An laptop computer stolen from a business associated with Hartford Hospital and its sister home-health care group contains personal information of nearly 10,000 patients, the hospital said Monday. Officials from the hospital and VNA HealthCare learned on June 26 that the laptop had been stolen from the home of an employee of Greenplum, a subsidiary of a hospital vendor, EMC Corp., according to a press release from hospital spokeswoman Rebecca Stewart. The hospital has no evidence to suggest that any personal information has been misused as a result of the theft, Stewart said in the release. However, the information on the laptop was not encrypted, which she said is a violation of EMC company policy.
Remote monitoring of intensive care patients—a strategy to maximize scarce medical expertise—can cost hospitals anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 per bed in the first year of operation, according to a new study. Whether this investment pays off in the long run by improving ICU patients' care and saving money, "we don't know," said Dr. Gaurav Kumar, a fellow at the University of Iowa and the lead author of the study published in the journal Chest. Kumar's review of past research on the costs and benefits of telemedicine in the ICU found a range of estimates of the technology's economic impact—from increasing hospital profits to adding a financial burden.
RFID technology is well known in the retail industry, which uses tags to track inventory because individual items can be quickly counted with scanners. Some hospitals use the tags or bar codes to track other gear such as wheelchairs and beds, and some use technology to show when crash cart trays have been opened. And while hospitals have been focusing more on reducing human error, University of Maryland Medical Center appears to be the first to use the high-tech markers to track all its emergency medications.
IBM has announced that its Curam Social Program Management platform will be used to verify the eligibility of approximately 1.2 million Minnesotans who are expected to apply for health coverage through the state's health insurance exchanges (HIX). Earlier this month, Minnesota awarded Maximus a prime contract worth $41 million to create the state's new HIX website. IBM will work as a subcontractor to Maximus on the project. Like many state health insurance exchanges in development across the country, Minnesota's will rely on several technology vendors. HIXes require a robust health IT infrastructure to support their secure websites.
The tangle of wires and lines a patient in an intensive care unit can be tethered to has long been a frustration for nurses. For years, engineers at GE Healthcare and its competitors have envisioned using wireless technology to do just that. The obstacle hasn't been the technology. It has been getting dedicated space on the wireless spectrum. That happened this May when the Federal Communications Commission allocated a sliver of the spectrum for wireless sensors. Life Care Solutions, a unit of GE Healthcare based in Milwaukee, has pushed for the allocation for more than five years. The decision clears the way for what the industry is calling medical body area networks, or MBANs.
The U.S. market for advanced patient monitoring systems has grown from $3.9 billion in 2007 to $8.9 billion in 2011 and is forecast to reach $20.9 billion by 2016, according to a study by Kalorama Information. Efforts to reduce costs in healthcare, avoid emergency room overcrowding, and prepare for a growing number of elderly patients in the years to come are a few of the drivers for the adoption of these systems. In Kalorama Information's recently published report, "Remote and Wireless Patient Monitoring Markets", researchers predict the U.S. healthcare system faces "a looming healthcare crisis of unseen proportions," and there will be fewer healthcare personnel and funds to address the industry's growing needs.