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Digital Doctoring
ssajous writes "This is an interesting article in the NY times which talks about PDAs quickly finding their place in the world of medical billing and keeping track of patient's care, there is a lot of money in the medical field, but also currently a lot of unnecessary paper work. I like what I see!!!" I don't think Palm makes a tricorder card yet, but it's only a matter of time. The last time I saw a doctor, he was doing things the old-fashioned way - I would guess it will take a while before this sort of technology is widely used.
believe it or not the Newton had made a lot of inroads into this before Steve killed it. A lot of the apps for the Newton were specifically medical/hospital.
There are a number of problems with the concept of digital assistants in medicine. I worked in the field for some time and ran into all of them...
o Resistance
But I've *always* done it this way
o Portability
How do you move from patient to patient and
get data into a centralized database reliably?
o Reliability & Security
Medical data must be valid, authenticated, and
readily available. Having a system crash when
you're evaluating someone's heart condition is
unacceptable.
o Legal considerations
Doctors' notes are considered as legal
documents when looking at medical malpractice
and other legal-medical collisions. How do you
verify that the electronic format is the same
as the paper one when there *is* no paper one?
There are more, of course, but these are the big ones I ran into time and again. The bottom line is that while Hippocrates and other PDA software packages are useful, the likelihood of the medical profession accepting the widespread use of portable technology for medical data entry and retrieval is slim anytime soon.
To a new everything, so that now there is a complete PC (Windows) in every office that brings up your history, the works...and even sends prescriptions over to the pharmacy for pickup. Of course, when they implemented it at first there were tremendous problems (like 3 hour lines for drugs) but they seem to have worked it out now. I'm just afraid that I'm going to go in there for something serious one day and his machine is going to crash in the middle of something important, thus giving Blue Screen of Death a whole new meaning. (Ok, I bet I'm not the first one to say that. :))
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
The books published by Franklin for all the hand top OSs. It's just that the hot swap HandSprings allow people to carry several around.
A small piece not mentioned in a good article.
Profit motivates invention.
My friend is a doctor in large hospital in NYC, and she uses her Palm all the time. It has replaced a least a half dozen heavy manuals she used to keep in her pockets. Many companies now sell e-text versions of their reference works. She got it to reduce the number of reference works she had to use, but I think it is better in that it facilitates better searching and indexing. She is young, and young doctors liker her use them all the time, it is the older ones in power that are technologically resistant.
I think that it is unfortunate the medical field has been so slow to adopt technology like this. If anyone knows the history of MYCIN, it is amazing to me that the medical field has ignored such powerful diagonostic tools. In the end I think it is the public that suffers.
"Politics is for the moment, an equation lasts eternity" -A. Einstein
I've learned about this first-hand: Last year, My wife was diagnosed with Type II diabetes in the aftermath of a failed pregnancy.
People diagnosed with Type II diabetes often have to test their blood seven (7!) times a day (or more!) in the first few years, and record the results, time/date, and diet info for their doctors. Manually, this can be a pain in the ass, especially when full records for 2 months need to be given to a doctor.
Right after being diagnosed, my wife found out about Glucopilot (see http://www.healthetech.com/), an award-winning program for the palm OS, which prompted her to buy a Palm V and a hard case. It does a wonderful job of recording, handling, and outputting & graphing the data. With the purchase of a small cable (made one myself, ha!) it can read the output of some blood sugar testers directly and eliminate the manual entry of numbers all together.
Her doctors, both of whom where unfamiliar with the program, were astounded by it and the detailed data it provided when she show it to them, and they began mentioning it to their other patients.
It's not just the Glucopilot software though, My wife found several other programs for the Palm that she uses to track diet, and other medical info like details on her menstral cycle, sudden sickenesses, and anything else.
Where this really makes the impact is on the day-to-day lifestyle front. She has a tiny case that she carries with her eveywhere she goes because it is so compact and totable. It holds her Palm V, and her blood testing gear. Because the form factor is so friendly, and the software provides such immediate feedback on blood-level trends, etc, she has displayed incredible dicipline in taking readings and entering data as it occurs. And that dicipline has seriously impressed me and her doctors, and is probably why they are saying she will be able to control the condition without needing insulin shots, etc.
The palm has been great for collecting all my loose data in one place, and I see specialized, easy-to-use medical tracking and info software as providing great benefit to people who have problems that are ongoing and have to shared with their doctors.
The Healthy Palm
and others...
Thing is, though, I'm not sure I'd trust, for example, a pregnancy-safe drug list I just got off some guy's home page...
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o Portability - use Symbol 802.11 enabled Palm and have spread spectrum radio coverage throughout and either a telnet or html client.
o Reliability & Security - NEVER USE MICROSOFT!!! Use AS/400 if you want absolute reliability, or Unix if you want high reliability with ease/cheapness of coding/updating.
o Legal considerations - there are many ways to sign/legally encode a file...discussed elsewhere.
This only leaves the "We've always done it this way" brigade - work on them:)
Frog51