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Wednesday, October 06, 2004
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 BlackBerry Season
Om Malik points to this full version of the Oct. Business 2.0 which previously was only available to subscribers or single issue purchasers.
This is a must-read article is you want to read a quick history of this device as well as its current success. I think it bodes well for wireless data devices in general as the general public begins to discover the advantages of continual access to email and the Web.
Seven 125-foot-long assembly lines are stamping out wallet-size BlackBerrys--the wireless handhelds now in the hands of more than 1.3 million users worldwide--at a rate of about 230 per hour.
There's also mention of the Treo and its rise to popularity, as well as a side bar featuring the Good company which supplies email services in competition with RIM.
7:15:37 PM 
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Wild King Salmon with an Oregon Pinot Noir
Was discussing a wireless project with someone when the topic turned to food and wine. The salmon and pinot was my choice and he came back by telling me that tonight he'll be dining at the Mon Viel Ami in Paris.
I searched and came up with this blog post from chez pim. I think I'd go with the duck over the kidney or the bland cod.
4:42:39 PM
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 Baby Ben Fleishman Benefits from Advanced Swaddling Technique
Glenn Fleishman of WiFiNetNews fame is a proud new papa who is discovering the art of swaddling with a video you can download so you can observe his technique. (My next baby will probably be a Mac.)
He took some time out from his sleepless nights to comment on my post about Cisco's use of 802.11a & g for hospital WLANs to provided added support for VoIP.
Interesting. There's a density issue that no one seems to talk about, either. It doesn't matter if 802.11g passes through 50 feet of walls and cubicles and 802.11a only goes 30 feet. If you're using it in a dense environment, then you need more APs just to handle the traffic regardless of distance and frequency. If you have to have 10 APs just for bandwidth reasons in the same space, then 802.11a is a much much better choice. And it doesn't drop to 0 at 40 feet or 50 feet. It drops down to a variety of lower speeds that still allow roaming in less dense areas.
Maimonides Hospital here in Brooklyn uses 802.11a with a Cisco system in their ER. When I visited there last year, it seems to be adequate for their needs. Support can be concentrated around selected nursing stations for the inpatient areas.
3:47:06 PM
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PatientKeeper and iPAQS for Duke's First Year Residents
This year, Duke provided all first-year residents at Duke University Hospital with handheld personal digital assistants during their orientation in June. The residents’ Hewlett-Packard iPAQs, which normally cost between $400 and $500 each, came loaded with software from PatientKeeper, a Boston-based company with which the University recently entered into a partnership.
PatientKeeper features a Treo along with the iPAQ on their site (and Tablet PC).
11:51:18 AM
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Implantable Sensors and the Doctor In Your Pocket (The Fallacy of Ubiquitous Clinical Testing)
I read about this story through a link on boingboing.net where David Pescovitz that author of this article is an editor.
Briefly, and I'll probably elaborate more on this tonight, the problem is the belief that more clinical tests equals better diagnosis. I see no mention of the specificity of any of the data derived from this implantable device, also no mention of the consequences of a false positive. What do you do with an elevated C-reactive protein serum level? This is a very non-specific clinical test that some are associating with increased risk for a cardiac event. What will be the costs of chasing down false positives? What if there is a disease to which a patient may have a diathesis and there is no good clinical test for revealing its presence?
I did this post a while back, showing how poorly a clinical test will perform if you're not careful in selecting a subgroup of patients with whom the disease has a higher prevalence.
As another example, look at the controversy over using prostate-specific antigen (PSA) as a screening modality for prostate cancer. The problem is not access to the test, but the specificity in detecting cancer as opposed to benign prostatic hyperplasia.
11:19:04 AM
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MercuryMD Supports Clinical Cellular Data with Sprint/AT&T
Sprint (NYSE: FON) and palmOne, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLMO) today announced that Riverside Health System’s three non-profit, community hospitals in Virginia are using Sprint PCS Vision(SM) Smart Device Treo™ 600s by palmOne on the Sprint PCS Vision(SM) network with the MData® Enterprise System from MercuryMD, Inc.
And AT&T:
Through this relationship, the MData® Enterprise System from MercuryMD has been enabled for the AT&T Wireless nationwide GSM™/GPRS wireless data network for use with popular handheld devices. Beginning today, physicians and other healthcare professionals now can use a palmOne™ Treo™ 600 or an Audiovox PPC 4100 to wirelessly and securely access real-time patient information such as demographics, lab results, medication lists, and other reports in any of 7,500 cities and towns in the U.S. in which AT&T Wireless has coverage.
I'll have to call my contact at MercuryMD to get more information about these stories. Information about cellular data services is usually obscured by talk of WLANs whenever medical wireless topics are discussed.
11:00:22 AM
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Motion Medical Pak for the Tablet PC
Motion Computing is announcing its software suite for the Tablet PC:
The Motion Medical Pak is a suite of applications designed to increase healthcare productivity and take advantage of Microsoft® Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. This set of personal productivity applications was carefully selected to assist a wide-range of medical practitioners – including doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.
Some of the features include a Tablet Input Panel with over 200,000 medical terms to improve handwriting recognition; Multimedia Pharmacology Office Pak for up-to-date drug information; Dorland Medical dictionary; and Physician Office forms.
9:23:41 AM
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Podcasting Nothing New
For those extolling the "pioneers" who are currently developing mp3 tech conversations available for download, they should be aware that Ken Rutkowski and Andy Abramson have been doing this for quite some time now, and have optimized the sound quality. (Here's an example.) The recent innovation is utilizing RSS for push feeds based on a user's subscription choices.
Steve Ballmer expressed a negative opinion of iPod owners. But, this is a viable format, and Microsoft is the major sponsor of Ken and Andy's daily radiocast. This has much potential when it comes to the dissemination of tutorials or medical updates or CME. Mp3 players are here to stay and it's no longer about Kazaa.
9:09:17 AM
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Smartphone War Heats Up
This article on the Forbes Web site confirming the focus now on smartphones, as opposed to the unconnected PDA. It cites Orange, a European carrier, about the profitability:
Nearly two years ago, Orange was the first carrier in the world to launch a Microsoft Windows Smartphone handset and it has since launched a number of similar computer-like devices. It started selling the PalmOne Treo 600 handset this year and says revenue from a Treo user is double that of a non-smartphone subscriber ? more than $120 per month. The same holds true for another Windows Smartphone, the SPV E200.
The Google hit that took me to this article involves the following quote:
As an example, Cook [John Cook, product marketing manager for PalmSource] says, some 100 professional medical applications are written for Palm, compared to six for Symbian and none for Windows Mobile Smartphone.
This highlights the fact that the Palm platform has a head start when it comes to clinical applications for a smartphone such as the Treo.
8:58:51 AM
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© Copyright
2004
Bill Koslosky, MD.
Last update:
11/10/2004; 7:33:23 AM.
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