Wednesday, September 8, 2010

The Future for Physician Mobility #mHealth

Today is day #1 of the International mHealth Networking Conference in San Diego and the day is starting to wrap up.

As a physician champion for the HCPLive Network, I'm excited to blog about some of the highlights from this meeting. You can also follow updates about the mHealth Networking Conference on HCPLive.com.

This afternoon, I attended a session titled, "A New and Better State of the Future for Physician Mobility." The speaker was Richard Pentella from PatientKeeper.  He spoke about the mobility of physicians and then spent some time focusing on verbal orders in the era of HITECH and CPOE..

So, let's take a look at verbal orders. How do we deal with this when a hospital is relying on computerized physician order entry (CPOE)? Back in the day of paper orders, it was easy to call a verbal order and then swing by the chart to sign the verbal order at a later time/date. Now, the implementation of verbal orders is getting more complicated as hospitals are aiming to become 100% digital.

If we look at the verbal order clinical workflow, we see many areas where a medical error could occur. The use of a mobile device will reduce verbal order medical errors in the setting of CPOE and you don't necessarily need a mobile device that fully integrates with the hospital CPOE. There are other ways to leverage mobile devices to improve the clinical workflow and to reduce the potential for medical errors when physicians are giving verbal orders.


I want to thank Epocrates for sponsoring these blog posts from the 2nd International mHealth Networking Conference. Epocrates, Inc. develops clinical information and decision support tools that enable healthcare professionals to find answers more quickly and confidently at the point of care.

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