Today’s Healthcare 20 BY DON FLUCKINGER
U
P TO now, the buzz around mobile health (mHealth) technology seems to have been about its potential to make healthcare cheaper and more
efficient while perhaps improving outcomes. But potential doesn’t pay the bills. In a panel at the
World Congress 3rd Annual Leadership Summit on mHealth, healthcare providers shared how mHealth technology is beginning to enable meaningful use compliance in their workflows. The panelists—Hennepin County (Minn.) Medical
Center CMIO Kevin L. Larsen, M.D., Physicians Interactive President Sanjay Pingle and U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery Clinical Informatics Deputy Director Peter Park, M.D.—described how mobile apps can address specific meaningful use criteria.
Smile, Your Ailment
Is On Candid Camera Larsen outlined his facility’s expansion of its Epic
Systems Inc. electronic health record (EHR) into mobile apps, including in ambulances with patients en route. He said tablets and phones have made their way closer to the bedside, enriching communications and efficiency of care. Practitioners are finding new ways to interact using
features such as still cameras and webcams built into mobile devices. One example he cited was a nurse dressing a patient’s wound and sending a physician a picture to document how it’s healing; previously, the nurse would describe the healing in words or have the physician come to the bedside, take off the bandage, and inspect it himself. Physicians, too, are using the cameras built into mobile
devices for documentation of patient progress. Even though docs learn in medical school how to describe things well in their charts, it’s not a precise science. Taking a picture of a patient’s rash at one visit and then taking another a week later yields a much more precise document for comparison.
Hennepin County Medical Center virtualized its EHR
system, e-prescribing system, and reference library, making all available on phones and tablets. The facility purchased tablets for its residents. Now, in addition to simply using EHR systems, residents can fulfill meaningful use criteria such as e-prescribing and looking up drug interactions.
Please, Speak into the Mic Larsen said speech recognition software is proving
to be effective for navigating the EHR system as well as adding more detailed care documentation when manual data-entry isn’t as quick. In the future, as accuracy improves and software vendors integrate speech recognition with EHRs, he feels it will be an even more effective tool. Docs might like their Dictaphones now, Larsen said, but
a smartphone running the EHR—with access to patient lists that don’t take forever to load—recording those same notes and converting them to text on the spot is faster and more efficient. Over time, he added, it also will be more effective for care, as natural-language processors will make those voice notes more searchable and the data within them more accessible.
Let Me Google That While the smartphone EHR virtualization is “not fun”
to use, Larsen said nurses prefer it—it’s a smaller device and, besides, they use fewer EHR functions than doctors. Both doctors and nurses use other software tools on their smartphones, too, including Google (for looking up medical data needed in the course of administering care) as well as calculators (for medication dosing). “A dirty little secret—doctors in the room probably
know this—Google is one of our best friends for finding information for patients,” Larsen said. “Its search engine I find much easier to use than medical search engines that require complex medical terminology.”
CONNECTION
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