There has always been somewhat a tendency of healthcare to slowly embrace technology, but certainly this has not been the case in the last year. If you take a walk around a hospital today you will not see the following very often. A physician carrying a pager and or 4lb laptop, (they are usually bolted down to cart someplace). But will see them carrying probably a smart phone and probably also an I-Pad. (User interface, portability, just enables every aspect of their patient care process.). Not to knock Apple, but somewhat like Linux, but even more so, Android is beating them to punch. (open source) Also, their is no way I would buy a I-Phone to run on the AT&T horrendous network (GSM), but they are fixing this now. (That is a another blog in detail). I got the DroidX from Motorola. As my son said, it is basically a computer that as a side is a phone.
Now to the interesting part. For years hospitals have tried to adopt bar code scanning (I used to work for Symbol and helped push this early on). Bar coding was cheap, could use unique symbologies, and with CMOS imagers have really lowered the hassle factor of traditional laser scanners. However, it seems that each EMR company, and also IV therapy company, forces the clinician to use their application with their bar code scanner. Hence the clinician at times must feel like a clerk at WalMart. Then also the whole aspect of using active RFID tags to locate equipment.
The latest Android phone (running Gingerbread) (Nexus S), includes a NFC (Near Field Communications chipset). Apple is right around the corner also with the i-Phone next yer swith NFC.
So what does this all mean for healthcare? The jest of NFC for the consumer was to provide contactless payment of credit cards. You could call up an application and look to order and they then can accept payment from the 13.MHz passive RFID in the card. So logically makes sense that you use the same for the point of care. Call up the EMR application with the integrated NFC on your smart phone (not on the I-Pad yet), patient wrist band, medical device, care giver (all have passive RFID). Simply associate all together (right patient, right device, with the right clinician), and the associative integration is dropped into the EMR application. Think that laptops in the hallway with the scanner dangling from it, could be a thing of the past. Would welcome opinions here
www.open-nfc.org
www.code.google.com/android
