Interesting piece on whether wireless technology, specifically WiFi, can be used by doctors and medical facilities to not only help improve patient care but also reduce errors such as incorrect prescriptions. The key here is that the medical industry, especially doctors, have to embrace the concept of using technology to help them do their jobs better, and not to do their jobs for them.

But doctors themselves have been a major obstacle to putting such systems in place. “Many of the systems that were available in the early days seemed to doctors to be slower and more cumbersome than simply handwriting a prescription,” says Suzanne Delbanco, executive director of the Leapfrog Group, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates computerized prescribing. Just last year Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center delayed a computerized prescribing system because doctors protested it was too time-consuming. For a system to work, physicians must embrace it. “If it’s not going to make life easier,” Chief Information Officer Stettheimer says, “I don’t want to put it out there.”

That’s where Wi-Fi could help. “It’s indispensable,” says Mark Maldia, an internist who has worked at St. Vincent’s since last July. At another hospital he might spend an hour running from floor to floor to get an X-ray. Now he can download it in five minutes. Lab results come across as soon as they’re ready, not hours later. And with his tablet PC, Maldia can show patients images of their broken bones or tumors. He can even compare new images to old ones. In March, Maldia became one of the first doctors at St. Vincent’s to begin prescribing drugs by computer. His verdict? “It could be the biggest time-saver yet.”