Mobihealthnews is reporting that the Veterans Administration is planning to launch an electronic health record app for the iPhone later this year.  The initial roll out will take place beginning this summer at the veteran’s medical center in Washington DC and will include up to 1,000 mobile devices, including iPhones and iPads at the DC-based centers.

According to the article the VA also plans on developing an EHR app for use on Android devices.

Allscripts announced the much-anticipated release of Allscripts Wand™, which provides users of Allscripts Electronic Health Records a unique, native iPad application that extends the most commonly used functions of Allscripts Professional™ and Enterprise™ solutions.

iPad™ use in healthcare is rising rapidly. A recent study in Archives of Internal Medicine found that iPad use in hospitals could reduce delays and improve continuity of patient care. And a poll of more than 5,000 physicians conducted by the Physicians Consulting Network revealed that 27 percent of primary care and specialty physicians own an iPad or similar device, a rate that is five times higher than the general population.

“Wand’s patient timeline enables me to see at-a-glance when and why patients last visited,” said Lisa Young, M.D., a physician with Pediatric Clinic LLC in Auburn, Alabama. “I can show patients lab trends that are easy to pull up and look elegant. And the quick view of immunizations is perfect for pediatrics.”

The latest in a long line of mobility innovations from Allscripts, Wand breaks new ground in its intuitive interface, which allows for ease of use with virtually no training, translating into a better physician experience. Allscripts developers employed Human Performance Modeling – the technique used by NASA to predict and improve pilot performance, to ensure that user input translated into the final product. The result is a streamlined workflow and quick access to information.

WAND provides clinicians the ability to:

• Review a chart quickly before entering the exam room
• Input real-time information like vitals and medications from the exam room
• Access EHR information after hours

“Wand is where we need to be. If we want to be paperless, and we do, we need to have something that’s quick and easy,” said Chantal Guidi, R.N., a nurse at USF Health in Tampa, Florida. “Now we don’t have to write patient vital signs on a piece of paper that could get lost, forcing us to go back and take the signs again.”

• Wand’s graphical interface and intuitive workflow enables clinicians to:
• View a timeline of key patient information such as lab results, medications, vitals, and more
• Review appointment lists and current patient status
• Retrieve patient data quickly, with drill-down access to details
• ePrescribe with electronic transmission to pharmacies
• Resolve tasks and respond to messages with a quick swipe of the screen

“The idea behind Allscripts Wand is to offer fast, easy access to the EHR features that clinicians use most,” said Stanley Crane, Chief Innovation Officer for Allscripts. “Our native iPad application delivers up-to-date tablet technology with a redesigned user experience into the hands of clinicians.”

Wand is available for users of Allscripts Professional and Enterprise Electronic Health Records. Users simply need to download the app from iTunes and install the necessary components from Allscripts. No on-site training is required. Interested media also can download the app to see features and functionality firsthand.

SwiftPayMD™ allows physicians to ‘Touch, Talk, and Submit’ billing data eliminating the need for paper-based billing cards and manual data entry. Charges are captured via voice, encrypted, and instantaneously delivered to the physician’s home billing department. The app features a template for physicians to follow and the ability to securely capture patient demographics from a wristband or face sheet with the smart phone camera. Using SwiftPayMDTM at the point of care ensures doctors get paid for 100% of the work they do, eliminates lost, damaged and illegible billing cards, and speeds up the process. Doctors get paid as much as 30 days sooner than when using a paper process.

“Physicians are losing a lot of revenue as a result of archaic paper-based billing processes still needed today to address the lack of communication between hospital information systems and private practice physician offices,” said David LaBorde, CEO and co-founder of Iconic Data. “The widespread adoption of mobile smart phones and tablet technologies has created a paradigm shift in medicine. SwiftPayMD™ helps physicians improve their practice’s financial performanceleveraging increasingly ubiquitous smart phone technology.”

SwiftPayMD™ is  available now from the Apple store for $99 per month. There are no upfront costs. Physicians subscribe and go live. No implementation or integration is needed. The solution works with any billing system and can be used with or without an electronic medical records system. The company is offering a 30-day free trial.

“Entrada’s key mission is to protect physician productivity before, during and after EHR adoption,” notes Bill Brown, CEO. “Our new app continues this promise by offering a mobile product that physicians love to use.”

Leveraging the simplicity and elegance of Apple’s touchscreen mobile interface, Entrada’s revolutionary new app replicates all of the functionality of an industry standard digital recorder or speechmike, such as Insert or Overwrite recording modes and the ability to put jobs on hold or designate them for stat-speed return. Also, with simple voice tags such as “Tag HPI” or “Tag Impression,” physicians can now verbally delineate between different portions of the note, which are automatically separated into unique sections utilizing Entrada’s groundbreaking ExpressNote™ technology and returned into individual narrative text fields within an EHR.

“The level of functionality and speed Entrada has achieved with their newest app is truly remarkable,” says Dr. William Edwards, general vascular surgeon at The Surgical Clinic in Nashville, TN. “With Entrada, I’m no longer tied to a workstation when dictating, and the added mobility and flexibility saves me significant time each week.”

Since the last release, Entrada has achieved even greater depths of integration with many practice management systems and EHRs, substantially accelerating the speeds at which the app can download changes to the physician’s daily schedule as well as sync audio dictations captured with the device back to Entrada’s data center. The app is now available through Apple’s app store.

Using electronic medical record (EMR) technology, the iPad application allows the Mercy Jets medical team to access important patient care information, easily identifying which procedures have been accomplished and what medications have been administered. This will increase the amount of time that the medical team can spend focusing directly on patient care while simultaneously reducing the possibility of misinterpretation by the receiving facility. Data can then be forwarded to the facility receiving the patient so that healthcare providers will have up-to-date information upon arrival.

“This enhances patient care continuity and eliminates the challenge of trying to decipher handwritten notes by care givers at the receiving end,” said John Bohn, president of Mercy Jets. “The automated system integrates nicely with our advanced medical equipment and allows us to ensure the best medical care in the industry.” With the testing phase soon to be complete, the Phoenix-based medical transportation company will integrate the iPad technology with patient care records on its medical transport flights.

SOURCE  Mercy Jets

“Force Mobile was created for consumers who want instant access to the best rehabilitation exercises. The application is easy to use and takes the guesswork out of preventive fitness training. It’s basically like having a physical therapist in your pocket.” says Bronwyn Spira, Chief Executive Officer of FORCE Therapeutics. A team of prominent physical therapists built the FORCE video library based on evidence-based best practices and years of clinical experience.  These high definition video exercises are easy to follow, promote proper technique and offer active consumers a first response solution to injury. The flexibility of FORCE Mobile enables users to custom tailor their exercise protocols and save them as favorites for instant replay.

Athletes care most about staying on the field, on the road and in the gym even as they get older.  “When injury strikes,” says co-Founder Mark Lieberman, “we want FORCE Mobile to be your instant aid — a virtual physical therapist. With a complete library of professional exercise videos created by leading PTs, the app provides immediate rehab solutions as well as direct access to top physical therapists and gear to get you back on your feet.”

FORCE Therapeutics was founded in 2010 by Bronwyn Spira, a veteran physical therapist with 20 years of clinical experience, and Mark Lieberman, a health media executive and serial technology entrepreneur.  FORCE Therapeutics designs and builds best in class, mobile applications for physical therapists and their patients.  Early success with FORCE TherEx, an all-in-one suite of online solutions for the professional market, gave birth to the launch of FORCE Mobile for consumers.

To download a free trail of FORCE Mobile go to the Apple store by clicking here or visit forcemobile.net for all platforms.

Image via CrunchBase

GE Healthcare and AirStrip Technologies have announced AirStrip PATIENT MONITORING^TM, which securely delivers patient monitoring information to critical-care physicians’ iPhones® and iPads.™ AirStrip helps physicians interact with, manipulate and zoom in on more than 100 clinical measurements and access physiologic data and monitoring waveforms, anytime and anywhere.

AirStrip PATIENT MONITORING is designed to help mobile physicians make efficient, informed clinical decisions across and beyond hospital boundaries. The technology adds to GE Healthcare and AirStrip Technologies’ initial joint offering, AirStrip CARDIOLOGY^TM, which provides cardiologists with digitally enhanced and comparative cardiac ECG data that can be accessed on iPads and iPhones.

Critical-care physicians must make timely treatment decisions for the hospital’s sickest patients. However, they face increasingly hectic patient care responsibilities, making it difficult to continuously be at the bedside. AirStrip PATIENT MONITORING can serve as an important clinical decision support tool and help expand physicians’ access to patient information. If a nurse requires immediate consultation, physicians can be located anywhere and access critical patient information before determining appropriate care approaches.

Clinicians are early adopters of many wireless devices. According to a Manhattan Research survey, 75 percent of U.S. physicians own some form of Apple device, such as an iPhone or iPad.¹

“As doctors increasingly use smartphones and tablets, GE Healthcare is committed to driving convergence between mobile technologies, biomedical devices and clinical information systems,” said Thierry Leclercq, general manager, Life Care Solutions, GE Healthcare. “AirStrip PATIENT MONITORING combines GE Healthcare’s clinical innovations and AirStrip’s powerful mobile health technologies. Empowering doctors with highly interactive patient monitoring information, when and where it is needed, supports physician decision-making and ultimately, patient safety and care.

Because physicians can directly view and zoom in on live clinical measurements, AirStrip PATIENT MONITORING offers physicians greater decision support than traditional mobile viewing applications which do not enable this level of interaction and provide only limited subsets of data.

AirStrip PATIENT MONITORING is a native application specifically designed for environments where mobile access to critical patient data is essential.

According to market research from RNCOS, physician adoption of mobile devices in healthcare is expected to reach 81-85 percent this year, heightening the need for intuitive, user-friendly healthcare applications that enhance clinicians’ experience, improve mobile workflow and lead to better patient care.  As part of the 2012 Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge, developers had access to the 360 | Development Platform (formerly the Nuance Healthcare Developer Program), which supports multiple devices and operating systems and enables developers to seamlessly and quickly embed Nuance’s SpeechAnywhere services into their healthcare applications.

“Through access to Nuance’s secure, cloud-based, medical speech recognition platform developers were challenged to give mobile clinicians a voice,” said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Healthcare.  “Developers stepped up to the challenge and delivered some truly innovative clinical applications including disease management tools, diagnosis checklist systems, physician-patient interaction and communication tools, and practice management apps that will help mobile clinicians research, access, create and share clinical information faster than ever before.”

Our judging panel (see panel participants detailed below) reviewed all submissions based on pre-defined judging criteria – including Innovation, Functional Implementation, Workflow and Patient Care Benefits, and Visual Appeal – and selected SparrowEDIS, developed by Montrue Technologies, Inc., as the grand prize winner.

SparrowEDIS is an emergency department information system for the iPad that allows doctors and nurses to dictate, through Nuance Healthcare-powered voice recognition technology, the clinical narrative at the point-of-care.  With the added layer of medical voice recognition, clinicians can also check for prescription interaction issues, create prescription orders, and share discharge instructions at the bedside all through voice, helping to streamline emergency medicine workflow and improve patient safety.  For more insight into the winning app from Montrue Technologies, please visit:  http://vimeo.com/35912556

“As an emergency doctor, I know access to the clinical narrative is crucial in enabling us to get a 360 degree view of a patient.  I also know that speech recognition is the best way to capture this narrative in its fullest form, and in the most efficient fashion,” says Brian Phelps, CEO and co-founder, Montrue Technologies, Inc.  “By speech-enabling our app, SparrowEDIS, on Nuance’s 360 | Development Platform we are able to capture the essence of the patient doctor relationship.”

Following grand prize recognition, first prize in Nuance’s Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge was awarded to healthcare application developer, Remedy Systems.  By speech-enabling their Deep Query Engine app, they’ve enabled physicians to interact and organize their practice via voice commands, much like a mobile, medical personal assistant.  Second prize was given to WholeSlide, Inc., a technology company that creates novel tools for image viewing and analysis, for their educational program app.  With WholeSlide’s voice-enabled app, clinicians and researchers are able to rapidly annotate regions of the apps hosted histology, hematology, and pathology data via spoken form to quickly share with colleagues.

“What was evident from the broad range of speech-driven mobile applications submitted as part of the Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge, is there’s a need for a more integrated approach to the development process and we’re just starting to see a smart focus on apps that are truly user-friendly for the medical community,” said Dr. Andres Jimenez, CEO, ImplementHIT.  ”As a practicing physician, and consultant working with large healthcare organizations to implement health IT, evaluating these new mobile apps from both perspectives helped me realize that speech-enabling apps will greatly facilitate adoption by healthcare providers.”

2012 Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge Judging Panel:

• Mr. HIStalk – Leading blog on hospital IT news, healthcare technology and healthcare industry trends
• Dr. Steven Zuber – CMIO, Methodist Health System
• Dr. Andres Jimenez – CEO, ImplementHIT
• Janet Dillione – EVP and General Manager, Nuance Healthcare
• Jonathon Dreyer – Senior Manager, Mobile Solutions Marketing, Nuance Healthcare

To learn more about Nuance’s 360 | Development Platform and to catch a live demo of the winning app, SparrowEDIS, please visit the Nuance booth #3523 at HIMSS on Wednesday, February 22 at 4:30 PM PST.

Networks hosting MacPractice can have a mix of Lion and Snow Leopard computers with MacPractice 4.1.3. This updated version of the software has been introduced to several hundred MacPractice clients over the past several months, and MacPractice is now offering the software to new users. Current users of earlier versions of MacPractice 4.1 will also receive an electronic alert over the coming weeks that MacPractice 4.1.3 is now available for download.

In addition to the added Lion compatibility, MacPractice 4.1.3 features payment plans and an ordering system, which have been added to the core products and will benefit all users. Many additional features have been added throughout MacPractice 4.1 as it has evolved to 4.1.3 including responses to suggestions from MacPractice’s 26,000 users representing 11,000 providers.

“With the release of Lion a few months ago, it became our priority to make our unique line of products compatible,” said Mark Hollis, President of MacPractice. “MacPractice strives to be on the cutting edge of technology and innovation, so we constantly develop our products to best meet the evolving needs of our clients. We are already working on the next update to MacPractice, which we expect to release in December.”

A minimum of 4GB of RAM is required to operate MacPractice with Lion. 4GB of RAM is also recommended for optimal use of MacPractice on a terminal with Snow Leopard.

MacPractice leverages Apple’s legendary ease of use, stability and low-cost maintenance to create affordable, intuitive and flexible Mac-native software for doctors. The software, currently used in 3,800 practices, combines a low-cost, highly customizable and flexible ONC-ATCB 2011-2012 Certified EHR/EMR solution with practice management tools in an easy-to-use, intuitive system that can improve patient care, efficiency and productivity.

Unique to the iPad offering is the ability to capture data to a web-based solution even without connectivity and upload when connectivity is present. Clinicians are able to receive updates to forms on the iPad as they become available without the need to sync a device on a daily basis, and entire patient records are no longer required to be downloaded to the device before making visits for the day, greatly minimizing HIPAA exposure.

Jeff Brittain, CTO said “What makes our iPad application unique is that we took our approach to capturing clinical information in the field and applied it to a true iPad application. This application allows a clinician to work offline as well as online using current forms and formats familiar to them, not requiring a constant internet connection like some EMR vendors. This approach leverages true HTML5 language allowing us to also to provide support to standard laptop clients as well as future support for Android devices.”