Mobile

Many healthcare providers are nervous about using the cloud, but that may change soon, say industry analysts.

For nearly 2,000 care workers in Stockholm, a smart phone has become the most important tool in their daily operations. The goal is to make life easier for care workers and care providers and to give relatives access to various eServices that are provided via the city's website. City officials presented the solution in a World of Health IT session during the pan-European eHealth Week 2012 in Denmark.

Mobile health is poised to "explode" over the next decade, says Chad Udell, managing director of Float Mobile Learning, a mobile learning consulting, strategy and research firm based in Morton, Ill.

Chesapeake Regional Medical Center has rolled out a five-foot, automated disinfection robot named Tru-D (Total Room Ultraviolet Disinfection), part of a $2 million CDC grant awarded to Duke University for the prevention of healthcare-associated infections.

This past fall, as the academic year got under way, medical schools across the country, from Brown to Stanford, were tossing out heavy and expensive textbooks in favor of fully-loaded and interactive iPads. Now that spring is here, it's time for the iPad to graduate: moving out of the classroom and into the clinical setting.

HL7 – not just for IT anymore. That thinking is the catalyst behind a triptych of recent moves designed to open the standards process to more health professionals, notably caregivers.

Everyone in healthcare uses smartphones nowadays, but no one's quite sure what to do about them.

Epocrates officials were showing off an iPad version of their new electronic health record at the HIMSS12 Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas, Feb.20-24. The sleek, easy-to-use EHR app, which operated on screen touches rather than mouse clicks, seemed poised to make a splash in an ever-crowded field, which numbers more than 300 offerings at last count.

A new study from HIMSS Analytics and Kroll Advisory Solutions shows that, a diligent focus on security compliance notwithstanding, healthcare providers are still badly lacking when it comes to privacy protections. In fact, data breaches have only increased in recent years.

Intel Fellow Eric Dishman speaks with Healthcare IT News about the value of mobile health tools and personal health records -- and about the challenges and opportunities for more empowered patients.