Part 3: In the next article, I will touch on devices that enhance communication within the hospital and remote-monitoring technologies that are changing the way our patients can be monitored in a variety of nontraditional settings.
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ACEP Now: Vol 36 – No 01 – January 2017Dr. Younggren is chief medical officer at Cue; medical advisor for Shift Labs and Blumio; medical mentor for the Highway1 hardware accelerator; and a practicing emergency physician and medical director for emergency preparedness and urgent care at Evergreen Health in Kirkland, Washington.
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One Response to “Wearable Health Care Technology, Devices that Emergency Physicians Need to Know About”
September 15, 2017
KevinC-MDYou can buy NIBP, pulse ox, finger stick glucose, pregnancy test*, and dip UA* at Walgreens. The cost to produce (albeit not license) a wearable multilead ECG is within most patient’s discretionary healthcare spending. While we agonize over all the false positives and worried well, good analytics/AI could greatly help in both detecting serious injury or excluding things like unstable angina.
But, it is totally a pipe dream, or bad trip.
The electronic health record systems in use in the vast majority of acute care hospitals are incapable of even the most simple standard-based information exchange. These IoT devices will drive up consumer (what we call patient’s) expectations (“Its in my FitBit”) and create substantial investor/regulator/end-user resentment.
As emergency physician’s we need to stop accepting the antiquated (largely unstudied, if you use a commercial system), and potentially dangerous impediments to safe and efficient patient care.
Technology can be a great boon. What has been shoveled to us, however, is not. Realistic at home data collection (which should include additional low hanging fruit as daily weight and spirometer results) likely can help PCPs and EPs detect and abort early stage disease.
Without decent emergency department information systems (EDIS) and electronic health record system (EHRS), however, we are stuck.
While administrators may be patting themselves on the back (or wringing their hands over the exorbitant sunk costs) for “successfully deploying” what amounts to a crappy documentation(word processing?) and ordering (a lot like emailing tasks with circa 1995 MS Outlook) system, the “proven” benefits fail to manifest (almost all shown using home grown, typically physician directed/engineered), and productivity takes a permanent record.
Want this 21st century in-put? Let’s force the issue and demand a 21st century EDIS!
*Tests, like fecal occult blood and wet preps, we no longer are smart enough to do in the ED (but that is another issue).