Take Tunstall’s RTX3371 Wireless Telehealth Monitor, for example. The device just cleared the U.S. FDA and uses a slower GPRS cellular radio to receive and send data.

Vital signs are wirelessly collected from other compatible devices like weight scales and blood pressure units; the stats can then be forwarded on to doctors or hospitals by using the integrated cellular radio. As if that weren’t enough, the RTX3371 offers voice functionality for questionnaires on how a patient is feeling.

I still want to see this done by just one device… my smartphone.

Cell phones are now a common part of our everyday lives. But not
only is the technology taken for granted, its wide-reaching potential
is largely unrecognized. The technology that is found in cell phones
and PDAs is currently being applied to improve health services in developing countries.

The United Nations Foundation (UNF)
and Vodafone Foundation (VF) Technology Partnership is using mobile
health (mHealth) technology to support UN programs in developing
countries. Innovative mHealth projects are powering the collection of
health data, supporting diagnosis and treatment, and advancing
education and research in even the most remote and poverty stricken
environments.

In health care, time is of the essence. With
mobile technology, data can be quickly and accurately collected,
allowing health workers to coordinate their efforts and track the
success of health campaigns. This technology can also be used in
disaster and outbreak response, to track the spread of an epidemic in
real time. With the most up-to-date, easily accessible information and
communications, mHealth is revolutionizing healthcare delivery in much
of the developing world.

Read the rest here.

Physicians increasingly are discovering smartphones serve a purpose beyond being a convenient communication gadget.

It is good to hear.  As you know we are big proponents of the use of mobile technology for everything  … so it is always good to read research that supports our crazy ideas.   Some of the highlights:

Physicians are adopting mobile technology at a faster rate than the general public (54% of U.S. physicians now and by 2011 70%).

Drug references are the top function accessed by physicians… Other applications are also available (i.e. medical calculators, decision-support tools and electronic health records).

Use of mobile technology among physicians will increase EHR adoption.

Palm started the trend a while back (no idea of dates) when they offered their devices to medical students with select drug reference guides already loaded.  Initially and for quite some time, physicians in general, and for no better reason than pure familiarity were heavy Palm users.  At first, BlackBerry had a tough time breaking in with this group but began to trickle into their ranks after having won the hearts and minds of hospital management and administration.  The main reason for this can be summarized into two words: enterprise grade! Administrators, security folks and management all recognized the BlackBerry platform as being more secure, stable, easy to manage and reliable.

Unfortunately I don’t have access to the reports referenced in the above article by Manhattan Research or the Diffusion Group to see if adoption is broken down by device, however if the data is there I would assume a continuing decline on the Palm side and an upwards trend for BlackBerry usage.  If we look at physicians specifically I would have to say that this group would lean more towards the iPhone.  But again this is pure speculation from my view (from the ground up).

My conclusion: mobile devices are still being used by physicians as a personal productivity tool and are not  integrated into care giving processes to the extent that real and transformational value have been achieved.  There are pockets of success around but it is definitely not widespread.

Read the rest of the post at the American Medical News.