55.7 F
San Diego
Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024
-Advertisement-

Palomar Health Licenses App For Doctors Remote Access to Data

PALOMAR HEALTH

President, CEO: Michael H. Covert.

Patient net revenues: $490 million (2011).

No. of local employees: 4,000.

Headquarters: Carmel Mountain Ranch and Escondido.

Year founded: 1933.

Description: Palomar provides a full spectrum of health services, including state-of-the-art hospitals, birth centers, rehabilitation and long-term care centers, and home health care and hospice services.

Mission: To heal, comfort, and promote health of North County residents.

Key factors for success: Regarded by patients, physicians and employees as the health system of choice; and recognized nationally for the highest quality of clinical care and access to comprehensive services.

Palomar Health has selected San Antonio-based AirStrip Technologies to develop and market the San Diego health system’s smartphone app that allows physicians to view their hospitalized patients’ electronic medical records at anytime and anywhere.

As a result of its exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with Palomar Health, AirStrip likely will be the first software development company to commercialize an EMR mobile device app for physicians to use outside the hospital, Alan Portela, the La Jolla-based CEO of AirStrip, said.

Palomar’s app, named Medical Information Anytime Anywhere, will particularly benefit on-call physicians, such as Dr. Benjamin Kanter, a critical care specialist as well as chief medical information officer at Palomar Health. With the MIAA app, Kanter said he will be able “to quickly access the electronic medical records of a patient when the hospital calls me while I’m watching my child play soccer on the weekend.”

Now when he or other physicians are called in the evenings or on weekends, Kanter said, “The conversations with the hospital staff can be long and complicated because we have to ask a lot of questions to get the information we need to make a clinical decision.”

MIAA “provides secure access to real-time lab reports, radiology images, vital signs and drug allergies along with the medical history,” he said. “This gives physicians the information required to make the correct decision.”

By reducing the time that a physician spends to obtain information about a hospitalized patient’s condition, such technologies as MIAA should benefit patient care, Kanter, one of the three Palomar Health staff members who designed the app with seed funding from the Palomar Health Foundation, said.

While the details of the licensing agreement were not disclosed, Kanter noted that Palomar Health retains the intellectual property rights for MIAA. Airstrip, one of several companies interested in developing and marketing MIAA, was selected because MIAA fits with the company’s current mobile platform, and “AirStrip has a national presence,” Kanter said.

Designed to Work on Any Device

Portela said that AirStrip will integrate MIAA with the company’s current mobile services that allow a physician to use a smartphone or an electronic tablet to remotely monitor a hospitalized patient’s temperature and other vital signs as well as heart function via real-time electrocardiogram. AirStrip’s technology also enables out-of-hospital monitoring of obstetric patients’ maternal contraction patterns and fetal heart tracings.

Kanter said that he and his Palomar Health colleagues designed MIAA to work seamlessly with the many EMR applications now commercially available to hospitals, outpatient clinics and physicians’ offices. Because physicians typically view a patient’s EMR on a large desktop computer screen in a hospital, Kanter and his colleagues designed the MIAA app to present EMR data to accommodate the much smaller “real estate” of a cellphone screen.

“We reformulated it so the doctor has one way to look at the information with the fingertip controls that he or she is used to with smartphones,” he said. Because MIAA is still under development, Palomar doctors are not yet routinely using the app. Pilot studies first must occur, Kanter said and added that the initial six to eight week evaluation soon will begin and involve 12 Palomar Health physicians.

Before learning about Palomar Health’s efforts to develop MIAA, Portela said that he had realized that, “if we want to make a positive impact on clinical workflow, we had to focus on EMRs.” Portela said MIAA’s development by a “close collaboration of a physician working with technology experts” was among the factors that persuaded him to contact Palomar Health about licensing the app for the AirStrip platform.

“The move by Airstrip further emphasizes the importance of the San Diego region for the future of connected health,” Rob McCray, president & CEO of the San Diego-based Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance. “Airstrip, which is a WLSA industry member, is rapidly establishing itself as a leader in medical information sharing, and this platform integration is a key step in improving physicians’ access to patient data, wherever they may be connected.”

Airstrip’s first priority, Portela said, will be to integrate in 90 days MIAA “as it is now” into the company’s platform.

Cathy Yarbrough is a freelance writer for the San Diego Business Journal.

-Advertisement-

Featured Articles

Oberon Eyes Europe for Renewable DME

Leaders of Influence in Law 2024

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-

Related Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-