Healthcare Technology Trends form HIMSS 11
The HIMSS 2011 conference was held in Orlando , Florida
The reported from IT Solutions blog reported on four of what he considered the hottest trends for the year.
Trend # One
Visualization and Business Intelligence
Software vendors have taken the critical measures of an efficient hospital and created dashboards to give the service providers a visual representation of where things are in real time. A business intelligence metrics will show the status of the time it takes to complete a task within the hospital system.
How long is the average wait time in the ER? It’s a dashboard on your screen with a gauge showing acceptable waiting times displayed in varying colors; green, yellow and red.
When questioned how long patient remain in the ER awaiting placement on medical floors, time is variable during the season of the year. This system would certainly help reduce waiting time and increase efficiency.
Trend # Two
Collaboration, not Just Communication
Today’s healthcare communications are about workflows and how groups can collaborate on providing the best care. It involves messaging of nurse assignments, push to talk technology for emergency assistance, quick conferencing with the response team, and different types of communication based upon the level of emergency. Some systems have even integrated location technology so that you know the closet available resource help.
This trend is now available within the hospital that I work in, I can see that we were ahead of the curve.
Trend # Three
Intelligent Mobile Devices
Today’s hospital environment contains many different types of mobile devices, some stationary and others mobile. Every device can have intelligence build into it. Infusion pumps have Wi-Fi chipsets that upload data as well as show the location using Wi-Fi-RTLS. The trend is to upload test results directly into the patients EMR, thereby helping to reduce medical errors.
Want to check the weight of a patient? The hospital bed shows you in real time and the data is automatically uploaded to the patient’s medical record, over the hospitals wireless network.
The system is installed in our hospital, but I am not sure that it is fully operational. But I an see this coming. It’s funny that I overheard the staff talking about this particular subject this week. If the bed could weigh the patient, it would often times save the labor of two additional staff to weight patient who are deconditioned.
Trend # 4
Healthcare Technology is about Integration
If you are going to mange a hospitals networking environment, you will have to pull together different platforms of technology together. These systems are to be linked together into one system. The biggest challenge for healthcare tech will be the ability of healthcare providers to pull all different systems together in one working platform.
One such vendor is SecurEdge Networks which designs, deploys and supports large scale mobile infrastructure to help healthcare providers manage all of these mobile initiatives.
IT Solutions Blog
By Philip Wegner 2/25/2011
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