The recent death of President Reagan has brought much attention to Alzheimer’s Disease, including its symptoms and the emotional and physical toll it heaps on patients and their families. New studies are underway to combat the disease, and Mrs. Reagan has been staunchly behind stem cell research in order to diminish its effects.

Here’s news of a trial about to begin in Portland, Oregon and Las Vegas that uses wireless networks, along with RFID tags and sensors, to help those stricken with the disease lead more productive lives at home. Intel is leading the effort through its research arm, Proactive Health Research.

RFID tags are placed on items such as teacups, plates, and cabinet doors to monitor routine tasks and determine if a patient is having difficulty. Quarter-size motes, tiny wireless computers, connect disparate sensors embedded around the room. The motes contain tiny processors that gather and transmit the data to a central PC. If the system detects trouble, it will communicate wirelessly with a nearby digital device that can use a PC, television, radio, or cell phone to provide step-by-step audio and visual assistance from doctors or caregivers if required.

Interesting piece on whether wireless technology, specifically WiFi, can be used by doctors and medical facilities to not only help improve patient care but also reduce errors such as incorrect prescriptions. The key here is that the medical industry, especially doctors, have to embrace the concept of using technology to help them do their jobs better, and not to do their jobs for them.

But doctors themselves have been a major obstacle to putting such systems in place. “Many of the systems that were available in the early days seemed to doctors to be slower and more cumbersome than simply handwriting a prescription,” says Suzanne Delbanco, executive director of the Leapfrog Group, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates computerized prescribing. Just last year Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center delayed a computerized prescribing system because doctors protested it was too time-consuming. For a system to work, physicians must embrace it. “If it’s not going to make life easier,” Chief Information Officer Stettheimer says, “I don’t want to put it out there.”

That’s where Wi-Fi could help. “It’s indispensable,” says Mark Maldia, an internist who has worked at St. Vincent’s since last July. At another hospital he might spend an hour running from floor to floor to get an X-ray. Now he can download it in five minutes. Lab results come across as soon as they’re ready, not hours later. And with his tablet PC, Maldia can show patients images of their broken bones or tumors. He can even compare new images to old ones. In March, Maldia became one of the first doctors at St. Vincent’s to begin prescribing drugs by computer. His verdict? “It could be the biggest time-saver yet.”

A new report out of England states that when mobile phone subscribers have the ability to interact/communicate with other wireless devices, especially those operated by healthcare providers, all parties will benefit greatly. Here’s an example that paints a very vivid picture:

Unlike a fixed line service, a mobile phone usually has just one unique user who keeps the handset within reach throughout the day. A mobile phone, therefore, would make an ideal gateway between a range of wireless monitoring devices and a GSM or GPRS network. The report identifies technologies - such as wireless enabled scales and blood pressure monitors - that are essential for a mobile patient monitoring services. Health monitoring services would be used to monitor compliance with diets and healthcare plans and gather data prior to a patient’s visit to their GP.

Research by the non-profit Center for Information Technology Leadership indicates that the standardization of the exchange of healthcare information could save the industry about $86 billion. The CTIL data was presented at the HIMSS conference being held this week in Orlando, Florida.

From American Medical News: Like others in the nonprofit world, hospitals are cashing in on a relatively new way to raise charitable donations by using online auctions as fund-raising events.

Though items have been auctioned over the Internet for years, experts say a surge in the popularity of online auction houses, such as eBay, and growing computer savvy among the general public has helped fuel hospitals’ increased use of the technology. Observers say hospitals also are being forced to be more creative in finding new sources of donations.

From the Boston Globe: Children’s Hospital in Boston said it signed a $35 million, three-year contract with Cerner Corporation to provide a computer system that promises to make patient care more efficient and reduce the chance of medical errors. The contract, for an integrated clinical information technology system, will help doctors and nurses calculate the right medication doses for children, based on weight, and make sure the dose is given to the right patient at the right time. The system will also provide caregivers with up-to-date information about pediatric research.

From the Boston Globe: Dr. Mark Horton has piloted a propeller plane miles into the Arizona desert and thousands of feet to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It’s the only way the ophthalmologist gets to see some of his patients.

So when Horton’s employer, the Indian Health Service, partnered with the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston to roll out a telemedicine program to detect diabetic eye disease, he quickly recognized the scale of the opportunity. The Joslin camera snaps digital photographs of a patient’s retina — without needing to dilate their pupils — and the images are transmitted electronically to a trained reader in a central location.

“Theoretically,” Horton said, “you can [read the images] from home in your underwear.”

From the London Times: England’s National Health Service announced that it has awarded three contracts for computerizing its health records, including two contracts worth $2.8 billion to BT and one to Accenture worth $1.9 billion. It is expected that three further contracts will be announced by the end of the year.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week adopted new rules to improve the universal service program for rural health care providers. The program helps rural health care providers obtain access to modern telecommunications and information services for medical and health maintenance purposes. The six-year-old program provides discounted telecommunications services to rural health care providers at rates equal to the rates charged for similar services in urban areas.

From Government Computer News: The Food and Drug Administration and the National Cancer Institute are teaming to up to build a grid-computing system that will let drug researchers share developmental data about cancer drugs.

The initiative will let researchers electronically submit applications to investigate new drugs. It also will give cancer researchers online access to FDA’s drug review databases, letting them access and evaluate clinical trial data.

The data-sharing program is part of NCI’s broader Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid Project, caBIG.

From Federal Computer Week: Veterans have a new resource for up-to-date information about medications and health news with the Department of Veterans Affairs’ launch of the My HealtheVet portal.

The site is designed to be a one-stop service for VA benefits, special programs and health information. It also offers a health education library and tools for measuring health status.

TheraDoc, Inc. announced contracts with two of the premier medical centers in the country, Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Northwestern) and The John Hopkins Hospital and Health System (Hopkins) in Baltimore.

A medical informatics company specializing in therapeutic decision-support, TheraDoc will implement its Infection Control Assistant, Antibiotic Assistant and Public Health Surveillance at both health care providers. TheraDoc’s knowledge-based solutions will provide clinicians at each institution with enhanced infection control capabilities and the critical, real-time information necessary to reduce errors and improve the quality and timeliness of patient care

This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded a four-year grant for nearly $500,000 to Cybernet Medical, a provider of biometric monitoring technology and medical devices for outpatient care.

The grant will be used to continue a rural telemedicine project between Cybernet and Integris Health’s rural telemedicine project for chronic disease patients in rural Oklahoma. The project’s pilot program began in October 2002 for 11 patients. Beginning in December, the grant will assist 200 patients in six Integris hospitals suffering from heart failure, diabetes, stroke, and congestive obstructive pulmonary diseases.

From the San Francisco Chronicle: Breaking her silence for the first time, the Pakistani woman who threatened to release UCSF patient files on the Internet says she had “no choice” but to breach the hospital’s security after being cut off by the Texas man who’d made her the final link in a long chain of clerical subcontractors.

Lubna Baloch said by e-mail from Karachi that she is “not an opportunistic person who willfully did that to gain some attention.”

She said she is instead the “worst sufferer of this situation” because she was only trying to secure UCSF Medical Center’s help last month in obtaining money that she was owed.

From the Business Journal of Kansas City: In a bold move to assert the power of the physician, 900 Kansas City area doctors have banded together to form a PPO and market themselves directly to big employers and the federal government.

Their pitch: Because of technology, they will be able to prove that they provide better health care services than their competitors.