Sunday, June 22, 2014

Alarms in healthcare - not much has changed

The conclusions of this 2014 study - "Since 2005–2006 when the first survey was conducted, not much has changed. False alarms continue to contribute to a noisy hospital environment, and sentinel events related to alarm fatigue persist. Alarm hazards are a significant patient safety issue."


Monday, June 16, 2014

Wearable Technology - Is this the future user interface for clinicians?

Philips built proof of concept that transfer patient vital signs into Google Glass.

That's an interesting use case for wearable technology, and once the integration will be reliable this might be the future user interface for clinicians.


(image source: Philips.com)


Sunday, June 8, 2014

FDA launches openFDA

The FDA launches openFDA - an open interface designed to make it easier to access large, public health datasets collected by the agency. (You can find an example of a report generated by this interface here).

While having publicly available datasets of adverse events is always a good idea, one need also to think about the known issues of under-reporting in healthcare. There are many good reasons why the healthcare system suffers from under-reporting, and when we analyse this data we always have to ask ourselves - what can we learn from the tip of the iceberg.