The latest advancement in medical technology, the da Vinci^® Surgical System, now benefits patients at Heritage Valley Health System. Earlier this month, David A. Corral, MD, FACS, utilized the state-of-the-art system to perform the first robotic assisted surgery at Heritage Valley Sewickley.

Dr. Corral, along with Ash Kshirsagar, MD, and Jonas Gricius, MD, physicians at Valley Urological Associates, is utilizing the da Vinci^® Surgical System at Heritage Valley Sewickley for a variety of urological procedures. The da Vinci^®Surgical System allows surgeons to perform complex procedures through just a few tiny incisions and provides them with enhanced capabilities, including high-definition 3D vision and a magnified view. The surgeon controls the da Vinci^®System, which translates his or her hand movements into smaller, more precise movements of tiny instruments inside the body.

“Robotic assisted surgery provides many benefits for patients,” explained Dr. Corral. “The precision surgeons are able to achieve through this type of surgery minimizes surgical complications, pain and lengthy hospital stays. For the appropriate surgical candidate, this type of surgery is a great option and we’re fortunate to be able to provide it at Heritage Valley Sewickley.”

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New version of Glooko’s Logbook app gives users new ability to benchmark blood glucose averages against previous weeks and show big picture of diabetes management

Glooko, Inc., makers of an FDA-cleared mobile logbook solution for people with diabetes, today launches the first-ever way for users to check their blood glucose averages on a smartphone. The new version of the app will allow users to view week-to-week comparisons of their blood glucose readings to understand macro-level changes in the effectiveness of their diabetes management and treatment plans.

With today’s launch of version 1.6 of the app, Glooko the only mobile solution that allows users to sync readings form multiple blood glucose meters and compute these averages with the single click of a button. The Glooko homepage will automatically display a user’s high, low and average blood glucose readings for the week. Additionally, the new version of the app allows users to view averages before a meal, after a meal or all readings, complementing the day-to-day blood glucose tracking capabilities that are already available.

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This is a great read… here’s an excerpt:

Everyone Has A Cell Phone But No One Answers Anymore

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New technological developments offer hope for better and earlier detection of Parkinson’s disease. According to PubMed Health, Parkinson’s is a serious disease that affects people’s movements, coordination and muscle control. Among elderly men and women, Parkinson’s is one of the most common disorders of the nervous system. Although it typically develops in people older than 50, younger adults can get Parkinson’s.

A New Form of Diagnosis

Health professionals normally rely on measuring tremors, a symptom of the disease. New voice-recognition software could be a game changer in terms of Parkinson’s diagnosis and monitoring, reports Forbes.com.

The voice-recognition software is being used for smart phones and has been talked about for the past three years in PCWorld.com and Wired magazine. Sites could potentially offer the program for patients to use from their home computers and can store the tests and results on cloud hosting, storage, and backup for business and homeowners.

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Device available now for military and civilian emergency medical services

InfraScan, a medical device company specializing in brain injury diagnostic products, announced today that it has obtained U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to market the Infrascanner™ Model 2000, a noninvasive handheld brain hematoma detector.

The Infrascanner™ Model 2000 is a handheld device with a disposable patient interface that uses Near-Infrared (NIR) technology to detect intracranial bleeding, identifying those patients who would most benefit from immediate referral to a CT scan and neurosurgical intervention.

“FDA approval in the U.S. allows InfraScan to offer an industry first, powerful tool for use by civilian and military medical professionals to quickly triage head trauma patients,” said Baruch Ben Dor, President and CEO of InfraScan, Inc. “Shortening the time to treatment through effective detection of intracranial bleeding can mean preserving brain function in a patient and even saving lives.”

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By Tom Youso

The healthcare sector appears to be getting over some of its apprehensions about moving to cloud computing. Recent studies by firms like Foley and Lardner LLP show cloud adoption is rapidly accelerating among healthcare companies despite lingering concerns about the security and privacy of patient data. Many organizations are ditching their aging internal IT systems and moving key applications like patient management, claims processing systems and patient billing to the cloud. According to HealthDataManagement.com, the health care cloud computing market is expected to grow from $1.7 billion in 2011 to $5.4 billion by 2017.

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), which provides fiscal incentives to healthcare organizations that move to an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, is driving much of the action. The migration is also being prompted by the cloud’s familiar promise of lower operational costs and better efficiencies.

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By Amos Adler, M.Sc.

When former Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, M.D. said, “Drugs don’t work in patients who don’t take them” he could never have imagined the crisis in medication compliance would reach multi-billion dollar proportions – but it has.

According to studies, only about 50 percent of American patients typically take their medicines as prescribed, resulting in approximately $177 billion annually in direct and indirect costs to the U.S. economy. Besides an estimated $47 billion each year for drug-related hospitalizations, not taking medicines as prescribed has been associated with as many as 40 percent of admissions to nursing homes and with an additional $2,000 a year per patient in medical costs for visits to physicians’ offices. (NCPIE Aug, 2007)

The health care system is overburdened in large part due to patients with chronic conditions like Diabetes, Asthma and high cholesterol failing to take their medications regularly. Whether patients cannot remember, they are asymptomatic, they don’t like the side effects or  there is a lack of support or education, these are factors that can be changed. Part of the issue is cost of the medications themselves and the cost of helping a patient stay on therapy.

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By John Chamberlin

How many times has your office received a complaint regarding how long a patient or patient’s family spent on hold waiting to speak to someone regarding scheduling an appointment?  How much of your office staff time is spent searching for patient records for work or school physicals and vaccination records?

There is no question that healthcare has gone through a number of changes with technology, especially in the past 5 years.  And, as patient satisfaction ratings become increasingly important to the reimbursement process and customer’s expectations for immediate information become part of that satisfaction, electronic access to one’s patient information, in real time, the utilization of patient portals is becoming more relevant and necessary.

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People who receive medical care in the Progressive Care Unit at Monongahela Valley Hospital may be wearing more than a hospital gown. MVH recently updated the telepaks now attaching a light-weight portable monitor to patients in order to continuously monitor the electrical activity in their hearts (ECG) and oxygen saturation in the blood (SpO₂,). The device also enables the medical staff to monitor other vital signs in real time when patients are on the move.

When patients wear the small monitors, nurses, physicians and other clinical staff can check a patient’s clinical status with a push of the button right in the patient’s room or at the bedside. All of the information is presented on a color touch-screen display.

“Our goal is to always provide the highest level of care to our patients,” said Mary Lou Murt, senior vice president of Nursing. “By using the device, patients have the ability to move freely, and our medical staff has immediate access to vital statistics in order to deliver the best care possible.

Rick Kam

Jeremy Henley

By Rick Kam, CIPP, & Jeremy Henley

Given the growing prevalence of data breaches in healthcare, the theft of protected health information (PHI) has become a major concern for hospitals and practices across the country. Thieves value this “big data” for its profit potential—often reselling it to other thieves or using it for multi-million-dollar healthcare fraud schemes.

Three trends are contributing to the increased growth in the number and complexity of data breaches:

1. Growing dependence on business associates. Gone is the idea of “it’s easier to do it myself.” Economic realities are causing companies to outsource many of their functions, such as billing, to a business associate or third-party provider. Unfortunately, the more parties with access to privacy data, the more likely a data breach will occur.

We’ve seen this trend in healthcare, where growing liability and the extra-sensitive nature of patient health records make data breaches a particularly painful experience. Even if a business associate causes a data breach, the healthcare provider, is accountable for its loss or theft.

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When TeleTracking Technologies was founded in 1991, the concept of patient flow hadn’t been invented, automation was something done in factories and ED overcrowding mainly happened on Friday nights in urban medical centers. Today, TeleTracking is proud to have a 95 percent client retention rate.

The video testimonials on this page helps to explain why.

By Kathleen Ganster

It may take a little bit of time and effort to save a lot of time and effort in the long run.

That is the issue that faces many medical providers when they begin to utilize electronic medical records programs, said James Troup, chief executive of BI Consulting, a subsidiary of Pediatric Alliance.

According to Troup, BI Consulting was formed to assist other medical practices with IT expertise in utilizing NextGen products.

“As Pediatric Alliance used the NextGen EHR/EPM System and really became experts in the application – we thought, ‘Why not offer our expertise to others?’” he said.

BI Consulting works with medical practices and facilities to assist with full cycle implementation and support, project management, workflow analysis and support. It is the change-over process that can be a bit overwhelming and time consuming at first for medical practices.

“That is where we can come in to provide IT assistance and resources to fully take advantage of the NextGen products,” Troup said.

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By Tedd Zobb

Network infrastructure is the heartbeat to your company, and in order to meet the demands of a complex and ever-changing health care environment, accurate and accessible records are critical to the health of your patients and business.

The current demands your communications network currently faces includes:

• Rise in health information exchanges, requiring network access to electronic medical records across multiple service providers
• Increased imaging capabilities driving the need for more flexible bandwidth
• Growing use of remote applications networked to central services, connected to each other
• HIPAA and other regulations require comprehensive medical records, involving high intensity security across your entire health care network

With fiber optics, the health care system will never be the same again. It’s transforming the way patients receive treatment, share medical information between providers and hospitals, tele-ER, e-prescriptions, video training and many other applications. The speed of fiber communications between insurance companies, pharmacists, patients and medical staff at any physician’s office, clinic and hospital, will allow your time and attention to be dedicated where it should be – on your patients and your health care practice.

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