Inspiring Nursing Practice via E-Health

My Journey from Nursing to Informatics: What I Learned

I went to nursing school to take care of mothers and babies; health IT was not yet on my radar screen. Having been inspired by my own birth experiences, I wished to support and advocate for other childbearing women.

When it came time to go to graduate school, nursing informatics was an option about which I’d read and, because I already appreciated that technology was becoming more prevalent in my daily life, it made sense that technology would at some point change healthcare. I wanted to learn more and to be part of this change.

After graduate school, I combined the knowledge I learned about systems, process and workflows, and the importance of data, with clinical certification and became a women’s services clinical specialist. Nursing informatics certification followed and I represented women’s health nursing at health IT venues as well as through my specialty nursing organization. On the clinical practice side, I was able to articulate the informatics perspective as part of the corporate leadership team, influencing health IT solutions.

During this time, colleagues inspired me in two ways: first by encouraging me to pursue a PhD and the second to continue to work on and advocate for health IT’s value as a vehicle to visualize and empower nursing practice.

I also began to realize that I have an opportunity to inspire others to advocate for health IT that works with us rather than against us.

To read more, visit Himss blog

Can Alexa Really Diagnose Illnesses?

I think it's safe to say, he have all heard about Alexa from Amazon. If not, well Amazon's Alexa is an artificial intelligent personal assistant, designed to automate and assist people around their homes via voice commands. Simple, say, "Alexa, switch my light off" or "Turn-up my heating" or "Play some Barry White's music" and it's done without you moving a finger.

Now, a company by the name of Healthtap Doctor AI, has launched an Artificial Intelligence Doctor using Alexa's Technology. The technology was developed to diagnose people's illness by simply understanding their symptoms.

But the really sophisticated part lays in the backend where Healthtap's artificial intelligence technology parses data from all those medical records to consider what the user's symptoms most likely mean and convey that information in a human-like way.

Dr. AI will provide feedback on the user's stated problem and, if it deems necessary, connect the user with on of Healthtap's associated Doctor.

Stay tune for more updates. Alternatively, check out a basic version the Doctor AI technology on Amazon's Alexa update page.

In the mean time, you can click on the link below to watch a sample video and leave your comments in the box below. Cheers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKyC_2E266s

Indigestible Sensor used to improve Childre's Health

The Proteus Discover digital health system uses an ingestible sensor embedded in a pill to record data about – among other things – patients’ medication adherence. The sensor sends data to an adhesive patch, which in turn sends it to a mobile device. But what are the use cases that require that kind of precision and reliability?

For the Children’s Health, a system of pediatric hospitals in the Dallas, Texas area, they turned to an ingestible sensor when other kinds of remote monitoring weren’t quite getting the job done for a population of post-organ transplant teenagers.

“What happens when you’re 15 or 16?” Julie Hall-Barrow, the vice president of virtual health and innovation at Children’s Health said this week at the Digital and Personal Connected Health conference at HIMSS17. “You want to start driving, making decisions, you’re independent, your mother is not on your hip 24-7. But the problem with this population is their mother had to be on their hip 24-7. It’s an extreme disease that requires a lot of regimen, and for a lot of kids the transition from Mom or Dad doing these things to doing it themselves is the transition from child to adult. And they have to do it, but there’s got to be a better way.”


For younger transplant patients, it sufficed to ask the parents whether they had taken their medication. But adolescent patients were much more likely to forget and to say they had taken their pills just to get the alarm to stop.

To read more: Check out Jonah Comstock on Mobile Health News

Simplifying Pre-surgery Consultations

If you're considering having an operation or your GP has suggested you may need surgery, then there are many ways to simplify your pre-surgery consultation. Gone are the days of sitting in waiting rooms and long appointments with GPs.

 

 

 

Healthcare Temps aspires to bride the gap between Hospital care & Home care.

Sometimes a trip to A&E can result in a prolonged hospital stay. Treatment of serious injuries and illnesses, such as stroke or wounding, may involve intensive diagnostic tests, blood transfusion and possibly surgery. After such treatments, some patients find themselves enduring months of rehabilitation and re-ablement services. In the late 1980s, post-hospital accounted for an average of 10%-12% of healthcare resources. Thirty years later and it has more than triple. According to recent reports, for every one person discharge from hospital, there are three-four people waiting for that bed. In other recent news, the UK’s Minister of health noted that the Government place larger emphasis on enhancing home care / post hospital care in order to free up more hospital beds for incoming patients. Consequently, the quality of home-care delivered to out-patients and rehabs must be stepped up a notch. This can be achieved through the adaptation of cutting edge technology, such as, real time mobile applications.

Post hospital care services can takes various forms and ranges from, rehabilitation therapy, reablement support, out-patient care, post-acute care and more. Two of the biggest challenges affecting the delivery and quality of post-hospital care includes the lack of qualified trained staff and cost. Some of the ways in which Heallthcare Temps is bridging the gap between post-hospital care and home care is through tele-medicine and call out care. Key advantages of these services include;

Stay tune for more  

Benefits of Virtual Care to Home Cared Patients

      Image the Elderly being cared for from the comfort of their home, without having to go to the hospital or clinic unless it's an emergency or critical appointment? Well, through real time video communication, the elderly patients at home can access medical care and support 24/7. This is what the future looks like as a consequence of Virtual care, otherwise known as Tele-health.

   Through telenursing, a registered nurse is able to provide nursing services through remote telecommunications. While aiding the patient and family with virtual learning, the telenurse provides the best practice to achieve optimal outcomes for the patient. “Telehealth nursing practice is now considered to be a sub-specialty of nursing

  Today’s healthcare industry is changing rapidly. Technology has allowed healthcare professionals to remotely access, monitor and manage patient medical needs. Telenurses are able to case manage patients with chronic illnesses, provide counseling, and coordinate care among healthcare providers. Allowing the telenurse to collect and transmit data for clinicians to interpret so medical interventions maybe applied. “Telehealth services include health promotions, disease prevention, diagnosis, consultation, education, and therapy.” (Hebda & Czar, 2013, p. 505).

   Secondly, through virtual care, patients become more educated. How? Opportunities frequently arise when patients are able to learn more about their illnesses via the web and can have more meaningful discussions with a nurse who can involve patient in the decision making of their health care.

    Empowerment through technology enables people who are recovering from operations or dealing with chronic conditions such as asthma or diabetes use self-care devices to help with their recovery. Tele-health acts as a bridge between the self-caring patient and the guidance from the practitioner to help make recover a success.

    The fourth benefit involves saving of time and money to both. Patients who are under telenurses save time and money as they don't have to travel to see a nurse. Likewise, the clinic or hospital has more free time to deal with more urgent health care problems.

    When you're telenursing, you can still have empathetic relationships with your patients as you    care for and communicate with them. The only difference is that you're doing it via real time     video rather than in person.

A Great Tech Development for Elderly Receiving Care at Home:

Caring for the elderly has its ups and downs. On the one hand, it can be lots of fun, especially when listening to old stories about the past. On the other hand, it can be very stressful, particularly when their hearing begins to fade, dementia steps-in or they are recovering from a severe physical injury. The latter scenarios present huge challenges for family members and relatives, who are now charge with the responsibility of either providing or finding suitable quality care for their elderly love one.

 Above all else, it is inevitable that some elderly will require some form of care at home, at some stage in their life. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), by 2050, approximately two billion people will be above the age of 60 yrs.

We live in an advance world, yet technology seems revolve around the youths, whilst making the elderly feel like a fish out of water. But not for long! In recent months, a few start-up companies have started developing and/or moderating modern technology geared towards the elderly, and more so, towards elderly healthcare at home.

For instance, Healthcare-Temps aims to make life easier for elderly people requiring care at home through virtual care on smart watches. In other words, elderly people at home can now speak to a healthcare-specialist from the comfort of their home via 3G Android Smart Watches.

This application saves them time, arranging transportation, travelling to and from the clinic or hospital and avoids waiting queues. Further, if the elderly user is more serious or beyond the requirements of virtual care, they can in turn get a home visit from a healthcare professional, such as, Doctor, Nurse, Neurologist, therapist and so forth. This also put the family members at ease since they know their love ones are just one touch away from accessing a healthcare professional. Especially family members who work long hours or live in separate dwellings from their love ones.

What’s more, with healthcare-temps smart watches, the elderly receiving care at home can also check their blood pressure, heart rate, monitor motion, GPS tracker & activity and loads more. Coming soon will be alarm/panic button direct to ambulance facilities and/or key family member in times of falls or other emergency system. Tech development, like this, has the potential of cutting elderly care cost in £1,000s per month.

Another tech development that could help elderly receiving care at home, include waist-line airbags, which can cushion people, in the event of a fall, minimising hip-injury or hip-replacement surgery.

To find out more about Healthcare-Temps Smart Watches, visit care-mart.co.uk