PatientKeeper and NextGate form partnership for Health Information Exchange. Under the partnership, PatientKeeper will offer NextGate’s Enterprise Master Patient Index solution as an option for its customers. NextGate’s MatchMetrix™ Suite for EMPI will connect with the PatientKeeper Platform™ to provide a single view of patient information to enhance PatientKeeper’s Health Information Exchange (HIE) capabilities… Paul Brient discusses PatientKeeper’s HIE rationale in a recent interview.

Healthy Travel Media announces world’s first mobile app for medical tourism. Publishers of the Patients Beyond Borders series is developing the HealthTraveler iPhone app. The application will allow patients and international travelers to quickly find the highest-quality, American-accredited hospitals and clinics in the world’s 50 most-traveled tourist destinations. HealthTraveler is expected to be released in the Fall of 2010… What? In the Fall? We’ll all be using iPads by then. Is this what it takes now to claim a “first” in the iPhone app race? Well, at least they have their app icon.

3M Mobile Dictation runs on iPhone. 3M Health Information Systems announces the release of 3M Mobile Dictation on the iPhone platform. 3M Mobile Dictation for Blackberry and Windows Mobile smartphones was previously announced back in December.

Hospitalists at Beth Israel Deaconess Healthcare choose MedAptus for point-of-care charge capture. BIDHC, a network of primary care physicians, will roll-out the web-based version of MedAptus’ Inpatient Edition at three area hospitals…For anyone not familiar with the company, MedAptus is one of the original pure-play mobile charge capture companies like PatientKeeper. Over the years, the company has remained tightly focused on providing charge capture and intelligent coding solutions to large ambulatory and inpatient-based practices. Congrats on the win!

Epocrates launches beta version of its software for Android devices, and then in quick succession announces a beta version for the Palm webOS platform… So, either the order of the releases is a statement about Epocrates’ view of relative importance or (what I believe to be the case) the two different development teams raced to see who could get a beta version out first. By my reckoning, the Palm webOS team is buying pizza and beer for the Android team on Friday night somewhere in San Mateo. Stay tuned for the results of which team had the fewer bugs.

And what about AT&T? The success of the iPhone and the never-ending supply of new applications has taken its toll. We’re all familiar with the grilling AT&T has taken for poor network performance. Stop the presses! AT&T roars back in PCWorld’s second 3G wireless performance test. After registering the lowest average download speeds in PCWorld’s 3G performance tests last spring, AT&T’s network turned in download speeds that were 84 percent better than the numbers from eight months ago. Even more, AT&T’s latest download speeds were 67 percent faster on average than those of the other three largest U.S. wireless providers – Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon… Just in time for the iPad.

Speaking of network performance testing… VeriWave launches “Mobile Healthcare Test Suite” to maximize performance, and minimize risks of WiFi deployments. The Mobile Healthcare Test Suite is the first unified solution addressing performance, interoperability and onsite testing throughout development and deployment. The suite includes: WaveClient, for performance testing of WiFi-enabled devices and the network; WaveInsight, for device interoperability testing; Interference Detection and Avoidance; and the Healthcare Master Test Plan.

Voalté launches point-of-care solution for Blackberry smartphones. The Voalté One application, originally developed for the iPhone platform, now enables users to send and receive text messages, make voice calls, and receive critical care alarms on BlackBerry devices… I’m pretty interested to see the HIMSS’10 Interoperability Showcase.  Among a bunch of cool demonstrations, Philips will be showing off the Emergin alert management platform interfacing with Voalté One for the iPhone. I’ll let you know what I think.

Speaking of integration, Vocera will be demonstrating how some of their communication devices integrate with key workflow solutions, including PatientKeeper, Epocrates, AirStrip and AeroScout. It looks like the race is on for the perfect unified mobile communication platform.

Patient Care Technology Systems announces the availability of auto-ID hand hygiene monitoring system. The Amelior 360° Hand Hygiene solution uses real-time locating system (RTLS) technology, disinfectant dispenser attachments and PCTS’ dynamic tracking and workflow automation engine to automatically and continuously monitor staff members’ compliance with defined hygiene and infection protocols… Pretty slick use of multiple technologies to monitor a serious problem. Now if they could just extend this to daycares and elementary schools.

My next post will be from Atlanta, HIMSS’10. I make no promises, but I will try to post every night, no matter how scattered and non-sensical my thoughts are after a marathon of product demos and interviews. Can’t wait!

Paul Brient is President and CEO of PatientKeeper

How does PatientKeeper help organizations achieve meaningful use?

The evolution of PatientKeeper has been very much about automating a day in the life of a physician. We got started much like MercuryMD did, although we started on the charge capture side, which is a small piece of what physicians do. Over the last 10 years we have built applications that support just about everything that a physician does.

Before the ARRA was passed and meaningful use was defined, the one product area we had not taken on was physician order entry. Now, with the definition of meaningful use and the acceleration of that market – or at least the proposed acceleration of that market – we have gone full force into building a CPOE solution which we actually had already designed and had “in our back pocket”. We raised a bunch of money and are going forward with building it. We signed our first customer and hopefully we will sign several more before HIMSS. We will be deploying it in the October-November time-frame.

So, the short answer is about 80 percent of the meaningful use measures are physician-facing; that is they require the physicians to do something; to use it. We will supply our clients with the ability to meet all of those physician-facing requirements of meaningful use.

I know that if you were to go in and run reports showing the frequency of direct physician interaction with legacy systems in the HIS environment, a lot of vendors – not to mention hospital CIOs – would be very embarrassed.

Yes they would. We have run those in fact. It’s a small number.

Clearly, the meaningful use criteria require direct clinician interaction, and ultimately adoption of the technology. If you told me that your adoption rates were 3 or 4 times greater than those legacy systems, I would think you were being extremely conservative. Having said that, how do you build a business model around being the "adoption layer" of technology?

Well, we’re more than the adoption layer. We now have 12 different applications. With CPOE we’ll have 13. We are fundamentally all about technology that supports physician workflow.

It isn’t just about looking at results, or just about trying to expose legacy systems in clever ways. We have a full stack of applications that do all of the functions that meaningful use requires. Now, CPOE is obviously about physicians putting in orders. We push those back to a back-end system, but the full order workflow for physicians and their supporting staff like nurses and ward clerks is all in the PatientKeeper system.

This is quite similar to our sign-out product, which is a little more straightforward. That’s an application that mostly stays in PatientKeeper to keep it distinct from the legal medical record. Sign-out is a proper application with business logic, and all that good stuff, that automates the sign-out process between physicians.

So, our business model is very much around selling applications to hospitals and enabling them to meet meaningful use criteria.

You know, you first have to get physician adoption, and most hospitals are still struggling to get doctors to use any technology. We’ve been very successful at getting adoption rates into the 70-80-90 percent rate, which is well more than double what the current HIS system has. Then, we also add to that functionality; for example, active problem list management. We have a problem list application which many organizations don’t have. Forget about the fact that the physicians wouldn’t use it if it were part of the core system – because they’re not using the core system – it’s not even available.

We add net application functionality. We look very much like – I won’t say a traditional application vendor because our technology approach and the fact that we’re a layer on “top of” is a little unique – but we sell software and create a tremendous amount of value for our clients. If you think of being able to meet meaningful use requirements without ripping and replacing your existing systems, to do so for a fraction of the cost of going out and buying a new system- in a half or a third of the time – then that’s a lot of value creation. So, we’re pretty excited about that.

Is it typically assumed by a hospital that their CPOE system is going to be provided by their core system, or are they attuned to the fact that no, they’re not going to get it from Cerner, or McKesson, or whoever it might be and that they need to talk to PatientKeeper?

Well, traditionally there really was only one choice. You had to buy a core system in order to get CPOE, and you got it from the core vendor. Obviously, given the adoption rates of core systems – and even worse, the adoption rates of CPOE, especially in the community setting, which are very low, single digits – that hasn’t been a very successful strategy.

I think we are one of the only… I’m sure HIMSS will tell us whether there are others that are approaching it this way. There aren’t any other systems that I know of that allow you to buy CPOE as an application to run on top of your current core system.

We think it is very important to decouple those two because you’re talking about automating physicians and not automating hospitals. So, let’s automate the physician. Obviously we have to send that data to the hospital system so they can fill the orders and do all that workflow, but that’s a well established workflow and if you try to just expose that to the doctors, it doesn’t work for the doctors. The doctors don’t use it. It’s really not going to help you on the meaningful use criteria since they were clever enough to say that meaningful use means people really use it, and not that you just have it.

It is not something that if you call up 100 CIOs, they’re going to go: “Oh, yeah, we have these two options. We can buy an add-on physician workflow, CPOE system or we can go to our core vendor.” Part of our big push at HIMSS is very much to let people know that we’re an option.

Maybe we’re not the right option for everybody, but we’re certainly at least worth thinking through as an option to, you know: “I’m a Meditech shop. I can either try to deploy Meditech Magic POM – which we know doesn’t work. I can try to upgrade to Meditech 6.0 – which might work. Or, I can rip it out and put in a Cerner or a McKesson – which several of those systems haven’t worked terribly well either.”

We’re all about an alternative. Here’s a different approach. Our CPOE product is not just a “me-too” product. It was designed for community physicians and based on a whole bunch of design principles that in some ways fly in the face of what a lot of traditional, more academic medical center- based CPOE systems do.

Do you have confidence that when the dust settles, meaningful use will be based on actual clinical adoption and not simply whether an organization purchased the prescribed laundry list of certified systems?

Certainly they’re going about it in the right way. The stage one criteria for CPOE is very much around 10 percent of the orders have to be put in directly by doctors. The government originally thought phase two would be a hundred percent, but they’ve signaled that they are backing off of that.

Let’s say its 50 or 60 percent. You and I both know that around the country in community settings, well less than 50 percent of physicians ever sign in to the core HIS system. Well less… like 10 percent. You look at the 10 percent hurdle and you go, I can probably somehow get there. That’s not a very big hurdle.

But, if it get’s anywhere north of that these systems aren’t going to support it unless they do something radical with their doctors, which in a community setting, you don’t have a lot of levers to pull. Doctors aren’t getting paid to do it. They’re voluntary physicians. In the academic world, or if you’ve employed all of your doctors, you can have a different argument. In the community world, it’s a non-starter.

We’ve got a lot of clients that have tried CPOE and have failed miserably. Just doing it again, now because the government said so, isn’t really going to produce a different result, right? We are very confident, first off that our CPOE will save doctors time, so they’ll want to use it. At the end of the day, if you’re going to give me some technology and it doesn’t save me any time, and doesn’t benefit me, why would I use it? And, that’s kind of what the old CPOE strategy is – well, it’s maybe time-neutral, at best, and it really isn’t.

What if I gave you a CPOE product that cut your rounding time in half? Now would you use it? So far the answer from the doctors that we’ve engaged in with our product is “Absolutely, thank God.”  What we are doing is a big change. It’s a significant departure from the approaches in the past. We’re all about that non-employed physician in the community that maybe goes to a couple of hospitals, who’s trying to make a living in an increasingly difficult-world. Slowing them down is just a non-starter.

I understand that you have been fairly involved with HIE through the PatientKeeper Community Connector solution that you offer. How important is HIE to PatientKeeper’s overall strategy?

Our approach to HIE, in some ways, is philosophically similar to the approach of the rest of our applications, which is “let’s make sure that we solve a problem with HIE that helps the physician”. So many HIE efforts have failed, just look at what happened in California and many other parts of the country.  Even where people have been successful with building an HIE or RHIO or a CHIN, or whatever you want to call it, physicians don’t really use it because it is separate from their core workflow. 

Our approach to HIE certainly involves exchanging clinical data –we do that all the time, so that’s not a big technological challenge for us. The real question is how do you do that in a way that is meaningful to the doctors and doesn’t slow them down and works in the context of their workflow.   Consequently, we prefer to work on HIE projects that are at the community level, where you have a couple of hospitals and the physicians in the community and start moving data there. Since most of the care that people receive is in their community this has most relevance and the most impact.

To the extent that people want to build HIEs that connect the country and allow me to go to Colorado and break my leg and get my medical records – that’s great. That’s useful to the patient, and will be useful to whatever doctor saw me down there, too. We, PatientKeeper, don’t necessarily want to play in that world, per se.

At PatientKeeper we are much more about connecting communities. We’re doing that in most of the places where we have clients. So, it really depends on how you define HIE. On almost every deployment that we do, we’re connecting something to something, and increasingly we’re focused on connecting EMRs as more and more physicians get EMRs.  One of the unexpected challenges we encountered is that we are finding that a lot of the EMR systems that are in production can’t connect. Physicians have to upgrade to the latest version or a version that’s coming out in 3 or 4 months before they can really plug-in nicely into the HIE world.

What is your view of a sustainable HIE? What is a business model that will work?

One of the things I like to remind our company is the simple fact that if our customers have no business model, we have no business model. So with much of the HIE activity (and the CHIN and RHIOs before them), one has to ask what problem are you solving? And it’s really expensive to solve the problem of – I go to Colorado skiing and break my leg and a physician can get my medical records. Is it really that useful? The doctor still has to take an H&P. It’s hard to really get excited about that as a way to spend billions of dollars, and operate a big enterprise.

Our company’s stance is – and I feel this same way personally – that we’re reasonably skeptical of what we call “standalone” HIEs. You know, go build an organization, go try to put all of this data in one place, and then ask people to go look at it – because I don’t think that solves enough of a problem to create any economic value for anyone to pay for it. Almost all of them have been funded through grants, which are one time grants. The grant runs out, and now you go out of business.

We’re more excited, though… at the local level, there really is value. That’s where most of the patients are – obviously if you’re in a community – and where most of the healthcare is delivered. There’s a lot of need for moving data around and understanding what medications people have, and just the simple thing of, if I do a referral to somebody, it’d be nice to do it electronically. So, there is some real value that is created locally.

The problem still remains – who pays for it? Where we’re seeing some good traction and some sustainability is where someone’s deployed our technology – and once you deploy either our Web product or our portal, or our handheld products, or both –they’ve solved all of these integration challenges that are in many ways the same integration challenges that you would solve in an HIE. A lot of our customers are saying, “Didn’t we already do this? And, if we just agree to work with the hospital across town, or with these 5 large practices and have them just link in, and do the integration just one more time for small dollars, don’t we have an HIE?”

And the answer is – Yes. I don’t know what the definitions out there are, officially. Someone out there might say, “No, it doesn’t count.” But it solves a lot of problems, and it doesn’t really cost anything more. You put it on the same servers, and it’s some incremental services work to do the integrations, which in some ways, in the outpatient world are significantly easier than in the inpatient world. It’s not even a particularly challenging problem technologically. It’s more operationally and politically getting everyone to agree. Once you get everyone to agree to do it, it’s pretty straight forward. Then, you do it in the context of something that’s already there. The incremental cost is low and the value is high. You know, it’s not going to change the world – but it’s kind of nice if I’m a doctor and I’m using a PatientKeeper system and I can whip out my iPhone when I get a new patient and I can see their meds and allergies from the other doctors in the community.

You know, that’s actually useful. Still have to take an H&P, so I don’t really save any time, per se, but it’s a more accurate H&P. If a patient comes in and says, “Yeah, I’m on 3 medications… the blue one. And, what’s the red one I take?” If you get those kinds of things, you’re going to be in trouble. With an HIE you’re able to solve that problem and make sure you don’t create any more problems for the patient.

One of the other big bonus things about this is – there’s a lot of drug-seeking behavior out there – and the HIE really nails that. Depending on what kind of physician you are, that can be a consideration in your practice. It takes a lot of the stress out of that, if you pull someone up and say, “Oh, geez, you’ve had Oxycontin from six different providers in the last six months.” And the patient’s presenting with some weird symptoms, you can feel confident about saying this person has drug-seeking behavior, and send them along. They don’t talk a lot about that, but it’s one of the things we’ve seen that is of real value.

I’d really love to see vendors, who are in the position of putting together HIEs, go the opposite direction of traditional – “guess what, now that’s our data; let’s lock it up” – and instead find a way to serve that up and to lend their platforms to actual application developers, to foster more rapid development of high-value applications. Do you see an opportunity to open up access to some of that information so that other, next-in-line developers now don’t have to go through that same integration learning curve?

It’s a really interesting question. I think it’s a great idea. The thing that I struggle with a little bit on all of this is the potential value lit up against all of the privacy and security regulations that are being put in place.

As you know, HIPAA was just re-tightened and we’re going through various audits and making sure that we are compliant with everything for our clients. It would be really great to get some guidance around this. Certainly from a technology perspective, given our architecture, opening up access to all the data in our system to third parties would not be difficult and I think others are in the same boat.  But if I went to one of our clients and said, “Hey, I know you put all your clinical data in our system, wouldn’t it be great if we could expose that data (obviously de-identified) to a bunch of people so they could do some analysis and research on it and learn stuff?”

I think there would be a crater in the ground when their compliance department heard about that. Whereas, if we get the government to say, “Hey, look, as long as you aggregate and de-identify the data this specified way, you can publish this data all you want.” That, I think, would be really powerful.

Other than a handful of new contracts, what would make HIMSS ‘10 a successful event for PatientKeeper?

HIMSS 2010 is all about ensuring that community hospitals understand that they have an “an alternative path” to achieving meaningful use – that doesn’t involve ripping and replacing their core IT system. We’re trying to have some fun with this message and you’ll see some brightly colored vehicles around Atlanta offering to provide an alternative path from local hotels to HIMSS. So I’m hoping that we can at least help with HIMSS logistics if nothing else.

Any final thoughts?

I have spent my career in the Healthcare IT space and I can say without question that this is the most exciting and challenging time to be in the industry. We have the opportunity to dramatically expand the scope of IT use in healthcare but also improve its ultimate impact on physicians, nurses, and of course, patients.

The iPad is dead. Long live the iPad.

By the UI Guy

Is the Apple iPad dead in the water – where healthcare’s concerned – before it’s even available? From all the mudslinging directed at Steve Jobs’s latest portable offering, you would think so. Much criticism has been leveled at Apple for failing to enable multitasking on the iPad. That’s fair comment with regard to the increasingly short attention span of the typical home user, who’s used to having instant and concurrent access to multiple applications at once, and flitting between them without spending more than a few minutes in each.

However, when it comes to the medical community, this supposed limitation could actually be a blessing. If a facility is giving its resident and attending physicians on-the-go-access to real-time patient chart data on the iPad, surely administrators want them to concentrate on this information. It would be less than desirable for a doctor to be checking e-mail, sending a tweet or updating a social media profile while he or she was supposed to be working on delivering the best possible care outcomes. The lack of a multitasking capability actually creates a more focused user experience for physicians, nurses and other clinicians, which in turn can positively impact patient care and service.

Then we come to another bugaboo with the iPad – no stylus. The visionaries in Cupertino have copped more flak for this omission than any other, with the possible exception of the Flash support (or rather, the lack thereof) debacle. For hospitals, this does put Apple at a disadvantage when going head to head against tablets that support digital ink and pen-like input. There is also a usability issue, in that e-ink enabled tablets have a very small learning curve with clinicians due to the replication and enhancement of the familiar pen and writing surface experience.

The way the blogosphere has been lighting up over the stylus issue, you’d think that Steve Jobs got to the day of the unveiling and said, “Hey guys, looks great but you forgot the pen.” No. Apple doesn’t do things by accident, nor (with the exception of that escalating Flash debacle/war with Adobe and caving-in on the two-button mouse) do they leave out required functionality. Most people initially thought the click wheel on the iPod was crazy because there were no buttons, and many (Apple employees included) believed the app store was a mere sideshow. Those theories didn’t work out too well for the skeptics, did they?

It’ll be the same with the stylus. Either app developers will innovate because of its absence, or, if Apple recognizes a need, it will release such a thing. This is a Bluetooth-enabled device, so what’s to stop Griffin and other third party accessory developers from coming up with a Bluetooth stylus? In fact, TenOne is already halfway there with its Pogo. The Apple accessory market can also come up with screen covers to withstand medical sanitation, splashes and the other day-to-day hazards of the hospital environment. For instance, impact-resistant cases are already available. Check two more complaints off the list.

Going back to the software issue, developers of iPad applications will undoubtedly find ways to change their UIs to accommodate Apple’s unique interaction model. This will likely manifest itself as a lot of movement-focused tasks that allow physicians to take advantage of the patented multi-touch gestures exclusive to the iPad. Use cases are unlimited for patient education. A physician could, for example, pull up a diagram of the heart and manipulate it with touch gestures and by rotating the device to the preferred viewing angle, taking advantage of the iPad’s accelerometer. This would help the doctor explain a patient’s condition in a clearer and more engaging fashion than with a piece of paper.

Steve Jobs and his cohorts would’ve made it a lot easier on themselves if they’d included every feature the public demanded: camera, multitasking, stylus input, Flash support and so on. But the genius of Jobs has always been about the degree of difficulty. While everyone else is doing predictable tricks, Apple is making Shaun White like moves (check out McTwist 1260). And, just as we saw with White at the Winter Olympics – he who dares the extraordinary, risks falling, but also risks winning extraordinarily. Just gotta stick the landing.

Apple’s vision eclipses the desires of the mainstream and moves consumer technology in innovative directions. Yes, there is some reason for skepticism about the iPad’s impact on healthcare, but Apple did not release the product on a whim, nor will it be adverse to making significant changes to future versions (and maybe even reluctantly giving us that elusive stylus, and a more rugged housing designed for hospital use). The combination of Apple’s couldn’t-be-simpler (and sharply focused) user interface, commitment from an ever-growing app developer base, and the potential for future advances (think how far the iPod has come) mean that the iPad is here to stay in healthcare.

 

Thank you to UI Guy for kicking off HIStalk Mobile’s Readers Write. I welcome all comers. Please feel free to submit your own articles up to 500 words in length. The only requirements are that the article be original (as in not previously published elsewhere), and thought/opinion pieces and not thinly veiled advertisements.

First off, thanks to everyone who has registered their company with the HIStalk Mobile Resource Guide. If you haven’t done so yet, please take a couple minutes to fill out the registration form.

There’s a great interview over on HIStalk with Cameron Powell, MD, of AirStrip Technologies.

On to the news…

Vodaphone releases ‘world’s cheapest phone’. UK-based cellular operator Vodaphone unveiled the VF 150 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this past week. The VF 150 costs less than $15 and is aimed at the developing world. It will initially be launched in India, Turkey, and eight African countries including Kenya and Ghana. The UN expects global cell phone ownership to reach 5 billion in 2010, with the developing world accounting for the most growth. According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the need to access banking and mobile health services is driving demand.

 

Orange joins mHealth Alliance. Orange Healthcare, the healthcare division of France Telecom’s Orange brand, is joining the mHealth Alliance – a partnership which leverages rapid advances in mobile technology to improve public health, healthcare systems and patient care in the developing world. Orange Healthcare will begin working with the mHealth Alliance on projects focused in West Africa.

iSoft announces Lorenzo for the iPhone. Australia-based iSoft will be releasing a prototype iPhone app later this year that will allow healthcare providers using iSoft’s Lorenzo health information platform to access scans, x-rays, and patients’ records. The app will also allow nurses to directly enter basic patient information including vitals.

Dataline Software announces free SNOMED browser for the iPhone.  The Brighton, UK-based software company – developers of the free, online Snoflake SNOMED CT browser – will be releasing a mobile version of the browser for the iPhone, called Snomobile [I love it!], on February 26th. The Snomobile browser uses a variety of techniques to find, sort and retrieve codes, including ‘fast find’ functionality allowing text and code search, with full detail pages.

And how long has this been in the making?… Skype and Verizon Wireless announce strategic alliance. The partnership will bring Skype to Verizon Wireless smartphones beginning in March. Verizon Wireless 3G smartphone users with data plans will be able to use Skype to: make unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls to any Skype user around the globe; call international phone numbers at competitive Skype Out rates; send and receive instant messages; and, remain always connected with the ability to see friends’ online presence.

Many thanks to 3M Health Information Systems for joining the ranks of HIStalk Mobile’s Founding Sponsors. 3M Health Information Systems delivers comprehensive software and consulting services to help organizations worldwide improve documentation, quality, and financial performance across the healthcare continuum. 3M offers integrated solutions for transcription, speech recognition, clinical documentation improvement, documentation management, computer-assisted coding, quality, and revenue cycle management. Make sure to visit them at HIMSS’10 Booth 5817 and make sure you check out 3M™ Mobile Dictation Software.

Also a big thanks to Access, HIStalk Mobile’s first Platinum Sponsor – and they’re double Platinum as Mr. HIStalk noted since they are also Platinum Sponsors of HIStalk. The Sulphur Springs, TX company offers solutions that address patient flow, electronic forms, electronic signature, an e-Forms Repository, and portals that connect to media such as fax, e-mail, images, and universal documents such as EKG strips and other device output. Swing by Booth 4333 at HIMSS and let them know their support of HIStalk and HIStalk Mobile is well justified!

A week to go until HIMSS and I am already completely slammed. Nevertheless, the offer remains – if you’ve got the coolest app or solution on the market, drop me a line and I will make sure to check it out in Atlanta.

In the meantime, keep sending news, stories, rumors, whatever you’ve got to me.

FINALLY! Microsoft announces Windows Mobile 7. And for starters, it’s not Windows Mobile but Windows Phone. Windows Phone 7 Series, to be more precise. By all accounts, the new mobile OS represents a major overhaul to Windows Mobile 6.5 which was released back in October. Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer unveiled the new OS at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The recurring theme during the announcement was – the phone is not a PC, reflecting a major change in the company’s mobile strategy. The biggest and boldest changes? To begin with, the user interface has been completely redesigned. Instead of the small icons that were used as part of the desktop metaphor, the home screen uses “live tiles” which provide dynamically updated, real-time content. The tiles can be customized as quick launches, or links to contacts or applications. The OS places heavy emphasis on social networking with built-in support for managing status updates from multiple sources. Close integration with the XBox allows for LIVE games. Windows Phone 7 Series integrates key elements from the Zune HD as well as the Zune marketplace to support a broad array of video and music, including FM radio. Microsoft is partnering with nearly all of the major carriers, as well as multiple device manufacturers.  The first handsets are expected to hit the market before the holidays late this year.

And if that’s not enough… Nokia and Intel launch a new mobile operating system. The companies merged two of their mobile operating systems to create MeeGo, a Linux-based, open operating system. The new operating system will combine the best features from each of the companies respective operating systems, including the Moblin core (Intel) and the user interface toolkit from Maemo (Nokia). The MeeGo source code, along with the build system and developer tools will be released in the coming weeks. The MeeGo source code will be hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Also announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona…

Twenty four of the largest phone operators join together to challenge the dominance of proprietary mobile app stores. The Wholesale Applications Community aims to make it easier for developers to build and sell applications, regardless of device or technology, by providing a single, open platform. The alliance, which includes Vodaphone, China Mobile, and Sprint, has access to more than 3 billion customers.

Vodafone, Verizon Wireless, and nPhase announce strategic partnership to provide global M2M solutions. The strategic alliance aims to accelerate adoption of global machine-to-machine (M2M) deployments by simplifying the remote management and monitoring of devices spread across both European and US networks. M2M solutions are expected to play a major role in healthcare over the next decade.

Recognizing the growing role of M2M solutions, the GSM Association establishes guidelines on design and build of M2M devices to drive down cost and drive up sales and network data traffic. Twenty five of the largest mobile organizations joined GSMA in drafting the guidelines. In parallel, GSMA partners with the Continua Health Alliance to promote the global mHealth sector.

Closer to home…

Thomson Reuters and Ingenious Med announce collaboration. The companies are combining Clinical Xpert Navigator (previously MercuryMD) from Thomson Reuters and IM Practice Manager from Ingenious Med. With the combined solution, clinicians can monitor their patient’s clinical data from a single desktop view and, with single-sign-on capability, launch directly into IM Practice Manager for simplified procedure and diagnosis coding, as well as direct transmission to the physician’s practice. I previously mentioned this agreement back in January. The release does not discuss how the integration works on mobile devices. I’ll be sure to give you my thoughts after HIMSS.

WebMD launches new version of free mobile application for physicians. Medscape Mobile now includes access to thousands of in-depth clinical reference articles on diseases, conditions, and procedures, in addition to complete reference information on over 7,000 brand name, generic and OTC medications.  The new multimedia clinical reference also includes medical images and procedure videos. According to WebMD, Medscape Mobile, which was launched seven months ago, has attracted over 200,000 users to become the number one free medical app for Apple’s iPhone or iPod touch.

And in the “how cool is this” category… GE Healthcare announces the commercial release of Vscan, a pocket-sized visualization tool developed to provide physicians with imaging capabilities at the point-of-care. The smartphone size device uses ultrasound technology to provide clinicians with an immediate, non-invasive method to secure visual information about what is happening inside the body. GE’s next step in developing Vscan is to work with 12 leading clinical sites throughout the world to help determine how the technology will impact patient workflow and focused exams in primary care, critical care and the cardiology practices. The ultimate goal is to develop a structural protocol for Vscan exams.

Cook Children’s Health Care System of Fort Worth releases free iPhone app. The application, called KidsCheckup, provides parents with information about childhood emergencies, medical conditions, and general health, along with directions and maps to the nearest clinic or doctor’s office. Hospital officials believe it is the first children’s hospital in the nation with an iPhone app.