Technology: Opportunities, Challenges

"Safety can be numbing to people because we preach it all the time," said Lorraine Kee, SSM's corporate Web manager. "I like [Super Carol] because it pushes it out in a newer, fresher way."

Safety officers can also find tweets from others to be helpful on the job. In December, U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis tweeted about her agency's updated regulatory agenda, which included information about an airborne transmissible disease standard, which is posed to become a big issue for safety officers.

Written by Scott Wallask on December 30, 2009

Top 10 Smartphone App Trends for 2010

Many chief information officers have smartphones at the top of their wish lists. The compact mobile devices combine online access to information with PDA functionality, making them perfect for on-the-go clinicians.

According to a report by market-research firm Manhattan Research, the number of physicians who own smartphones will increase from 64% to 81% by 2012. The October 2009 report states that the ability to complete tasks remotely will become even more important to physicians in the future.

The devices are becoming the desktops of the future as hardware improves and applications become more sophisticated and robust. Programs that were formerly only available on desktops, such as PACS (picture archiving and communication system), can now easily fit in a physician's hand.

"We're no longer using it as a reference device; we're using it as a computer replacement," says Henry J. Feldman, MD, chief information architect at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Whether your facility provided you with a smartphone or you purchased one as a gift to yourself, the experts say that you can expect to see some innovative trends in mobile health applications making their way to handheld screens, including augmented reality, electronic medical record integration, and image viewing.

Written by Cynthia Johnson on December 11, 2009