My family and I have escaped this week to our favorite vacation destination, Pensacola Beach. And so I sit here writing in the cozy confines of the condo that we call home for close to a week nearly every summer. I gave barely a thought to how I was going to transmit this blog to the HealthcareScene.com servers while here. As it turns out, there is no WiFi, which means I’m relying on my iPhone to do a bit of online research, my laptop for Word, and the hotel across the street’s business center with which to cobble it all together.

My connectivity issues pale, of course, in comparison to those of providers working outside of their hospital’s four walls – be it in emergency situations such as the aftermath of a hurricanes like Ivan and Dennis, which hit Pensacola back in 2004 and 2005, respectively, or as part of a routine provider/patient encounter in telehealth programs. I wonder how providers at Pensacola’s Sacred Heart Hospital, where I was born (and no, I’m not telling you what year), handled patient care in the aftermath of Ivan, which devastated the town and outlying beach communities, and how mobile health solutions might better enable them should Mother Nature pay the same sort of visit today.

Well timed for this blog was the recent news that Epocrates has released the first phase of its EHR system, including an iPhone app, targeted to primary care practices with 10 physicians or less. The EHR, according to a recent report at MobiHealthNews.com, “is initially available as a Web-based SaaS product, includes patient encounter notes, electronic lab integration, e-prescribing and Epocrates’ flagship drug database.”

The iPhone version should be available in a few weeks, and is likely to include remote patient record look-up and schedule access, and e-prescribing. The iPad version, which is in development, will focus on point-of-care data capture. MobiHealthNews.com also reports that an Android app is in the works, but will be rolled out in later versions of the EHR.

It will be interesting to see if later versions also target larger physician practices, which would surely also benefit from mobile technology like this. Perhaps most interesting, at least to providers in places like Pensacola that see their fair share of hurricane-induced on-site emergency care, is that the Epocrates mobile EHR app will “be a native app and it will store patient data on the device,” according to the company, which means that “the device will not need a signal to access the EHR. Any new data will be synched with the record once the phone finds a signal.”

Hopefully that signal will not be as elusive in a community’s time of need as the WiFi seems to be at my vacation destination.

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 first wrote about the possibility of an iPad EMR back in February when the iPad was first announced. At the time my speculation was that we wouldn’t see an iPad EMR developed, but that the iPad would have a significant impact on the EMR input methods.

Well, I guess I was wrong on one account. MangoMed has developed what their website calls an “iPad based EMR EHR.” I wonder if this was just a quick shift from being an EMR like all the rest and the company quickly just decided to capitalize on the PR that an iPad EMR would have. They’ll be interesting to watch. If I had an iPad I’d try out their EMR and give you a full recap. MangoMED EMR, want to buy me an iPad and I’ll review your EMR and post it on my site as payment?

I must admit that it’s not a bad initial move. I’m actually quite surprised how many people are searching for iPad EHR or iPad EMR or some variation on those terms. The other company that I think is likely to benefit from the iPad is the Epocrates EHR that was announced at HIMSS. Epocrates has been all about this type of form factor for a while and so they should definitely capitalize on that skill.

With all of this said, I still don’t see the iPad being a revolutionary device in the EMR world. Outside of my initial assertion that it will change EMR input methods that will then be implemented by other companies as well.

I’m still working through some of the various wrap ups from HIMSS that I’ve found. Matthew Holt is always an interesting blogger. Turns out that he’s even more interesting in person. Here’s a few of his thoughts that I think are worth sharing:

Busiest booth?: I think Cisco wins. Maybe it was HealthPresence, maybe the magician—but it was always packed. What I think it means is that mainstream Internet tools are now coming into health care (with some little tweeks). But as MrHISTalk says, putting all the big guys in the A hall was a mite unfair on the C side—although I got to both a little.

Most intruiging announcement?: Epocrates will release a hand-held and web-base EMR app for the iPhone and other handhelds. Why is that interesting? Because they already have 275,000 docs actively using their tool on a handheld, most on iPhones. If their tool’s any good you have to assume they have a great marketing advantage. If this succeeds there’s no way they remain independent in 18 months.
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Most interesting niche company you’ve never heard of whose CEO you randomly met at a party?: LiveProcess is a SaaS-based emergency preparedness tool. (I think CEO Nathaniel Weiss said) it has 500 hospitals paying $10K a year each with no customization.

Other interesting niche company?: CPM does CRM outbound marketing for hospitals and as nearly doubled in size during the downturn (video of them to come).
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Most interesting philosophical chat?: Andy Weisenthal of Kaiser Permanente discussing how specialists are going to change entirely what they do now that everything in KP is online. One Hawaii endocrenologist is on a jihad to prevent diabetics ending up on dialysis—he’s completely reorganized how primary care docs treat their patients. It’s almost like his goal is to put himself out of a job. Andy said about Healthconnect’s finalization of the $6bn (?) implementation—”It’s not the end, it’s the start”.

It’s also worth linking to Matthew Holt’s interview with Epocrates about the Epocrates EHR. Although, I also just remembered I could embed it below: