Wireless Healthcare Reports

The first wave of baby boomers, i.e. people born in the years following the 1914-18 war, dominates today’s market for telecare for the aged. However these people are about to be joined by a second wave of ageing baby boomers: people born in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This second wave of elderly consumers is more computer literate than their parents and has different aspirations with regard to how they expect to be treated and cared for in their old age. The people who drove social change in the sixties may want something more from life than merely ‘ageing in place.’ […]

While at present there is much talk of consumer resistance to RFID technology, there are a number of other issues retailers should address before deploying RFID systems. RFID technology could support services that, far from threatening their privacy, empower the consumer and enable third parties to influence a shopper’s purchasing decisions. […]

The number of potential nextgen healthcare providers is growing, and companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are attempting to position their Internet search tools as healthcare information portals. The market is also being driven by the mobile communications and consumer electronics industry who were initially drawn into the ehealth market when researchers and ehealth service developers began to use standard off-the-shelf consumer electronics devices within telemedicine and remote care projects. […]

While the performance of the current generation of picture phones and PDAs is limited a number of clinicians are experimenting with these devices, using them to either access existing PACS data or to build completely new medical imaging applications. Some of these ad hoc trials employ off the shelf picture phone technology and require only minimal participation on the part of IT departments and vendors while others are supported by purpose built wireless imaging products. […]

During the past two years the concept of telemedicine (as ehealth was known before the Dot Com revolution) has been turned on its head. It was thought that remote healthcare would be used to take advanced clinical processes, available in the West, to patients in remote areas of developing, or underdeveloped, countries. […]

At a time when government health departments are seeking evidence of a return on their investment in IT, attention could turn to simple applications, such as patient reminders and patient paging, which are already producing results. […]

The UK government is already modernising the healthcare sector and plans to spend over £6 billion over the next decade to provide the National Health Service (NHS) with the sort of IT infrastructure that organisations within the financial services and manufacturing sector have been using for the past two decades. […]

Even though the telecoms sector provided IT companies, such as Cisco, with impressive sales growth during the third quarter of 2003, this growth was from a low base. It will be some time before carriers and service providers order significant amounts of equipment. […]

While retailers may not wish to enter the healthcare market the following analysis will illustrate the basic tools any organisation, including the NHS itself, will need to build a successful NextGen healthcare service. […]

This report examines issues and challenges associated with the new ehealth model and describes technologies and revenue models that can be used to support an effective deployment of a next generation, consumer facing ehealth service.  […]

n this report we make a business case for wearable computing in ehealth, and explain the role of IT vendors, garment manufacturers, communications companies and healthcare providers in this market. These players range from companies seeking to diversify into new and less competitive markets, to new entrants to the healthcare sector hoping to build services requiring the minimum of manual intervention. […]

Beyond concerns over the safety of handsets and masts, healthcare is not something the general public associates with mobile phones. As yet few people regard mobile networks as key pieces of infrastructure, capable of supporting […]

A new ehealth model is emerging based on a wider range of devices, automated analysis of vital signs data and feedback to the patient or their carer. A number of vendors – in particular IBM and Oracle – are developing technology that will add intelligence and diagnostic functionality to the ehealth model. At the same time manufacturers are attempting to push wireless medical devices into the consumer electronics market. The resulting model will be one that scales easily and can intercept a person at risk before they enter the healthcare system. […]

The market for wireless healthcare devices is perceived as being driven by two interlinked requirements; the need to reduce the cost of delivering care and the need to build healthcare IT infrastructure that will cope with the growth in the number of ageing baby boomers who will require care in the near future. Even so, many vendors are struggling to find a route into what should be a potentially large and rapidly growing market for new medical devices and healthcare software. […]

Before every one gets too excited and, on the assumption that the NHS will be forced to spend its way out of trouble, invests in any IT company with more then a toe in the healthcare market it is worth taking a closer look at the healthcare needs of the elderly. […]