I’ve only been wondering around the health IT space for a few years.  Like almost everyone on the planet I’ve spent a bit of time on the UK national program.  With that experience I wonder whether the current direction of travel in health IT isn’t a little bit of a rat-hole.

Can you imagine a pill box that blinks on time, beeps if you make a mistake and calls your phone if you still forget? But wait there is more, if you do not respond to phone call it will call your family member or your caregiver ... http://www.boston.com/video/viral_page/?/services/player/bcpid19067533001&bctid=35817028001
Wow..they are really getting close to physically chasing, opening the mouth and popping the pill in...
Dont worry we will get the robot soon :)

Today Apple launched it's new flagship product the iPad. The device is similar to an oversized iPhone or iPod Touch. It has the feel of a tablet PC but without the overhead of a processor and memory hungry operating system which - going by the videos - seems to allow for a light-weight and responsive device.

To me, this looks like a very good option for use in healthcare:

- It has a smooth surface that can allow it to be wiped clean.

- It has an impressive 10 hour battery life.

- It is very intuitive and easy to use.

- There are already hundreds of medical applications designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch that are ready to go.

"ACAFE-a computerised clinical decision support advancement for emergency medicine. Hospital electronic medical record EHR or EMR. Used commercially. Other uses include research-development into chronic and infectious-diseases. A demo is available at http://acafe.msdrg.org."

You can download ACAFE for free from SourceForge.

PR from Alcatel-Lucent:
 

The Auckland District Health Board (ADHB), Gen-i (a member of the Telecom New Zealand Group) and Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) have joined efforts to launch New Zealand’s first trial of a healthcare remote patient monitoring (RPM) solution using mobile technology to monitor and manage chronic illness in the home. The three-month trial focuses on 20 heart disease patients selected by Auckland Hospital.

Press release from WDHB:

Waitemata DHB is planning a Health Campus for education, research and innovation to support the training of health professionals in the district.

The objective of the initiative is to build on existing education and research strengths and also foster new centres of excellence.

The proposed campus would include a new education and research centre at North Shore Hospital and be linked with tertiary education institutions, other DHBs and primary and community care providers to create a district-wide network.

The University of Auckland, AUT University, Unitec and Massey University all support the project.

Here's a very interesting video from the BMJ about surgical simulation. One interesting comment I heard in the video was that surgical trainees who had used the simulator performed in a similar fashion to trainees who had performed the operation many times before.

Here's the conclusion from the RCT "Effect of virtual reality training on laparoscopic surgery: randomised controlled trial"

Dr Mike Cadogan has posted a table of all the Australian and New Zealand MedBloggers. It looks like a pretty complete list with links to twitter accounts and RSS feed. Check it out here: http://lifeinthefastlane.com/resources/anz-medical-blogs/

I saw this article on Medgadget and thought it might be of interest to those looking at how RFID tags can be used in Healthcare. This machine will help keep track of those pesky swabs that keep getting lost in patients.

Just saw this on Techcrunch. AsthmaMD is an iPhone application that lets users log their asthma activities including medications and causes of asthma. Here are some screenshots of the program. You can check it out a AsthmaMD.org.