Barcode.com: “On the football field, for example, heat prostration has led to several fatalities over the past few years. The problem starts during pre-season practices that take place under the intense summer sun. Identec has already developed a headband with an embedded heat-sensing chip. The RFID chips embedded in helmets developed by HotHead Technologies, combine RFID with a heat-sensing thermistor, offering plenty of range.”

From the hotheads technology website:

The H.O.T. System is a patent-pending, two-component package that embeds a heat sensing unit inside the helmet of an individual and collects and relays periodic temperature readings from that person’s skin to a portable data collector (A ruggedized PDA or Laptop Computer). The portable device is used to alert the individual or an observer that the person has exceeded an allowable temperature while the subject’s helmet is on.

If skin temperature ranges outside of the set parameters then the data collector will alert the sensor unit in the helmet to take temperature readings at a faster rate. The alert will be displayed on the data collector so the operator of the data collector can make a decision on whether to stop the current activity and seek to receive further observation from a professional and take measures to cool their temperature down. The alert will be automatically removed from the data collector as soon as the skin temperature falls back into the normal parameters.

There’s also a short video that shows the basic idea here.

Best session I attended was Care Coordination in Practice: Managing Data Volume and Data
Reconciliation. The presentation was all about big data and how we’re failing to use it appropriately in healthcare. The slide deck was great. It’s available here if you’re interested.

A couple of things I found interesting in the presentation:

1. There are approximately 1-2 billion clinical documents produced in the United States each year. That’s mind boggling if you stop and think about for a minute.
2. More than 60% of key clinical data are not found in coded lists.The remainder of the information is found in free text, scanned documents, etc. That’s a problem because a lot of clinical decision support is based on information in coded lists. So what are we missing? A lot.

The takeaway from the presentation: “Get massive amounts of data flowing, then build structure slowly and incrementally. Don’t wait.” The presenter referred to this as “the Google approach to data”. I’m a fan of all things Google so that works for me.

I had coffee with Pauline Sweetman yesterday (@psweetman). Pauline is a pharmacist from the UK that I’ve been tweeting back and forth with for a couple of years. We had a pretty interesting conversation around the differences and similarities between hospital pharmacy practice in the U.S. and UK. Good stuff.

I also had a great conversation with Dr. Heather Leslie (@omowizard), a physician out of Melbourne, Austrialia that’s doing a lot of work with the openEHR project. During our short visit she persuaded me to participate in their Adverse Reaction archetype review; as a pharmacist of course.She’s always looking for additional help if anyone is interested. It’s a worthwhile project so at least have a look.

I spent more time roaming around the exhibitor area, specifically looking at RFID technology. I’m a fan of RFID, but it doesn’t seem to be catching on in healthcare. There are several reasons why, but we should still be looking hard at it’s application. I’m not sure whether RFID will become important or it it’s a bridge technology to something else. But the only way to find out is start using it and see where it goes.

One product that uses RFID technology that I found particularly interesting comes from a company called MEPS Real Time, Inc. Their product features a dispensing cabinet with real-time RFID driven inventory management to go along with a RFID med tray tracking system. Of course you wouldn’t use RFID for everything because it would be labor intensive and expensive, but for high dollar drugs it might make sense. It was pretty impressive.

Abstract
Objective
To control the workflow for surgical patients, we in-cooperate radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology to develop a Patient Advancement Monitoring System (PAMS) in operation theater.
Methods
The web-based PAMS is designed to monitor the whole workflow for the handling of surgical patients. The system integrates multiple data entry ports Across the multi-functional surgical teams. Data are entered into the system through RFID, bar code, palm digital assistance (PDA), ultra-mobile personal computer (UMPC), or traditional keyboard at designated checkpoints. Active radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag can initiate data demonstration on the computer screens upon a patient’s arrival at any particular checkpoint along the advancement pathway.
Results
The PAMS can manage the progress of operations, patient localization, identity verification, and peri-operative care. The workflow monitoring provides caregivers’ instant information sharing to enhance management efficiency.
Conclusion
RFID-initiate surgical workflow control is valuable to meet the safety, quality, efficiency requirements in operation theater.

I like the concept that the article presents, but take a look in the methods section and note the presence of “palm digital assistance (PDA)”. That made me a little suspicious about the age of the article. Even though it was published in December 2011, it was received by the journal December 4, 2009; received in revised form August 16, 2010; accepted August 27, 2010 and finally published more than a year later in December 2011. So it took two years from the time the article was received until it was published. This just fuels my opinion that methods used to disseminate medical and scientific information is completely outdated.

_________________________

1. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine Vol. 104, Issue 3, Pages 435-442, December 2011

Well, KitCheck is a system that uses RFID technology to track the medications found in all those different med trays, code boxes, etc. I thought it was pretty cool. It’s a great idea. Wish I would have thought of it.

From the website:

The KitCheck solution utilizes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to accurately determine exactly what is in a kit, what has been consumed or missing and which items are expired.

Pharmacies start by tagging product upon bulk receiving in the hospital. The KitCheck solution makes this process fast and painless by utilizing the bar codes present on most items currently in the pharmacy code kits.

Pharmacists build kits by placing items physically into the kit. When they are finished, rather than manually checking each expiration date and quantity, the user simply puts the kit into the RFID reading station for verification. The kit contents and expiry dates are validated in less than 15 seconds. Any problems with the kit contents are reported and the pharmacist can quickly correct any issues. A control log with the kit contents and expirations is automatically generated.

When the kit is complete, simply seal it up as you would normally. The kit is now ready to be deployed for use in the hospital.

After a kit is broken open for use, simply bring it back to the RFID scanning station. The KitCheck station will show you in less than 15 seconds which items have been consumed as well as which items were erroneously put into the kit. Kit use information is updated in the system to be used for patient billing or supply ordering purposes.Simply rebuild the kit using the automatically generated report, and then you are ready to deploy the kit again for another use.

The problem addressed by metal RFID of forgotten surgical tools, sponges and towels is a serious one. The Healthcare Informatics Company found in 2008 that in one out of every eight operations, surgical tools are not properly accounted for. Other statistics indicate such items are left inside a patient’s body in between 1 out of every 1,000 and 1 out of every 5,000 operations. When this happens, they can cause infections and require additional operations, putting a patient’s health at risk and costing a hospital time and money. Until now, hospital operating table personnel had to manually count each small item.

The solution comes from a new generation of small RFID tags. These new metal RFID tags are robust enough to be inserted into surgical instruments, towels and sponges at the time of manufacture and can be read from distances of up to two meters. However, they remain compatible with, and safe for the human body. Xerafy, a Hong Kong company specializing in this technology, has recently introduced a new range of such RFID metal tags. Now RFID for surgical instruments allows them to be tracked automatically, through the operation itself and even throughout sterilization and disposal.

Xerafy offers a couple of whitepapers on the subject worth reading. They can be found here.

• Tangled was #1 at the box office last weekend. I haven’t seen it, so really can’t comment on the movie. My wife and I went to see Faster instead. It was exactly what you would expect from Dwayne Johnson playing a touch good-bad guy. I’d see it again.
• I found an interesting article about a company called RCG Holdings Limited. RCG specializes in the commercialization of RFID and biometrics technology. “The Group offers a vast service of products and solutions, including RFID-enabled asset management systems, machine to machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. It has developed an intelligent surveillance system using facial recognition technology called Fx Guard Windows Logon, which has been adopted by international computer manufacturers like Acer and NEC.” The FxGuard Windows Logon really caught my attention. You can find more information here. It’s pretty cool stuff.
• GottaBeMobile: “The QNX operating system was unveiled for the company’s forthcoming BlackBerry PlayBooktablet, which boasts a smooth operation with multimedia prowess and multitasking capabilities. Since the PlayBook was unveiled, RIM has been forthcoming in saying that the next-generation OS would appear in the company’s smartphone offerings as well and won’t be limited to tablets, demonstrating the scalability of QNX much like what Apple has done with iOS, Google with Android, and Nokia and Intel with MeeGo.” –RIM is doing some remarkable things, evident by the video below. My only concern is that it may be a little too late as the iOS and Android operating systems are slowly becoming the two giants in the industry. Only time will tell.

• There’s a great article at EMR Daily News that discusses the differences between SaaS and hosted solutions. As so eloquently put in the article “These terms [SaaS and hosted] are sometimes used interchangeably and they shouldn’t be. If you’re hearing these terms from the vendors you are speaking with you need to understand the difference.”
• I found an excellent list of things to consider when designing a user interface (UI) at the Ellen Beldner website. The list includes great tid-bits like “When in doubt, take it out” and “Users matter more than we do”. Healthcare vendors could certainly learn something from this list of recommendations for UI design.
• There’s been a lot said recently about the use of telemedicine including telemonitoring of patients and telepharmacy to handle remote checking. I think the concept is great, but I’m not quite sure where it fits in the overall scope of things. A recent New England Journal of Medicine (N Engl J Med 2010; 363:2301-2309) article found that using telemonitoring for patients with chronic heart disease didn’t improve outcomes. I can’t say that I’m surprised by this, as heart failure may not be the right disease state to employ heightened monitoring and interaction. Disease states where medication timing and compliance is crucial like diabetes and HIV might be worth exploration. Information presented at the mHealth session at ASHP Midyear where SMS reminders were successfully utilized in those disease states reinforces this idea.
• Clinical Transplantation “Taking Immunosuppressive Medications Effectively: A pilot randomized controlled trial in adult kidney transplant recipients” ( published online Nov. 16): “Using a randomized controlled trial design, 30 adult renal transplant recipients were screened for medication non-adherence using electronic monitoring. Fifteen non-adherent participants were randomized to receive either a continuous self-improvement intervention or attention control management.” The electronic monitoring consisted of medication bottles with microcircuits that recorded information on medication compliance and wirelessly transmitted the data to the healthcare provider. The study concluded that “The continuous self-improvement intervention shows promise as an effective and feasible approach to improve medication adherence in adult renal transplant recipients.” So a little bit of technology plus gentle reminders equals better compliance. Go figure.
• Pharmacotherpy: “Clinical pharmacists have served as principal investigators on a wide range of grants and contracts from all available funding sources, including peer-reviewed funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Most important, clinical pharmacist development needs to be an academic and practice priority to ensure an adequate supply of clinical pharmacists as principal investigators to continue making substantial and meaningful contributions in meeting the needs of patients, improving public health, and expanding the roles of clinical pharmacists.” Well there you have it. I find it interesting that people keep saying the same thing over and over again. All pharmacists know this, so what are you going to do about it? Writing another article with outdated information certainly doesn’t help.
• Here’s an interesting product at IDAutomation.com: Native Barcode Generator for Google Docs. It’s a little pricey, but worth a look.
• This video at the Beacon Community site says it all. “Death by decimal point” and “it’s about system design”. Someone gets it.

• Wolters Kluwer is busy gobbling up various pieces of the healthcare market. From the EMR Daily News site: “Wolters Kluwer Health’s unit Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW) today announced the acquisition of iCare LLC, makers of iCare EMR, an educational Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software program.” Last week they acquired Pharmacy OneSource, the maker of some pretty cool pharmacy applications. What are they up to?
• Interested in an eSeminar on mHealth? Well look no further than the HIMSS Event Center website where you can register for “Mobility and Population Health: A Clinical Case Study on the Role of Mobile Devices – The mCare Project”.
• MobileBeat: “Google’s Andy Rubin tweeted last night that over 300,000 Android phones are activated daily— that’s up from 200,000 daily activations in August. The news puts Android’s daily activations over both the iPhone and BlackBerry, and it even surpasses Nokia’s 260,000 daily Symbian activations (though research firm Canalys says those numbers may be closer to 325,000), Fortune reports. Android’s daily activations also point to Google nearing 10 million Android activations a month.” – It appears that people throughout the universe are beginning to realize they have a choice in the matter. Hmm, why would anyone want a choice? According to Apple we’re all supposed to just shut up and do as we’re told. Fickle people.
• I really love Acer’s ingenuity. At a press release last week, they announced the details for a dual-screen tablet, the Iconia. It sports a pair of 14-inch touchscreens. Here’s hoping it makes it to the market so we can all have the opportunity to drool on it.
• Google just keeps rolling along. It looks like the Google operating system and Chrome OS notebook will be available sometime early next year. Take a look at the video below showing a demo model of the Cr-48 Google OS notebook. I must say that I like the looks of the thing. They’ve clearly taken queues from Apple and their line of MacBook laptops. Nothing wrong with that. I’ve been wondering for quite some time when someone was going to start doing that. I love you Google.

• The activity at my site was pretty much status quo, but between Sunday, December 5 and Friday, December 10 the posts on Midyear were clearly on everyone’s mind. Here are the top four posts from those dates. See a trend?:

1. #ASHPMidyear rolls on
2. #AHSPMidyear, the end
3. #ASHPMidyear 2010 part deux
4. #ASHPMidyear day one comes to an end

• Time for a quick rant. Please avert your eyes if you don’t want to see it. Twice while at ASHP Midyear someone commented on the fact that I wasn’t wearing a “coat and tie”. I don’t like to wear a coat and tie. Never have and never will. I come from a fairly humble background and didn’t consider wearing a suit until much later in life. Will I wear one when required by my employer for my job? Of course I will. Someone is paying me to be a cog in the wheel. A grunt if you will, and as long as I take their money I’ll do as they ask. As I’ve said before either live with it, change it, or move on. However, when I’m on my own time I wear what I like. I dress in a professional manner most of the time and that should be enough. For some reason people equate a business suite with intelligence and station in life. I don’t. My initial thought of someone in a suit is that they’re trying to distract me from the important stuff by presenting me with something shiny, i.e. like a used car salesman. So, if you want to sit down with me and shoot the breeze or talk about informatics, pharmacy, life, kids, football, or whatever, feel free to approach me. I’d be happy to talk your ear off. On the other hand, if you want to size me up by what I’m wearing, don’t bother. I’m just sayin’.

• I was fortunate enough to start my day by discussing RFID tracking of medications with a colleague over breakfast. MedKeeper is working with Swisslog to utilize the RFID tracking capabilities of their Pneumatic Tube System. You can read more about Swisslog’s RFID for pneumatic tube systems here.
• There was an interesting impromptu get together among several informatics pharmacists this morning to discuss the future of pharmacy practice and the results of the recent ASHP PPMI Summit. There were some great ideas tossed around. Obviously the future of pharmacy practice isn’t something you work through in a couple of hours, but one thing is for certain: the future of pharmacy will be patient centric and make judicious use of technology as the pharmacists move away from the physical drug. Other themes that popped up were the increased use of pharmacy technicians in an expanded role, and the need to collect and analyze data from cutting edge practice models currently in existence. One item that I found particularly interesting was the notion that the act of prescribing a medication will someday be obsolete. I initially dismissed the idea, but the more I thought about it the more I realized it may not be outside the realm of possibility. Think of the number of standardized protocols, initiatives and treatment guidelines that are used today. Couple that with the advancing field of pharmacogenomics and you have a recipe for therapy directed completely by disease state and genetic typing. Not too futuristic after all.
• The Midday Symposium of choice today was The Power of Control, which was supposed to be a presentation on patient safety, lean pharmacy and data management and reporting. Unfortunately it turned into a long infomercial for DoseEdge. I believe DoseEdge is awesome technology that I’ve blogged about before, but the presenters spent a little too much time praising the workflow manager instead of talking about the importance of other pieces of the puzzle in the IV room. Good points were presented by all the speakers, but I felt that Pranish Kantesaria, the Director of Pharmacy at Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, IN did the best job of presenting the reason for pushing for safety in the IV room. He talked about the human brain’s inability to multi-task, distractions in the IV room and trust bias. In addition he presented some great information on how to measure the reliability of a process as well as what constitutes the hierarchy of controls in patient safety. I took away a lot of good information from his section of the talk.
• Secondary to my discussion on RFID medication tracking earlier in the day, I ventured over to the exhibit hall after the Midday Symposium to visit the Aethon booth and get a demonstration of their asset tracking and recovery solution that makes use of RFID tags, a tracking board and a little TUG robot. Overall the system was quite impressive, and the technology is exciting. The video below gives you a basic idea of what the TUG robot can do, but appears to be a little dated. The TUG unit I observed today looked a lot more up to date than the one in the video.

• After my jaunt through the exhibit hall I had a meeting with another group of informatics pharmacists where we discussed a project by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) involving Pillbox. There’s quite an effort underway to develop a standardized library of images that can be used to better identify tablets using readily available technology. Words like “the cloud”, “high resolution imaging”, “pixel recognition”, etc were used. Absolutely fascinating stuff.
• My day concluded with the 13th annual ISMP Cheers Awards Reception and Dinner at Anaheim Stadium. I was excited to be there as it was the first time I’d ever attended an event like that. Barbara Olson (@SafetyNurse) was honored with the ISMP Volunteer Award for her efforts centered on the use of social media to increase awareness of patient safety issues. Barbara is a great advocate of patient safety and a positive example of how one can use social media to advance knowledge. Mark Neuenschwander (@hospitalrx) received the ISMP Lifetime Achievement Award for his tireless work in advancing patient safety through the use of bar-code technology at the point of care. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Mark on several occasions and have been impressed with his knowledge and passion about healthcare and patient safety. Congratulations to both Barbara and Mark for their achievements.

Time to get some sleep and hit it again tomorrow.

I’ve been interested in the use of RFID technology in healthcare for quite some time. I think there’s real value in the use of RFID secondary to the ability to encode significant amounts of information in the tag. The information contained in an RFID tag could potentially include a patient’s medication regimen, allergies and medical condition. The value become obvious when you consider the possibilities during medication administration in the acute care setting.

The article has a great list of reasons why RFID should at least be considered a viable alternative to BCMA.

Barcoding presents challenges, however, especially with regard to barcode medication administration (BCMA).

• Barcoding requires human compliance—in order to perform its function, a barcode must be scanned and that requires a human to pull the trigger. If a human elects to bypass the process and not use the barcode scanner, there is little that can be done about it.
• Barcodes require line-of-sight scanning. To identify a patient, for example, the care provider must locate and scan the patient’s wristband. If the patient is asleep and resting on that hand, that means disturbing, and possibly waking, the patient.
• The scanner cannot verify that the barcode scanned is actually physically attached to the item it represents. There are well-documented instances of users producing surrogate copies of barcodes and scanning those surrogates, rather than scanning the barcodes actually affixed to the appropriate items (Koppel, et al., 2008).
• Barcode scanners cannot tell the difference between scanning 10 different instances of the same barcode (e.g., scanning 10 different medication vials) or scanning the same barcode 10 times (e.g., scanning the same vial 10 times). This means that people can “cheat” the system, and a user who loses track of where they are in a scanning process cannot tell if they have already scanned an item. It should be noted that the FDA has proposed a serialized National Drug Code (NDC) implementation that would improve this issue.
• When a large number of items must be scanned, users experience fatigue that may result in failure to scan some items, or increase the probability of the user taking shortcuts.
• Barcodes rely on print quality: a damaged barcode may not scan.
• Data is fixed at the time the barcode is printed; it cannot be updated.
• Barcode scanning typically requires a flat surface with high contrast. Barcodes on irregular surfaces (such as on a foil-wrapped suppository) or on surfaces without good printed contrast (such as an IV bag) are difficult to scan.
• On some packaging (notably IV bags), the container has multiple barcodes, and the provider cannot always tell which one they should scan.
• Barcode scanning of medications relies heavily on barcodes containing the NDC for which there is not a well-maintained definitive reference list.”

RFID technology in healthcare is in its infancy even though it’s an older technology, but in my opinion now is the perfect time to be exploring its use. Waiting for the technology to mature in healthcare means you’ve already missed the boat. In addition, having your hands in technology during it’s development offers the opportunity to influence future direction.

Here’s a cool video demonstrating some possible uses for RFID technology in healthcare. I especially like the part where the patient’s profile is automatically pulled onto a tablet pc once the patient has been positively identified via an RFID scanner in the tablet.

On a side note, I’ve seen articles popping up all over the internet this week talking about Apple’s use of the iPhone and iPod touch as a RFID transponder, and according to the Patently Apple website “the RFID antenna could be placed in the touch sensor panel, such that the touch sensor panel could now additionally function as an RFID transponder.” Details on the patent from Apple can be found here.

I have a small collection of RFID web clippings and articles that can be found in a shared Evernote Notebook. I haven’t been collecting information for long and the notebook is quite limited, but feel free to browse. If you know of a good article relating RFID to healthcare don’t hesitate to point me in the right direction.

According to the Motorola website, the DS9808-R:

The DS9808-R is a ground-breaking data capture device that represents two Motorola firsts. The DS9808-R is not only the first combination 1D/2D bar code scanner and RFID reader, it also represents a new RFID product category — the first combination handheld/hands-free UHF RFID reader. Motorola’s revolutionary imaging engine enables the capture of 1D and 2D bar codes as well as images and signatures, with record swipe speeds on both 1D and 2D bar codes. The hands-free read range for bar codes and RFID tags can be adjusted to meet your needs — for example, the RFID read range can be set to prevent the inadvertent capture of RFID tags in a nearby cash-wrap. The flexible device can capture virtually any 1D or 2D bar code quickly and easily on paper labels as well as on mobile phone displays, providing built-in support for emerging applications — mobile coupons and mobile loyalty cards in retail to mobile boarding passes at the airport. The DS9808-R can also capture and parse the PDF417 bar codes on U.S. driver’s licenses and other AAMVA compliant ID cards, enabling retailers to automatically populate a credit or loyalty care application or other form. The result is the extraordinary flexibility to accommodate virtually any type of inventory management technology at the POS — all with a single cost-effective device.

More detailed information can be found at the Motorola website here (PDF).

- Avatar was #1 at the box office for a second weekend in a row. It really is a great movie.

- The New Year was ushered in this week.

- TechCrunch: “Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010 – There are beautiful Android tablets , concept tablets, and, of course, the one tablet which could define the category, the Apple Tablet. “ – Yep, the iSlate tablet from Apple is the most yet-to-be-seen-in-the-wild device I’ve ever read about. Here’s hoping that it lives up to the hype.

- GottaBeMobile : “There’s an eerie silence amongst all the excitement, though, and it is coming from none other than Microsoft and its’ partners. This silence is very concerning and it will cause Microsoft to suddenly see something they owned get snatched from their hands if they don’t quickly change their ways.” – Unfortunately I think Rob’s words are far too true for my taste. Microsoft has been blazing a trail in tablet development for years and now they are going to sit around and watch companies like Apple snatch it away from them.

- PubMed got a face lift. I know it’s been that way for a little while, but I thought I would mention it anyway. PubMed is the premiere search engine for scientific literature.

- The New York Times: “How to Train the Aging Brain – Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.” – I spent a good chunk of my life playing football; spring football, passing league in the summers, conditioning in the early fall, the season in the winter, etc. This had a definite impact on my brain. To this day, the smell of freshly cut grass makes me think of football fields and certain sounds in the weight room bring back fond memories of good times with close friends. It’s a great article.

- Barcode.com: “CardBank conveniently stores all of your retailer preferred cards in your iPhone. By eliminating the need to rummage through card after card on countless keyrings, CardBank centralizes the location of your cards for easy access.” The CardBank application has remained among the Top 50 Paid Utility Applications on the iTunes Store with at least 80 loyalty card programs programmed into CardBank. Users have easy access to the programs and are able to request new programs. CardBank has the ability to display barcodes in both landscape and portrait pieces to help generate positive scanning results.” – I love this idea. Doesn’t everyone have a ton of those “rewards cards” in their wallet; Barns & Noble, Borders, UA Movie Theaters, Best Buy, Starbucks, HardRock Café, etc? You can get more information on CardBank at their website.

- Green.TMCnet.com: “Zebra Enterprise Solutions, a division of Zebra Technologies, announced American Barcode and RFID has joined its partner program. The ZES partner program enables AB&R to integrate a broader range of technology solutions with its existing offerings. American Barcode and RFID is a technology integrator of Automatic Identification and Data Collection (AIDC) solutions that help customers manage assets, track inventory, mobilize their work force, and secure their work place.” – There’s that RFID thing again.

- Health Content Advisors: “In the healthcare industry, where I focus most of my attention, the possibilities for making the world run better by exploiting research, outcomes, and administrative data are enormous. Yet, the healthcare sector lags other industries by more than a decade in data management, data access and interoperability.” – Everyone knows that the healthcare industry is more then ten years behind other industries in several key areas, but the question remains; what are we going to do about it?

- The Entourage eDGe Dual Screen eBook Reader was caught on Video. This is a very exciting little device. Check out the hands-on review at CNET News.

.

- There is a must read article at Technology Review called The Year in Biomedicine. The article speaks of 2009 “as the year human genome sequencing finally became routine enough to generate useful medical information”. I don’t know whether to be excited or frightened by such a thing. Anyway, the article covers some fantastic material, be sure to check it out.

- TechCrunch: “Android Finally Gets An Official Yammer App” – Think of Yammer as Twitter for use from within your company. Yammer is advertised as “Enterprise Microblogging”. Is anyone out there using this service? I’d certainly like to give it a try at my hospital. You can get more information at the Yammer website.

- GottaBeMobile has a list of ten free apps “that will help improve your overall Droid experience.” That’s cool, considering my overall Droid experience to this point has been fantastic.

- I visit a site called MobileRead.com several times a week because I have an interest in e-readers and e-ink technology. They have a feature called “MobileRead Week in Review” that any e-reader/e-book enthusiast should check out.

- Simon Bramfitt : “But no matter how you look at it thin-clients are expensive in comparison to PCs. I’ve tried to get straight answers from thin-client vendors in the past, as to why their machines cost so much, but while they are very willing to share information about sizable cost of ownership benefits, I’ve never had a complete answer to the question I was asking.” – I completely agree with this sentiment. Thin clients offer bare-bones configurations and often times cost more than a bare-bones desktop client with better specs.

- The Electronic Health Record Incentive Program, “Meaningful Use”, program was released this week. John Poikonen points out that pharmacists are listed a total of zero times in the 556 page document. That my friend is a complete travesty.

- Speaking of John; please stop by the RxInformatics website and vote for the top 10 pharmacy/pharmacoinformatics articles of 2009. The list of related articles compiled by John is impressive, and I struggled mightily trying to select the “top” ten.

- HealthcareIT News: “The government announced Friday $60 million to support healthcare IT research projects aimed at “breakthrough” advances. David Blumenthal, MD, national coordinator for health information technology, said the money would support the development of Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP). SHARP projects will conduct focused research in critical areas where breakthrough advances are needed to address existing barriers to the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology. Applications are due on Jan. 25, 2010, with awards anticipated in March 2010.” – That’s not much time to get my application in. I’d better sharpen my pencil.

- EHR Bloggers: “Meaningful Use Quick Reference Guide – The following list has been excerpted from pages 47-65 of the CMS document. EHR vendors and providers should read the original document as part of any formal planning exercise and certainly in advance of any EHR purchasing decision.” – I love quick reference guides.

- Microsoft Word always tries to change “EHR” to “HER”; interesting.

Have a great weekend everyone.