology solutions for 2008. Many of these make a lot of sense for small practices (e.g. claims submission, mobile dictation, practice management systems, etc.), but most of the sponsors are cost-prohibitive for most primary care offices and other small practice groups. In the coming weeks I plan to highlight companies that provide these services reliably and affordably for these groups. In the meanwhile, the business case for each of these services is very well described in this free e-book.