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May 9, 2009Mobihealthnews, an online news site that chronicles the mobile revolution within the healthcare sector and tracks the rise of electronic health records, recently reported that Gartner analysts don’t see the HealthcareIT revolution centering around the emergence of wireless technologies, such as the recent applications may hospitals are adopting announced in a Computerworld report here.
Gartner analyst Wes Rischel says that these new wireless technologies are “incremental advancements”, and that the real revolution in HealthIT will likely come from elsewhere: “increased deployments of electronic medical records systems and the resulting improvements in data-sharing among organizations.”
“First, Rischel threw cold water on wireless health applications by pointing to the tepid uptake of RFID tracking for medical devices. Sure, they both use some form of wireless technology, but how does RFID’s uptake relate to the potential of a wireless blood pressure cuff or connected blood glucose monitor? It doesn’t.
“Next, Rischel said that technologies like the heart sensor patch that Dr. Eric Topol demonstrated at the CTIA conference are “incremental advances.” “The real revolution in health care IT, Rischel said, will likely come from something else: increased deployments of electronic medical records systems and the resulting improvements in data-sharing among organizations.”
“The federal government’s effort to encourage all physicians and hospital groups to deploy electronic medical records (EMRs) may one day come to fruition. I’m in the camp that believes it will. While the challenges for EMR interoperability are staggering, the end result will correct a massive problem of inefficiency. And it’s a long overdue correction.
“From a patient’s perspective, though, enabling different hospitals and clinics to share medical records is far from “revolutionary”. In fact, it’s more outrageous that the industry is still unable to do it fluidly. Sure, it will lead to better care for patients since all of their caretakers should have access to the same information leading to fewer repeated tests, fewer mistakes should follow and so on. That’s still just correcting problems, though.
“The healthcare revolution will be patient-centered, participatory health care — anytime and anywhere. Wireless cardiac sensors like the one Topol demonstrated last month will lead to improvements in data sharing — not just among organizations — but among patients and caregivers, too. That’s the mark of a new era, not just a more efficient version of the old one.”
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