IT Expert Voice

The doctor may be in. Or the doctor may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. In either case, telemedicine can enable physicians to improve patient care. But the technology faces regulatory barriers.

Telehealth is bringing treatment to rural patients in Colorado. In June, health insurance carrier UnitedHealthcare and Centura Health, Colorado’s largest health care provider, launched Connected Care, which uses telehealth technology to give patients in four rural Colorado communities expanded access to physicians and specialists. “The goal of the Colorado Telehealth Network is to improve patient safety, increase access to care, reduce health care costs and allow providers to focus on the needs of the patient,” said Steven J. Summer, CEO and president of the Colorado Hospital Association.

Telemedicine also allows healthcare to expand outside the doctor’s office. Medication-management vendor CompuMed, partnered with California School Health Centers Association to use CompuMed’s CardioGram and CardioGramKids electrocardiogram (ECG) telemedicine technologies in more than 150 school health centers throughout California. READ MORE

Innovation is booming in healthcare IT, going well beyond the electronic health record requirements of federal regulations. Healthcare providers are investing in a diverse array of technologies, including mobile and wireless, and open source.

The HITECH Act, with its electronic record-keeping requirements for healthcare providers, gets a lot of attention and financial investment. But competition and margin pressures, coupled with technological developments, are encouraging both large and small healthcare providers to research and invest in a diverse array of solutions. READ MORE

The art of communicating well knows no industry boundaries, yet some vertical markets — those with a rich history of sharing ideas or bringing together disparate groups of people — seem tailor-made for unified communications (UC).

Both healthcare and education are collaboration-intensive environments where quality improves in direct proportion to the amount of valuable input from the right sources. In the hospitality industry, hotels, convention centers, and resorts vie for the conference organizers’ mindshare and money by offering them a smorgasbord packed with every conceivable amenity, be it massages and luxury rental cars, or on-demand videoconferencing and enhanced IP communications. READ MORE

One constraint that could hold back even more widespread adoption of unified communications are the incompatibilities that sometimes exist between vendors’ products.

Not only does unified communications include multiple technologies — think phone calls, voicemail, e-mail, instant messaging, videoconferencing, and presence, among others — it also includes hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors and their channel partners. Each of these brings their own expertise and bias, their own history and legacy, and their preferred methodology and technological approach. No wonder some corporate customers, already burned by proprietary systems and vendor incompatibilities in other implementations, are leery of promises to play well together. READ MORE

Anxious to reap the oft-touted benefits of Windows 7, you may want to jump right into a pilot implementation. But to realize the maximum and most effective return on your latest OS investment and to ensure user buy-in for the initiative, it’s prudent to take a step back and test all your existing applications for compatibility.

No doubt you’ve standardized on many applications, from spreadsheets and presentation tools to word processors and customer relationship management. But how many IT executives can guarantee that end users are running only corporate-approved tools? Who truly knows how many user-downloaded tools, orphan applications, and customized programs lurk throughout your network? The only way to be certain, then, is a PC to laptop treasure hunt to locate all applications and test their compatibility with Windows 7 before entering the migration fray.

After all, 54% of IT executives cite application-testing as the most successful way to mitigate deployment problems, according to a March 2010 report by Info-Tech.  While smaller businesses may solely depend on off-the-shelf software, larger companies’ software mix also often includes proprietary, customized, and non-IT installed applications, says Mark Tauschek, director of research at the London, Ontario research firm. READ MORE

Employees at the Ames Golf and Country Club are playing above par since implementing a Windows 7 solution to support office and point-of-sale (POS) software throughout the 164-acre private facility. READ MORE

The impact of corporations’ extended technology refresh schedules, pent-up demand, reduced vendor pricing and anticipation of the adoption of Windows 7 converged late last year, generating optimism about this year’s sales of desktop and notebook PCs. But analysts’ hardware predictions are conservative, as early adopters plan to refresh only half their organization’s computers. READ MORE

IT vendors and pharmaceutical reps may see a lot of each other, as hardware and software companies beat a path to healthcare providers’ doors. A surprising number of healthcare providers and related medical organizations have made only limited investments in their technology infrastructure. In this comparatively virginal market, Windows 7 will have an easier entry: Healthcare providers will be forced to buy PCs, notebooks, servers, and more to support the federally mandated electronic medical records and health information exchanges. READ MORE