Intel unveils mobile clinical assistant platform

[Berri]

This is definitely looking more like scenes from StarTrek


Intel unveils mobile clinical assistant platform




Intel took the wraps off some of its latest handiwork yesterday. On Wednesday, Santa Clara-based Intel unveiled a computer technology for digitally recording patient vital signs, progress charts and prescription information. The technology also allows the information to be sent wirelessly to pharmacists, record keeping databases and other physicians who need to see it. The platform, dubbed the mobile clinical assistant, is designed to streamline the work-flow of doctors and nurses, letting them digitally record patient's vital signs, progress charts, and prescription information on specially-designed tablet PCs, and wirelessly transfer that information to pharmacists or anyone else that needs to check up on your vitals. Anything in the way of specific details are still pretty vague at the moment, but the first devices based on the platform are set to be developed by Motion Computing and introduced in the first half of 2007. Among the possibilities for the devices are RFID-scanning to identify patients (better pack that tinfoil hat for your next hospital visit), barcode scanning for prescriptions, and integrated digital cameras.


The mobile clinical assistant devices — the first of which will be produced next year by Motion Computing Inc. of Texas — would use such things as RFID, or radio frequency identification, technology to identify patients; bar code scanning to write and send prescriptions; and WiFi to send digital information to other practitioners or record keeping offices.

All of these could improve the accuracy and speed of information exchanged at medical facilities.

"To improve the quality of health care and staff work flow, the most critical task is to deliver the right information to the point of decision, which is most often at the patient's bedside," said Louis Burns, Intel vice president and general manager of its Digital Health Group.

Burns and Motion Computing Chief Executive Scott Eckert introduced the plans for the digital clinical assistant computer platform at Intel's Development Forum in San Francisco.

"This was a concept years ago, it's a pilot now and soon it will be a product," Burns said, noting that Motion Computing has "stepped up to the plate" to develop it into a real product.

Intel and Motion Computing interviewed scores of doctors and nurses and did hospital work flow studies at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View to develop the product.

Motion Computing makes small mobile personal computers known as "tablet PCs" tailored to specific industry uses such as sales, delivery services and health care.

Health care is one of a few industries remaining not to have its day-to-day processes automated.

While many sophisticated medical machines exist for diagnostic procedures and surgeries, technology has not much entered the routine doctor-patient, nurse-patient and office record keeping realms of medicine.

Burns noted that very often patients themselves are the ones who transport X-ray images between a lab and a physician.

And as patients go from generalist to specialist offices or to laboratories, they in many situations fill out the same paper forms over and over.


Burns said that interviews with doctors and nurses confirmed that interoperable computer record systems were sorely needed, and cited by doctors and nurses as a significant need.
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