Radio Frequency Identification, which is better known as RFID, can be translated as the use of radio frequencies to read and transmit information through the use of small devices called tags. These are currently being used by healthcare organizations in order to tackle new challenges.

Such challenges are “operational efficiency, patient safety, and improvement of the business processes”, declares one of the TechNavio experts. In fact, healthcare providers and payers, including patients, “are transforming the usage of RFID from technology that is used to reduce costs to facilitating, automating, and streamlining identification processes.”

Healthcare organizations, including hospitals, nursing homes, home healthcare facilities, health maintenance organizations, laboratories, clinics, physician offices, and pharmacies situated within hospitals, form the cumulative healthcare industry in the report, which has recently been published by TechNavio Insights.

According to the report “RFID in Healthcare industry 2008-2012, by 2012”, “the market for RFID tags in healthcare industry is expected to reach $153.2 million driven by the development of lower cost tags and installed infrastructure, which will enable high volumes of articles to be tagged.”

(Original article: http://marketpublishers.com/lists/4538/news.html)

Microscan, a global technology leader for precision data acquisition and control solutions, announces the new Visionscape® Smart Camera that combines technologies from machine vision and auto ID into a singular PCB inspection solution that is powerful, low-cost, and easy to use.

The Visionscape® Smart Camera can perform as a cost-effective alternative for inspecting boards for misaligned or missing high-value components and connectors, such as heavy or odd-shaped connectors with a high misplacement rate. A single Visionscape® Smart Camera positioned over a conveyor or bench top can verify the accuracy of components and placement, or alternatively identify any errors prior to reflow. More cost-effective than AOI, this quick and simple quality inspection checkpoint enables savings, quality assurance, and line throughput.

The Visionscape® Smart Camera series combines a compact form factor with the broad applicability, versatility and proven performance of Visionscape® machine vision software. Designed for use in a range of applications, the Visionscape® Smart Camera provides a cost-effective, easily deployed solution for manufacturers to monitor quality, control processes, or identify and trace parts on production lines.

As a flexible solution, Visionscape ® Smart Cameras can be used for quality inspection, device metrology inspection, and full traceability. They stand alone in their support of Track, Trace, and Control processes with full blown optical character recognition (OCR), optical character verification (OCV), and full reading of any barcodes or 2D symbols including the most difficult direct part marks (DPM). The advanced technology used in this system includes high-end machine vision algorithms and state-of-the-art high-speed multi-core dual processor smart camera technology. This fast and powerful system is not only simple and easy to use, program, and operate, but also totally transportable across a wide variety of applications throughout the factory – all at a fraction of the cost of traditional AOI solutions.

As a portable one-piece unit, the Visionscape® Smart Camera is easy to handle for placement and install in over-the-belt or bench top inspection applications. Any job changeovers can be done quickly through user-friendly software. With a solid-state design and no moving parts, no maintenance is required.

Adding Track, Trace and Control can improve outbound product quality by several percentage points simply by catching potential problems before it is too late. The built-in communication protocols and I/O features make this system a snap to interface with any PLC, PC-based, or networked MES system currently in use within the factory.

When the new Dallas Cowboys football stadium opens in June, it may not only be the largest sports stadium in the world, but also the one with the most technological innovations.

Three million square feet is a lot of stadium, and 1.1 billion dollars is a lot of money, but part of what will make this new stadium shine is the technology that has been built into it. Jerry Jones, the owner of the team, is high on technology. Pete Walsh, head of technology for the Cowboys, says “I was given a blank sheet of paper and told to go create the future.”

Walsh took that directive literally and has created a tech marvel in the heart of Texas. When fans attend a game at the new stadium, they will be able to e-mail photos to friends, find lost children, cash in wireless coupons and watch customized content on the thousands of televisions, according to a Dallas News story. That’s a far cry from the limited technology that was available at the Cowboy’s previous, 37-year-old facility.

Walsh says, “Texas Stadium doesn’t have a whole lot of technology in it. Basically, you flip on the lights and roll out the football. In the new stadium, almost everything is tied to technology and to a computer.” Here are some of the innovations in the new stadium:

* The stadium will sport two 60 yard video monitors above the field.
* They will be among the 2800 monitors installed in the stadium, every one of which will have its own IP address.
* Stadium personnel can put any available video stream on any monitor at any time, via computer control.
* When complete, parents and stadium security will be able to track children via RFID.
* That same RFID system could help keep track of team property, and keep it from being removed from the stadium.
* Thirty antennae are spread throughout the stadium to insure good telephone and WiFi inside the facility.

Even if the team does not perform, the stadium will. Although most of us do not often think about it, there is a lot of technology packed into almost everything that is being built these days. There is no reason that stadiums should be any different. This new facility will give other team owners another way in which they need to keep up with the Jones’.

The 2009 HIMSS Exhibition featured more than 900 exhibiting companies and health informatics-related organizations. Despite a stormy economy, many vendors reached networking milestones and experienced increased interest in certain products due to the stimulating effect of the federal stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Overall attendance at the 2009 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition was down a little more than five percent this year from 2008. Many exhibitors noticed the difference, including Gail Malcolm, HIMSS fellow and marketing manager for Siemens’ Image and Knowledge Management Division.

“We’re really seeing the economic impact this year,” said Malcolm, “We certainly don’t see the number of attendees that we have in the past, and a lot of vendors are cutting back on their staff. Everyone is trying to tighten the belt and for a lot of customers, the funding for travel has just been eliminated.”

But despite fewer numbers, business was still booming due to the expected influx of funding from the recent Health IT stimulus bill.

“We’ve seen leads triple since the ARRA,” said Lynne Durham, senior public relations officer for Sage Software. “Our industry is affected a lot less than other industries in large part because of the stimulus act.”

Newer companies also experienced milestones, like Aruba Wireless Networks, which offers network integration solutions for health care centers. Since 2003 the company has secured 25 percent of the market for network integration and was flush with activity at HIMSS.

“We did better in the first few hours on Sunday than we did the entire HIMSS conference last year,” said Manav Khurana, head of marketing for Aruba Wireless Networks.

Products for “Meaningful Use”

One aspect of the ARRA that has vendors and health care systems on high alert is the lack of a clear definition of “meaningful use” — a standard of performance for health care information technologies. HIMSS offers guidelines for Clinical Diagnostic Support (CDS), e-Prescribing and quality outcomes and reporting, and many of the products on the showroom floor were a reflection of these processes.

Siemens displayed a software data management tool that uses algorithms to extrapolate data from clinical notes, reports and spreadsheets for quality control and reporting purposes. The REMIND Platform, which stands for Reliable Extraction & Meaningful Inference from Non-structured Data, automates reporting and helps free up personnel. Henri Primo, Siemens’ national director of marketing, explained the cycle of required CMS and Joint Commission quality of care measures and the reporting that is required by health care centers. In 2004 there were just 10 quality of care measures. Today there are an expansive 72 measures.

“A lot of hospitals trademark their quality of care, but quality control standards are constantly changing,” said Primo. “What is good today is not necessarily good tomorrow.”

Philips Business Development Manager Eric van’t Hoff talked to DOTmed about Philips’ telePC tablet technology, which serves much like a medical-grade PDA for clinicians. The product is sealed, hygienic, drop-proof, WIFI and Bluetooth-enabled, and includes a digital camera. The tablet is also capable of barcoding, RFID and asset tracking, and serves many clinical functions, including admissions assistance, vital-signs tracking, documentation, and physician order entry.

Physicians Warm to e-Prescribing and Patient Messaging

Atlantic Health, northern New Jersey’s largest health care system, has integrated many of McKesson’s health care information systems, including Horizon Expert Orders, a computerized provider order entry (CPOE) solution, in order to improve efficiency and quality outcomes. In just the past year, Linda Reed, vice president of information systems and CIO for Atlantic Health, saw a 27 percent surge in physician-patient messaging.

“It’s a different kind of communication that is really going to grow,” she said. At first physicians seemed wary of being bowled over by patient requests and comments, but the initial hesitance seems to have waned for many, and support for electronic prescriptions is building. As a result of their Health IT implementation, Atlantic Health has reduced the medication error rate to less than one percent at participating facilities.

Allscripts showcased an electronic health record kiosk, which allows patients to check in by biomedical hand scanning, retrieves scheduling and medical record information for clinical review and allows patients to view their personal profile and health maintenance plan. For e-Prescribing, Allscripts offers physicians an iPhone solution that provides remote access to records and the ability to create orders anytime and anywhere.

A Gradual Process

“The health care industry is not particularly agile,” but hospitals are making the big push to implement healthcare informatics technology by 2010-2020, said Glenn Loos-Austin, a user interface designer for EPIC.

One of the products EPIC featured at HIMSS was MyChart, which allows patients to access charts online. With the wave of new record accessibility products on the market, the issue of patient privacy becomes increasingly more important to address, especially since there aren’t clear regulatory guidelines from HIPAA or federal agencies.

At this point it’s about finding the right balance, said Loos-Austin. We try to adhere to HIPAA-like guidelines in the absence of actual mandates.

Economic pressures and the innate complexity of hospital systems make implementation a painstaking process. Even with the promise of funding, how much and where the actual federal stimulus monies can be applied is still a big question mark.

“There’s a high level of strategy, but no definitive answer as to how it’s actually going to occur,” said Jim Morgan, director of marketing for FujiFilm. The company had integrated and teleradiology-enabled RIS/PACS solutions on view, including the Synapse PACS and Empiric RIS.

Morgan mentioned that one of the concerns of vendors and their customers is the percentage of these technologies that won’t end up being covered by federal funding.

“If only 40 percent of the total cost gets funded, where is the other 60 percent going to come from? There has to be some sort of delta between the two,” said Morgan. Until there are concrete answers, vendors are trying to turn out products that increase productivity at a lower cost of ownership for the maximum use of their investments.

(Original article: http://www.dotmed.com/news/story/8798/)

Touchatag is a new tool for Twitter users being tested by R/GA’s Richard Ting that involves the use of tags on objects, that when swiped, can trigger content to be sent to the microblog. Potential uses of the Touchatag platform, which combines radio frequency identification technology with the bar-code system, include a shopper receiving branded content via an RFID chip placed in a pair of sneakers purchased at a shoe store, according to this article.

(Original article: New Tagging Tool Could Link Marketers With Twitter Users)