First-year residents at Duke University Hospital have been given PDAs loaded with software from PatientKeeper, a Boston-based company with which the University recently entered into a partnership. As a result, caregivers have immedidate, wireless access to patient data and allows greater attentiveness to their needs.

The FDA has given the approval to RTX Healthcare to market its Wireless Telehealth Gateway product, designed for home monitoring, e-health, and remote disease management applications.

No surprise here, but here’s more evidence of WiFi becoming more of a necessity, not a luxury, in the healthcare industry. A new report from The FocalPoint Group provides the details.

If you or your company have an interest in wireless sensing technology, which is finding uses in the manufacturing, healthcare, defense, and homeland security sectors, the Wireless Sensing Solutions Conference will take place this September 21-22 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois.

Some of the more notable sessions include:

• An Overview of 802.15.4 and ZigBee
• Wireless Sensor Networking: The Future is Now
• The Role of Wireless in Homeland Security
• Wireless Applications within the Healthcare Industry
• Smart Homes: Bring Wireless Sensors to the Residence
• RFID and Embedded Sensors: Deployment, Priorities, Potential and Paranoia

Click on the Related Links below for registration information.

(Thanks to the 802.11 Report!)

The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration announced it will be distributing an additional 2,000 PDAs to Medicaid physicians throughout the state.

This deployment will increase the number of physicians using the PDAs distributed by ACHA to 3,000. The effort is designed to reduce fraud, enhance patient safety by providing real-time data and drive down medication costs by better utilization of prescriptions.

The PDAs access Medicaid’s preferred drug list, patient-specific prescription histories, clinical pharmacology drug information and drug interaction screening tools.

The system also provides a 60-day history of all Medicaid drugs dispensed to a specific patient regardless of prescriber, which allows physicians to better monitor patient medications.

The recent death of President Reagan has brought much attention to Alzheimer’s Disease, including its symptoms and the emotional and physical toll it heaps on patients and their families. New studies are underway to combat the disease, and Mrs. Reagan has been staunchly behind stem cell research in order to diminish its effects.

Here’s news of a trial about to begin in Portland, Oregon and Las Vegas that uses wireless networks, along with RFID tags and sensors, to help those stricken with the disease lead more productive lives at home. Intel is leading the effort through its research arm, Proactive Health Research.

RFID tags are placed on items such as teacups, plates, and cabinet doors to monitor routine tasks and determine if a patient is having difficulty. Quarter-size motes, tiny wireless computers, connect disparate sensors embedded around the room. The motes contain tiny processors that gather and transmit the data to a central PC. If the system detects trouble, it will communicate wirelessly with a nearby digital device that can use a PC, television, radio, or cell phone to provide step-by-step audio and visual assistance from doctors or caregivers if required.

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.”

A new report out of England states that when mobile phone subscribers have the ability to interact/communicate with other wireless devices, especially those operated by healthcare providers, all parties will benefit greatly. Here’s an example that paints a very vivid picture:

Unlike a fixed line service, a mobile phone usually has just one unique user who keeps the handset within reach throughout the day. A mobile phone, therefore, would make an ideal gateway between a range of wireless monitoring devices and a GSM or GPRS network. The report identifies technologies - such as wireless enabled scales and blood pressure monitors - that are essential for a mobile patient monitoring services. Health monitoring services would be used to monitor compliance with diets and healthcare plans and gather data prior to a patient’s visit to their GP.