Medtronic ordered to pay BrainLAB $4.4M in patent infringement suit

This is a big OUCH.

Medtronic has been ordered by the District Court of Colorado to compensate $4.38 million in attorney fees, costs and expenses to BrainLAB in a patent infringement lawsuit - brought by Medtronic.

The patent infringement lawsuit filed in 1998 was dismissed by the U.S. District Court in Denver, Colorado back in February 2006 (it was ruled that BrainLAB products do not infringe any of Medtronic’s patents in suit). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the dismissal in February 2007 and the District Court determined in February 2008 that BrainLAB was entitled to its attorney fees and expenses.

The interesting part? Medtronic may appeal the decision.

Dell, Intel, Motion Computing join for healthcare IT app

This is good news, in fact, I’m rather excited about it.

Dell, Intel and Motion Computing (which is Intel) have jointly launched a new service to assess, design and validate the quality and coverage of wireless networks for healthcare information workflow.

As rambled before, this is what you get when you have the IT giants entering the healthcare informatics arena – accelerating the proper utilisation of effective computing and cutting edge technology

“The new Mobile Point of Care (MPOC) Wireless Assessment service enables healthcare customers to assess whether their wireless network is reliable and can provide 100 percent coverage and 24/7 access to patient information. The service provides wired and wireless network analysis, design and validation”

Will Open Source Breathe New Life Into Health Care Cost Savings?

I chanced upon this article by Charles Babcock of InformationWeek on a California bill that calls for “interoperable records and a full, hospital-running health care IT system that’s open source.”

While the article goes on about an open source health care system provided by Medsphere (if interested, you can read the article here)

My thoughts however, went on a different direction – will mandatory regulations forcing the adoption of Open Source in the healthcare industry really lower cost of health care?

• Are there enough qualified IT professionals available to implement and support it?
• Who will be responsible for correcting any bugs identified
• And will it really be cheaper?

Nuance buys Philips Speech Recognition for nearly $100M

Woah! Seems like the guys over at Nuance are going for ‘world domination’, they just bought Philips Speech Recognition Systems from Royal Philips Electronics for about €65 million ($95 million U.S.) in cash.

Now I’m not sure about the rest of the regions but Philips SpeechMagic and Nuance are two of the most popular speech recognition packages being adopted.

Well done Nuance, well done.

AHRQ issues new health IT funding opportunities

Good news folks, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has published three new health IT-related funding opportunity designed to offer applicants the opportunity to receive incremental support for the conduct of progressively more complex health IT research projects, the opportunities includes; 

• Career Development and Dissertation Research Grants that support and enhance expertise in health IT, research and evaluation methods.

• Small Research Grant to Improve Healthcare Quality through Health IT that supports different types of small research studies including small pilot and feasibility or self-contained health IT research projects; secondary data analysis of health IT research; and economic (prospective or retrospective) analyses of health IT implementation.

ARRT sets associate degree certification requirement

Seems that American Registry of Radiologic Technologists (ARRT) is raising the bar for the industry (which is a good thing in my opinion) by proposing eligibility requirements for certification in radiography, nuclear medicine technology and radiation therapy will require candidates to have earned an associate degree (or more advanced degree) from an appropriately accredited institution.

“The change in eligibility requirements will be published in the 2009 Annual Report for Registered Technologists to seek public comments. If adopted, the revised eligibility requirement would be incorporated in the August 2009 update of the ARRT Rules and Regulations, with an implementation date of Jan. 1, 2015. “

Journal of Nuclear Medicine Now Offering Open Online Access

Everyone loves a freebie (I know I do) and here’s one, courtesy of the Society of Nuclear Medicine.

The society has recently announced that they are now offering open online access of their flagship publication – the Journal of Nuclear Medicine (JNM)  to non-subscribers, just six months after publication (in addition, images in the JNM will be published in full color).

The icing to the cake would the that JNM was recently ranked second among 87 imaging publications by the Thomson Reuters Institute for Scientific Information in recognition of its exceptional quality and influence as an academic resource.

What are you folks waiting for, go grab it

Ramblings: The 17th ASEAN Congress of Cardiology

“Together To Reduce The Burden of Cardiovascular Disease In ASEAN”

You read that right, that’s the the ‘motto’ of the 17th ASEAN Congress of Cardiology (ACC), to be held from 18th to 21st October 2008 in Hanoi, Vietnam (by the Vietnam Heart Association). Attendees expected at this even includes eminent cardiologists from ASEAN, ASIA, Europe, America, Australia discussing topics of common interest (on Cardiovascular Diseases).

I would be attending the ACC for two particular reasons,

1. My company is exhibiting it’s Cardiovascular Informatics suite, as the Product Manger of Asia, how can I not be there
2. To launch CHIU (Committee of Healthcare Informatics User) for the Asia region

In all honestly, I am more excited about CHIU

I personally feel that it will become a key propeller in the ASIA region for Healthcare Informatics and I’m excited to be part of it.

Want to find out more about CHIU’s official launch? Stay tune then!