Palm Makes The Rounds At Jupiter

If you've ever received medical care at a state-of-the-art facility, you've likely seen physicians and nurses hurrying to and fro with some form of mobile technology in their hands. Not wanting to be left out the current technology revolution, the physicians at Jupiter Medical Center are using a combined solution from AT&T, Palm, and McKesson to access electronic medical records and more. Given the amount of information generated by hospitals, anything that health systems can do to speed up services, reduce errors, and increase effectiveness is generally a good thing.Whether it be your own physician's office or the local emergency room, everyone has probably experienced a painfully slow appointment at a health facility. Knowing this, Jupiter Medical Center, located in Jupiter, Fla., wanted to enable its physicians and health care providers with technology that would help them perform their jobs more effectively. By so doing, it sought to increase physician access to vital health information and, hopefully, make visiting the facility a better experience for patients.

Jupiter is using McKesson's Horizon MobileCare Rounding software on Palm Treo 680s to get the job done. Using the smart phones with AT&T's wireless services, Jupiter wanted its doctors to be able to take advantage of the smaller form factor, reduced cost, and added memory to boost productivity. The combined hardware, software, and wireless solution lets physicians access information wherever they might happen to be, whether its in or out of the hospital.

So far, the deployment seems to be getting the job done. "Patients are really impressed that I have ready access to their latest health information via Horizon MobileCare Rounding running on my Treo smart device. It has really improved my effectiveness," said J. Peter Lawler, M.D., internal medicine. "It has eliminated the hunt for an available computer to look up patient information. I have less stress."

The hospital was unable to provide any hard statistics (i.e., visit time reductions, or percentage of reduced errors) to back up its news, but they probably wouldn't be crowing about it if they didn't have some positive results somewhere.