HIMSS third day: how to ensure patient ID and safety, while boosting productivity

The road to profit goes through a tiny burg called accuracy, which is sometimes harder to find than it should be. Vendors on the HIMSS09 exhibit floor offered their own kinds of medical GPS, some using off-the-shelf technologies spun up with a proprietary brand of software, others offering home brewed data handling techniques. 

• Zebra Technologies is showcasing bar code and RFID products aimed at improving patient safety, ensuring privacy and boosting productivity. The company’s recent release, an infant wristband labeling system, protects newborns from the administration of the wrong medication or too much of the right one. Other applications in the Zebra portfolio address challenges in making positive patient identification, collecting bedside specimens, and administering medications.

• McKesson is casting for dollars with its Horizon Enterprise Revenue Management package. With a pitch aimed at providers reeling from the effects of a still strained national economy, the company is presenting its nine-month-old product as the means to more efficiently capture revenues by  strengthening the provider’s infrastructure and “fundamentally improving their economics of care.” The company is floating customer testimonials that Horizon Enterprise Revenue Management eliminates the need for costly bolt-on technologies and enables financial managers to more easily predict cash flow.
• Pano Logic has developed a server-based desktop virtualization solution that provides centralized management and improves security at the desktop. Pano announced at HIMSS the newest version of this product, the Pano System 2.6. A new feature, Pano Remote, uses a USB key to turn traditional desktop computers into secure Pano devices without a virtual private network. The Pano System moves all software, memory and drivers from the desktop to the data center. This centralization offers easier management as well as easy software updates and security and patch rollouts at a far lower total cost of ownership than with traditional PCs.
• Executives from AT&T and Cisco are conducting live demos of the AT&T Telepresence Solution, which enables healthcare companies to interact and collaborate with others in remote locations using life-size, high-definition video and high quality audio.  The two companies are framing the offering as a way improve collaboration and productivity by making experts available to patients visiting remote clinics, allowing consultations with remote pharmacologists or specialists, even providing “tele-psychiatry.”
• Content management pioneer Vignette is working with major health systems like Bon Secours to convert millions of pages of paper into digital files. When digital, the erstwhile pages  can be managed and accessed from anywhere. The goal of Vignette Transactional Content Management is to deliver a complete patient record by integrating with EMR systems to enable the archiving and retrieval of records. One major health system is actually converting or sending 30 million pages per month into their Vignette TCM repository. 
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