Recently, we offered a perspective that healthcare-focused mobile apps that target actual healthcare providers are far more important than the vast collection of often trivial end user-focused mobile health apps.
A mobile case in point, and a perfect example of serious mobile healthcare apps, is Nuvon, a company that has focused for nearly a decade on delivering real-time medical device data to healthcare personnel whenever and wherever it is needed, and which recently evolved and expanded its original machine to machine (M2M) technology into a care giver-focused mobile platform.
This core platform, its Vectored Event Grid Architecture (VEGA), captures and transmits real-time patient data from wherever a patient and caregiver happen to be located, and does so automatically through its M2M capabilities.
The most important aspect of VEGA is that it maintains and delivers enormously accurate data.
Over the last 10 months or so, the company has come around to fully embracing mobility and has expanded VEGA’s capabilities through what it has dubbed the Nuvon Mobile Device Manager. The combined hardware and software (packaged specifically as a Nuvon hardware device) collects critical patient device and transmits it to wherever it is needed within a hospital’s collection of clinical information systems, which include’s patient electronic medical records (EMRs).
The image to the right shows but a fraction of the available real-time data that is wirelessly captured and transmitted. Doctors, nurses and other clinicians have an entire array of collected (and more often than not inter-related) data.
The device itself includes a medical grade bar code scanner that will accurately identify any patient (yes, this does assume that the point of human intervention in creating the original barcode information is accurate) and that patient’s EMR.
The chief benefit that Nuvon strives to deliver on is full 100 percent accuracy of data. The company’s president and CEO, Cathleen Asch points out that “Our medical world offers enormous technical advantages, and yet it is also a medical world where the industry itself estimates that as much as 25 percent of patient data is inaccurate. From a medical perspective such a level of inaccuracy is a very dangerous scenario for any patient. Nuvon’s goal is to take that percentage down to zero."
The key to the mobile app and hardware combination is Nuvon’s VEGA platform. It is easily attached, securely and directly, to devices or platforms that support transportation of medical devices. The device can be transported with point-of-care biomedical devices within all settings in a hospital enterprise. It supports both wired and wireless secure, encrypted data transmission.
Once the data is available to VEGA it can then be accurately exported to any mobile device, including iPads (which remain favored devices in the healthcare space).
The secret sauce for VEGA itself is that it is interoperable with a large collection of the devices and networks typically found in hospital environments. Though the new Nuvon Mobile Device Manager is quickly becoming the “visible” face of Nuvon, so to speak, it’s not so visible heart is the company’s original intellectual property that is based on interoperable M2M communications. Through VEGA, any device can also be accessed remotely through M2M interfaces and monitored through a Web interface.
An important component of VEGA, as well, is that all data is completely traceable through a detailed audit trail. Not only data, but whatever actions may have been taken by a given caregiver is also available through the audit trail.
The combination of VEGA’s mobile-driven data accuracy and audit capabilities also provides a platform that ensures compliance with things like HIPAA regulations (among numerous others) – think of it as an additional safety net that keeps hospitals and other healthcare providers ahead of the often onerous regulations (onerous in the sense of how much potentially overwhelming regulatory responsibility there is to cover) they need to deal with on a daily basis.
Nuvon’s use of mobility is an excellent example of mobility being put to work in serious ways within healthcare environments. As we also noted in our earlier article, the technology also creates environments where healthcare providers can gain valuable face to face time with patients. It’s a real win-win.
Tony Rizzo has spent over 25 years in high tech publishing and joins HealthTechZone after a stint as Editor in Chief of Mobile Enterprise Magazine, which followed a two year stretch on the mobile vendor side of the world. Tony also spent five years as the Director of Mobile Research for 451 Research. Before his jump into mobility Tony spent a year as a publishing consultant for CMP Media, and served as the Editor in Chief of Internet World, NetGuide and Network Computing. He was the founding Technical Editor of Microsoft Systems Journal.
Edited by
Braden Becker
