St. Jude, Microsoft partner to integrate implantable device data into PHRs

It is exciting times to be working in Microsoft Health Solutions Group, the software giant is speeding up the development of Healthcare Informatics.

“St. Jude Medical has formed a partnership with the Microsoft Health Solutions Group to research the integration of data from implantable devices with patient-controlled, personal health records (PHRs).

St. Jude and Microsoft will work with physicians to determine the optimal level of integration (between the Merlin.net Patient Care Network and Microsoft HealthVault) that will allow physicians to share device information with their patients, according to the St. Paul, Minn.-based company.

I, Doctor, er, Robot

Now this is a funny post (at least I think its funny).

I wrote an article on TeleSurgery back in 2006 and it touch covered a fair bit on Robotic Surgery (well, that’s an important component of TeleSurgery) and this particular article looks at how well are medical robots complying with the Three Laws of Robotics (as codified by the late sci-fi author and Health Blog hero Isaac Asimov) which in case you don’t know, are;

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Details of the funny articles can be read here. Enjoy

White spaces could affect medical telemetry devices

I’m kinda stuck working on my MSc paper but felt that this is an important article, especially for Biomedical Engineers so I’ll just re-post this article from healthimaging.com;

“Next year, when cable converts to a digital signal, wireless frequencies called white spaces will be up for grabs and hospitals using remote patient monitoring through radio frequency could be impacted if other devices using the unlicensed white space generate signals that could interfere with medical telemetry devices.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2000 allocated spectrum and established rules for a Wireless Medical Telemetry Service (WTMS) that allows potentially life-critical equipment to operate on an interference-protected basis, according to the American Society of Healthcare Engineers. Medical telemetry devices operate on channel 37 of the white space spectrum.

Cell phone technology set to deliver diagnostic imaging

No, I’m not referring to the IPhone.

According to the study published on-line April 30 in Public Library of Science ONE,

“Researchers from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University Research Center in bioengineering at the Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering and the biophysics graduate group at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that their methodology allows for the transfer of raw data from the patient site to a central facility that has the software and hardware required for image reconstruction. The processed data is then returned from the central facility to the cellular phone as an image.

The team chose electrical impedance tomography (EIT) as a method to demonstrate cell phone feasibility in medical imaging.

Philips, BrainLAB team for intra-operative angiography, IGS technologies

Personally, I think both Philips Healthcare and and BrainLAB are great companies as they have some really nifty products that are in a class of its own; and I am quite glad that they are collaborating on the integration of intra-operative angiography and image-guided surgery (IGS) to drive the compatibility of the technologies in the operating room environment (and yes, the patients are the ones who will benefit.

According to the Chicago-based BrainLAB and Philips – “The integration of angiography and IGS would provide surgeons with real-time information during interventions that may lead to more precise surgical procedures” . (Kinda obvious in my opinion)

Healthcare IT plays key role in curing diseases, researchers say

Ok, this theme has been covered quite a few times by me but it never cease to provide me with motivation and inspiration blogging about it.

“Healthcare IT plays key role in curing diseases, researchers say” – so say the researchers, providers, pharmaceutical companies and vendors at the Bio-IT World Conference in Boston.

The story goes like this, transformational medicine – or the study of how to treat diseases based on genetic information – is growing at a rapid rate, the rational is that drugs designed to treat patients according to their genetic makeup are much more effective (which makes perfect sense to me) and for cancer patients and others with life-threatening illnesses, this can be vital.

So what does Healthcare IT have to do with this, well, the role of electronic data exchange was hailed as central to the advances being made in transformational medicine.

What can I say, I am proud to be an Healthcare IT Evangelist.

Innovation outsourcing proposal could change pace of informatics progress

Now this is a good article (well, the message in the article is good).

I’m not going to repost the entire story because I think it would be better to read this entire article on its whole but I’d give a quick breakdown (read all the point forms in sequence to get the essence of the article)

• Progress in imaging informatics tends to be incremental, one deliberate step at a time. But at least one expert believes change could be measured in much longer strides if corporations outsourced innovation.