From the Executive Summary:

If executed well, wireless home care solutions can significantly enhance an organization’s quality of service and profitability, not to mention providing a defensible source of competitive differentiation.  So why aren’t more organizations investing in these solutions?  Why does there continue to be a general reluctance or hesitancy in automating home care service processes?

At issue are the role of home care service providers within the health care sector and the approaches taken to automate service processes.  Yet the evidence of the benefits of homecare service automation, including improved quality, efficiency and safety, continues to mount.  VDC conducted in-depth interviews with a broad cross-section of home care service providers and wireless solution providers, many with several generations of home care service automation experience.  According to our research, home care service organizations can achieve an average net benefit of up to $15,000 per full-time equivalent (FTE) per year by deploying wireless home care solutions.

It is, however, important to note that these represent optimal benefits, which can vary based on factors such as service provider acceptance, level of solution functionality, reimbursement models (capitated vs. fee for service) and the quality of implementation.  Furthermore, the value proposition of wireless in home care is multi-faceted and revolves as much around the improved quality of life of individual service providers as it does around potential productivity enhancement.  In this paper VDC will examine the opportunity for wireless solutions in the home care sector in North America and provide recommendations on best practices to follow to maximize ROI and reduce the risks that home care service providers face when making wireless investments.

And these are their recommendations which I will not go into and instead point you back to the paper:

1. Avoid multiple, non-integrated information systems.
2. Understand the distribution of benefits received from wireless home care investments.
3. Clearly identify issues to be addressed/benefits gained through wireless solution.
4. Prepare for change.

We wanted to provide an update for those that want to see some content now so you are not disappointed and you keep coming back… It will get better and we will have some valuable and insightful content in these pages.  We haven’t sent the official invitation to our planned contributors but that will take place this week.  In the meantime you can head over to any of these other places mentioned below to get a dose of healthcare and technology news and information.

HITSphere – The brainchild of The Healthcareguy Shahid Shah this site is a Healthcare-IT blog aggregator you may find useful to discover and uncover other interesting sites.

eHealth – John Sharp’s eHealth blog comes up a lot throughout the net (at least it did for me) and I subscribe to it through Google Reader.  A good place to get news and brief commentary.  It has served as a gateway to other places for me.  (His posts don’t seem to accept trackbacks so I will probably drop by, leave a comment and introduce Virtuate to him).

Life As a Healthcare CIO – Everybody knows John Halamka… this is his blog and latest post.  I also found out about John’s post on the iPod (not the iPhone) in Healthcare through David Rothman’s blog – another good place to visit.  (BTW – The iPhone and other mobile devices in the enterprise will be one of the many topics discussed at the Mobile Strategy Blog over the next few weeks).

eHealthNews.EU Portal – The First European eHealth News Portal … This site is part of my daily read.

The Health Care Blog – David Kibbe is running a series: “Confessions of a Physician EMR Champion,” subtitled “A Conversation with American Physicians About How to Save Medicine in the Age of Information.”

The New Life of e-Patient Dave – Truly require reading for anyone in healthcare and technology.  One of our goals here at Virtuate would be to have e-Patient Dave do a few contributions.  We shall muster up our strength later.  Dave’s latest post here.

Through Dave above I found Dr. Ted Eytan‘s blog (where I went because this post interested me) and noticed we are using the same theme.  Since he was there first we will be looking for another themes soon (note at bottom of this post)… at least we know Dr. Eytan has good taste . More importantly you should read his definition of Health 2.0 which I am sure will be mentioned in one of our articles soon.

Quickly Now:

• Neil Versel – Healthcare IT Journalist with a blog.  Since he announced one of his gigs going away I wonder if he would consider writing for us?  Especially since he leans towards the productivity topic which is near and dear to where this blog wants to go.
• Health 2.0 Blog – A blog is for the whole Health2.0 Community as a space to write and to comment.
• The Doctor Weighs In – Written by five physicians.  Sample article: The Future of Health 2.0 Tools.
• The Future of Health IT – Could be summarized by saying its ‘like’ an aggregator that gives us a glimpse into the Long Tail of Healthcare IT (latest post).
• Health Populi – From a health economist and management consultant (sample post).
• Trusted MD – Hippocrates writes more on Health 2.0 which I am sure we will follow a lot of his links to get better acquainted with some of the players.  Some of his other posts show that not everything is hugs and kisses in the health 2.0 debate.  Nice. (BTW – there is a lot more on Trusted MD worth reading).
• HISTALK – Just imagine how much reading and work goes into a post like this one full of links and information.  Saves all of us time.

This is it for now.  Hope you find some of these links interesting.  Will work on the ABOUT page next and will send that email out to our coveted contributors.

A note on the design – You may have noticed the switch from the very elegant Carrington Theme to this  design.  We may go back to Carrington but there was dead link to the author pages that was creating some problems for Google so until we can figure it out we will stay with the current theme.  However don’t be surprised if the theme changes a few more times until we freeze it for a while.