October 3rd, 2011 by Medgadget in News
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Sleep tracking company Zeo has announced today that they’ll soon be selling a mobile version of their product, compatible with both iOS and Android. The company previously only offered what amounted to a base-station clock with a sleep monitoring headband. Together they tracked your sleep patterns, including Light, Deep, and REM, but in the process the data got a bit trapped in their clock. To upload sleep data to the web for easier analysis, users had to pull an SD card out of the clock, plug it to a computer, and complete the upload. This step presented a pretty high barrier to learning about your personal sleep.
The mobile version solves this Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
October 2nd, 2011 by DeborahSchwarzRPA in News
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Ventricular Assist Devices (VADs) are small pumps that take over the work of the heart in pumping the blood through the body. Patients who need a heart transplant, but for whom there is no donor heart available, might be given a VAD for what’s called a bridge-to-transplant while they wait for a donor.
PediMag, the pediatric version of the adult device, CentriMag, is an external device designed for short-term use in infants with heart failure. PediMag can also be used to support children after heart transplant surgery if they experience organ rejection and need time for their hearts to rest and heal, according to Jonathan M. Chen, MD, Surgical Director of Pediatric Heart Transplantation at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York. Dr. Chen has extensive experience treating children with heart failure and has recently authored an account of his first successful use of the PediMag as a biventricular bridge-to-transplant in an infant.
The PediMag ventricular assist device is Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Columbia University Department of Surgery Blog*
August 18th, 2011 by DrWes in Opinion
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With the explosion of medical devices to treat various medical ailments in medicine, we have seen significant improvements in quality and quantity of life. An underappreciated consequence of all of these electronic device therapies, however, has been the manpower and expertise required to manage these implanted electronic medical devices long-term.
Problems with electromagnetic interference (EMI) with medical devices are real. Innovations in medicine have come from various portions of the electromagnetic spectrum including analog and digital wireless technology, diagnostic and therapeutic radiation therapy and magnetic resonance imaging. The effects of these technologies on implanted electronic medical devices can vary and specialty physicians, ancillary health care providers, and medical device manufacturers expend significant man-hours managing these potential interference sources and their affects on devices without a single prospective randomized trial to guide us. The sheer number of devices and the many ways that EMI can interfere with these complex devices makes constructing an all-inclusive trial with sufficient number of “events” to compare difficult or nearly impossible. As a result, most of our management recommendations and hospital policies in this regard have been based from literature case reports or personal experience and expertise.
To date, recommendations for minimizing EMI with cardiac implantable electronic devices has Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
August 15th, 2011 by Lucy Hornstein, M.D. in Opinion
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Seven months into 2011, things look very different than they did this time last year at my office. Not only have I been using an electronic medical record for nine months now, but I’ve also been submitting claims electronically (through a free clearinghouse) using an online practice management system. I’ve also begun scanning patients’ insurance cards into the computer, as well as converting all the paper insurance Explanation of Benefits (EOBs) into digital form. I’ve even scanned all my office bills and business paperwork and tossed all the actual paper into one big box. As of the first of the year I even stopped generating “daysheets” at the end of work each day. After all, with my new system I can always call up the information I want whenever I need it.
How did such a committed papyrophile get to this point? It is the culmination of a process that actually began last summer with the purchase of an adorable refurbished little desktop scanner from Woot ($79.99, retails for $199, such a deal!) The organizational software is useless for my purposes, but it does generate OCR PDFs, which makes copying and pasting ID numbers from insurance cards into wherever else they need to be a piece of proverbial cake. The first step was to start Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Dinosaur*
August 13th, 2011 by Iltifat Husain, M.D. in News, Opinion
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Great blog piece in Forbes by Tom Gillis — VP of Cisco’s Security Technology Business Unit — on how hospital Chief Security Officers (CSOs) are having issues with managing physician use of mobile devices at work. He had dinner with the CSOs of five major healthcare providers, who stated their biggest headache is how Doctors love their iPads and want to use them for work.
Gillis is in the business of enterprise security, and he gives an insider’s perspective on mobile device use in the hospital setting. He writes about the fundamental shift in how physicians are consuming content. Before the proliferation of mobile devices, hospitals had complete control of managing the “endpoint” — how the content was consumed. This is no longer the case, and since these personal devices have created a new paradigm, IT teams are left playing catchup.
It was refreshing to hear Gillis talk about how the solution Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
