Wireless Healthcare Reports

The Internet of things is not a technology the patient can take with them onto a hospital ward. While it would, in many cases, make hospitals safer and more efficient, it would represent, for the clinician and other hospital staff, an unacceptable change in working practices. The challenge for the wireless technology vendor is to overcome resistance to these changes. […]

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. […]