Your family doc bustles into the examination room and without saying a word,
pulls out a Palm Pilot, taps the screen and pauses to read something on it.
The last time you were at this clinic, the guy was carrying around dog-eared
manila folders on a clipboard.
He looks up. "So," he says, "you’ve had a sore throat for a
few days?" Yes you have, but it was only a few minutes ago that you apprised
the nurse receptionist of this fact. How the devil does he know it already?
Dr. Hightech goes on to ask you more questions and appears to be making notes
on the PDA screen. After the popsicle stick on the tongue, the aaaahhhing and
the rest of it, you go back out to the nurse receptionist and she smiles and
hands you a prescription, neatly printed. She also hands you an itemized bill
— a very complete, detailed bill.
What’s up, doc? Welcome to the medical clinic of the — well, of the present.
The medical profession, which has long been on the high-tech leading edge when
it came to diagnostics and surgery, is finally beginning to automate day-to-day
patient care in clinics.
MDeverywhere of Durham,
NC, is one of the companies helping make it happen. Its Web-based suite of MDeverywhere
software services helps hospitals and medical clinics manage patient care by
having physicians use PDAs for scheduling, ordering, prescribing, note taking
— even dictation and medical reference. The company has about 1,300 physicians
in 20 institutions using the services.
Until recently, MDeverywhere docs had to plug their PDAs into a cradle attached
to a networked PC to synch with the clinic’s back-end practice management system.
Now, at least a few of them can update continuously in real time over a Wi-Fi
WLAN. They don’t even need a PC anymore, or a wired network for that matter.
"We absolutely believe that the world is moving towards wireless,"
says MDeverywhere vice president of marketing Dan Pollard. "There are policy
considerations and infrastructure costs for these organizations, so moving to
wireless is something that may take time for some. But when they’re ready to
start leveraging wireless, we’ll be ready too."
The company is in the process of implementing its first pilot Wi-Fi-based wireless
installations at some existing customer sites. The main target market will be
clinics and hospitals that already have WLANs installed. MDeverywhere won’t
get involved in implementing WLANs. It is also lab-testing Bluetooth for smaller
clinics.
The pre-wireless MDeverywhere service has been in use since 2000. The company
sells it as an ASP service, but also has a turnkey onsite server-based offering.
"Most customers have chosen the ASP deployment model," Pollard says.
"From their point of view it’s much more effective in terms of maintenance
and cost of deployment. We’re the ones managing the databases and backups and
the server hardware. It makes for a very robust service."
The MDeverywhere software sits between the clinic’s or hospital’s existing
practice management system and the physicians’ PDAs, mediating and managing
the communication between them over secure Internet connections. MDeverywhere
can integrate with virtually any practice management system using standardized
integration tools or custom integration.
Scheduling information and the patient records associated with a clinician’s
schedule or hospital rounds move from practice management system to PDA. When
a physician starts rounds, they’ll only have to look at the PDA screen to know
who they’ll be seeing.
Doctors use forms-based client applications on the PDAs to record everything
during the interaction with the patient, to take notes and place orders for
prescriptions, tests and diagnostics. That information passes from the PDA to
practice management system during synching sessions.
"Users can run synchronizations as frequently as they need," Pollard
explains. "Some run a couple of times a day, others every five minutes."
MDeverywhere has claimed returns on investment of as much as 300 percent per
year. When it’s easy and convenient for docs to record all the charges against
a patient’s record, and they’re continually prompted to do so, they actually
do it. Result: clinics capture more charges and therefore more revenue from
patients and insurance companies.
Because the physician is recording charges with an easy-to-use forms-based
application, there is no need for support staff to transcribe often messy —
and incomplete — notes. This saves support staff time and it also ensures higher
accuracy, which results in fewer denials of charges by insurance companies.
"It works just fine without wireless," Pollard notes. "But it’s
easier in some important ways with wireless."
For starters, wireless will make it easier to deploy and easier for doctors
to use. Institutions won’t have to disrupt clinical areas to deploy wired networks.
They also won’t have to try and shoe-horn PCs into cramped clinical spaces.
With wireless, PCs are bypassed and the PDAs synch directly with MDeverywhere
servers — without physicians having to do anything
"It’s also a benefit in certain work flows — in walk-in clinics, for
example, where if a patient comes into the clinic [without an appointment],
they won’t be on the physician’s handheld. This allows us to get that patient
on to the device immediately."
Wireless will definitely improve MDeverywhere’s business case when approaching
some new customers, Pollard says. "At a high level, a number of organizations
already view wireless as a key strategic initiative," he points out. "Our
being able to use their wireless infrastructure allows us to fit in better."
For new customers that have mature and widespread WLAN implementations, there
will be "significant cost savings" because they won’t have to buy,
configure and install PCs and wired networking infrastructure.
For those customers, and they’re mostly larger organizations, Wi-Fi is clearly
the technology of choice, but for smaller clinics, Bluetooth may be a more cost-effective
wireless solution, Pollard says. For one thing, Bluetooth is a more readily
available wireless option in lower-end PDAs such as some of the Palm products.
While more and more cost-effect wireless options are coming — including tiny
Secure Digital (SD) Wi-Fi cards that fit in the latest generation of PDAs —
client hardware is one of the hold-backs for this technology. Some existing
customers, for example, have already invested in PDAs that cannot add Wi-Fi
or Bluetooth connectivity at all.
For these and other reasons, MDeverywhere expects it will take a few years
for wireless to become the rule rather than the exception, even among its existing
customer base. Today, a quarter or perhaps a third of those existing customers
are seriously considering wireless, Pollard says. For the rest, it will take
more time.
Of course, with only 20 client organizations up and running, MDeverywhere’s
market universe for wired or wireless service remains enormous.
