Welcome to EMR and EHR

I find this completely fascinating. Yes, the Apple Store is demoing various medical applications like EMR on the iPad. Here’s an excerpt from blogger Iltifat Husain walking into an Apple Store:

When I recently walked into my local Apple store to buy an iPad accessory, I saw a group of about 20 people huddled around a large LCD screen while an Apple employee was giving a workshop.

When I saw the LCD screen full of medical applications, I was shocked. This wasn’t your run of the mill “how to use your iPhone” workshop.

The people gathered for the workshop consisted of healthcare professionals in medicine, dentistry, and other fields. About a third of the group consisted of physicians.

The workshop was focused on how the iPhone and iPad can be useful for their practices and as reference tools for day to day work.

The workshop was led by an Apple employee who went through a slideshow presentation of useful medical applications, such as Epocrates, iMurmur, Airstrips OB, and many of the other useful applications we’ve featured on iMedicalApps before.
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Along with the presentation given by the Apple employee, a MacPractice representative was on hand to demonstrate their electronic health record and how it worked from the desktop to the iPhone and to the iPad.

Pretty interesting to see Apple committing that type of resource to marketing the clinical applications.

I was glad that I had at least one chance to talk with a vendor about Smart Cards at HIMSS. Sure, smart cards have been around for a really long time, but I wanted to see what was happening with this relatively old (25 years or so) technology.

Well, I had a chance to do this video with Gemalto to talk about Smart Cards in healthcare and also the possibility of your cell phone becoming your smart card. Could be really interesting to see that evolve. Check it out:

This video coverage of HIMSS 10 sponsored by Practice Fusion and their Free EMR.

The tech world is buzzing about Google’s new Operating System (OS) called Chrome. You can read the full writeup from Google’s Chrome OS announcement on Techcrunch or the official announcement on the Official Google blog. Basically, Google has created an operating system for a netbook (or at least netbook like) computer that will be super fast. The reason it can work so fast is that it will basically only run web applications. Yes, this is hard to wrap your head around, but it is really interesting.

Let’s apply the Chrome OS to EMR and healthcare. Imagine you have an EMR software that’s completely web based (yes, there are a number of them already). Then, the Chrome OS would be perfect for that EMR. I should also mention that the Chrome OS computer is likely to be in the $300-$500 range. That’s a lot of savings.

Now let’s talk about speed. I’ve been using the Chrome web browser for months now and it’s just flat out faster than any other browser out there. In fact, every once in a while I open another browser and have to avoid slitting my throat as I wait for it to load. I expect the Chrome OS will be just as fast. Yes, every doctors office likes speed. Can the EMR integrate with Chrome at a level that they optimize the speed of the EMR? They could. Will be interesting to see if anyone will.

How about security? Well, there’s nothing being stored on the Chrome OS laptop. Yes, that means all of the data from this new laptop is being stored on the server. Even the data that’s temporarily stored on the laptop is encrypted. Now imagine you lose a laptop (nah, that’s never happened in healthcare, right?). Good news is that there’s no patient data on the laptop since it’s all stored in the cloud.

Of course, one downside with the Chrome OS is that you’re dependent on your internet connection to do much of anything. However, with an EMR that’s generally true anyway. So, I don’t see much difference there.

One challenge I do see is the document management piece of an EMR. Document management is file intensive and needs a real OS. I don’t see much getting around this. I don’t see Google adding in support for things like high end scanners (or even low end ones for that matter). However, you just purchase one or two computers for your office that can handle the scanning. Problem solved.

No doubt the Chrome OS isn’t the end all be all to computers. It likely won’t even takeover a HUGE percentage of market share. However, it is a really interesting development that could be interesting applied to an EMR and healthcare.

News came out this week about a Dell EMR, which is really just a branded version of eCW and possibly some other EMR companies. However, no doubt Dell’s ability to sell software is going to be a nice marketing tool for the EMR companies with which they interact.

Neil Versel posted about some rumblings about Apple joining the EMR fray. There are some EMR vendors that are optimized for some of Apple’s devices. In fact, I’ve even seen some action towards some iPhone specific EMR companies. Also, I think it’s reasonable to think that Apple may come out with an Apple tablet soon and healthcare has always been a tablets favorite market.

Either way, it’s interesting to see all these big brands joining in with others already in the healthcare space. Are they chasing after the $36.3 billion in EMR stimulus money?