Healthcare Information Technology, Mobiles and Telecom Topics
Here's a list of topics that I've been following because I think they will play an important role in the transformation of the practice of medicine.
Wireless Devices for Remote Patient Monitoring, Personal Health Records (PHR), Mobility and Electromagnetic Interference
Since medical school, I've also been involved with investigating the uses of information and device technology for supporting clinical practice. Part of my passion for exploring emerging technologies involves the hope of seeing the next big thing, but appraising current capabilities and what might just be coming next must be done carefully if you want to retain your credibility.
The prospect of using cell phones for multiple purposes is easily accepted by most people in this world. In fact, the US is lagging behind in using text messaging, accessing the Internet, while the vast majority of citizens in other countries use their cell phone as their primary Web access device over the PC. I don't there will be such a thing as a "medical cell phone," but rather a converged personal device that can be used for many purposes.
Wireless monitors could also be in the form of machine-to-machine (M2M) systems that can be applied as an adhesive bandage for monitoring vital signs for a post-op patient or as a capsule that is temporarily embedded in the esophagus to check pH as a means of diagnosing gastroesophageal reflux disease.
The real challenge is finding of way of integrating these devices and technology into the already busy workflow of clincians, and ideally with their input on how these will be designed.
For most of maladies of humankind or our healthcare system, there will never be a cure. However, it will always be expected that medical research will make steady progress through careful evaluation and good strategic decision making.
The wireless standards include: Wi-Fi (802.11 a, b g & n), Zigbee, Bluetooth and WiMAX.
;)
Security and Privacy in the Age of HIPAA
The near future of heathcare IT was be very much wrapped up in resolving the issues of security and privacy as zero-day exploits proliferate.
This includes biometric security...
Human-computer Interaction
More to come...
EHR/EMR/Practice Management software
more to come...
Speech Recognition
I've been using Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical version on my desktop PC for writing on oncology topics. I was amazed how well it work right out of the box with little training of the software on my part. You wouldn't want to use this on a laptop unless it had a good sound card, though.
On mobiles, speech recognition is bound to improve where it will be used to a great extent. Right now, the processing power of mobiles is not sufficient to support real time operation, and they depend on all the heavy lifting being done on the server side. Still, it's quite remarkably for short commands.
Here, I demonstrate the use of Google Voice Search to find a search of the medical literature.
This is a very useful app, and works well even with medical terms. In this case, I say "epigenetics new england journal," and it successfully does a Google search with the first hit displaying a review article by Dr Esteller on epigenetics published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year.
Energy Management
more to come...
RFID (radio-frequency indentification)
More to come...
ePrescribing
More to come...
Cloud Computing & SOA
More to come...
Imaging and Computerized Pattern Recognition
More to come...
