Met with Janine Buis yesterday of Nokia's Innovent arm. We're going to be sharing the podium at the Medical Record Institute's Mobile Healthcare Conference in San Diego this December. I will talk about BirdDog as a case study of the potential for mobile computing in the healthcare 'space.' The key concepts are 1) that mobile computing is not just running applications on portable devices; it's best thought of from the application layer up; 2) adoption of devices depends on the business value and usability of the tools more than a price point; 3) that application design should anticipate changing platforms and infrastructure support; 4) that devices that are aware of 'microcontexts' may have the best chance of serving the needs of mobile users; 5) that in healthcare specifically we are simultaneously heading toward a more transparent, shared, and distributed medical record at the same time that we are more than ever concerned with the security of protected health information (PHI).
I'd better elaborate on what I mean by 'microcontexts.' In emergency medicine, much work is done outside of a defined exam room, and as the medical record is essentially a datastream from electronic resources, the 'chart' may not be accessible at the bedside in the conventional sense. It may be difficult to have a private conversation, let alone do a decent examination without compromising the patients' privacy. Yet we may need to recruit them in decision making. Some portable devices may make this more possible since the information can be obfuscated in a way that shared workstations or COWs (computers on wheels) can't. A microcontext might also be thought of in terms of the temporal environment that encloses a decision point. E.g., 'should I order this medicine, here and now?' Because there will be new data incoming, this fleeting moment of opportunity may be best taken if there is a proximate device that allows an action. Lowering the threshold of access to information and the ability to act on that information is what mobile healthcare is about.