by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | March 07, 2014
From the March 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
In a step to bring Glass to health care, Philips Healthcare recently partnered with Accenture, a technology consulting firm, to investigate its usage. “We were excited by the prospect and agreed with them and thought it would be a good opportunity to, in fact, show the product within various use cases in a real clinical setting,” says Anthony Jones, chief marketing officer for the Philips Healthcare patient care and monitoring solutions business group.
They are currently in the development phase, but have made some strides. Philips created a tablet application for its eICU software that gives physicians access to all of the information from patient bedside monitors and recently began to work on creating a version for Glass.
The process to bring the application to Glass would normally have taken several months, but they managed to get it done in two weeks. There are some limitations because it’s a different platform and certain features that work on a tablet you can’t display on Glass, but they were able to make modifications and scale it down, says Jones.
“It’s not always practical for a nurse or doctor to take their hands off of what they’re doing and pick up a tablet or a smartphone, and so if I can call up information or see something out of the corner of my eye that is helping me without distracting me or requiring me to take my hands off of what I’m doing, that has value from a workflow standpoint for clinicians,” he says.
The product is coming along quickly, but it is nowhere near being commercially available. Philips has been showing it at a number of tradeshows to get feedback from clients, and going forward, they will continue to test it and identify its limitations.
Robots galore
In the past, it was inconceivable that a robot could assist a surgeon during a procedure, but today they are being used in almost every type of surgery. General, cardiothoracic, gastrointestinal, gynecological and neurological are only a few of the specialties that are being done with the aid of robots.
In 1999, Intuitive Surgical took the health care world by storm with the introduction of the da Vinci Surgical System. Using the system, surgeons no longer have to spend hours hunched over a surgical table performing the procedure because they now have the option to perform it remotely from a console. The surgeon can see a high-definition, 3-D video of inside the patient’s body as they control four robotic arms. By accessing the body through a few small incisions, the robot enables the surgeon to carry out precise, minimally invasive surgery that usually results in fewer complications and faster recovery times.
