Getting in Touch with Technology
Adam Landman |
Adam Landman, MD, Director of
Clinical Informatics, BWH Department of Emergency Medicine
You
may have seen the television commercials of people exchanging multimedia and
other content on their smart phones by simply bumping their phones together.
This latest feature in mobile devices is called near-field communication, or
NFC, and may one day be used for more than just sharing home videos and photos.
Adam
Landman, MD, director of Clinical Informatics in BWH Emergency Medicine, is now
taking NFC to the hospital bedside. As one of four recipients of BWH's Biomedical Research
Institute (BRI) Translatable Technologies & Care Grant for 2012, Landman was recognized
for his research project to create and test mobile device software that may one
day make a common task in patient care more pleasant and efficient.
Please describe your
project.
Our
project tackles the challenges clinical staff face when electronically administering
medications to patients. The Brigham is one of the world leaders in electronic
medication administration reconciliation (e-MAR), and we have come up with an
idea of how to make e-MAR more efficient.
We
are creating a software app that takes advantage of the NFC feature built into
commercially available tablet devices. For this project specifically, we are
using the Nexus 7 tablet.
What challenges will your
high-tech project address?
Nurses
spend about 28 percent of their time administering medicine to patients. They
currently use workstations-on-wheels and barcode scanners to do this. It can be challenging to scan the
medication using this process. For instance, if the medication is in a crinkled
wrapper, the barcode on it may be hard to scan. In addition, the
workstation-on-wheels can be clunky. You either have to wheel around the laptop
station or have a desktop in every exam room.
How will your software app
improve the current process?
Since
a tablet is mobile, small and easy to use, we think it will create a more user-friendly
experience for nurses. Rather than pushing around a workstation and fidgeting
with a barcode scanner, a nurse may simply hover the tablet within a few
millimeters of a medication bearing an NFC tag. Our software app will securely
exchange data between the tag and tablet, identifying the medication. It's that
simple.
What
inspired you to consider near-field technology as a health care tool?
There
are certainly people in health care talking about near-field technology, but we
haven't really seen it used in clinical devices. We hope we are at the leading
edge of applying this new technology. Since millions of medications are administered daily to
hospitalized patients across the country, shaving a few seconds from the e-MAR
process by using the latest mobile devices may greatly improve a nurse's efficiency
and quality of life.
How
can clinicians and patients prepare for advances in health care technology?
I
think instead of preparing for it, we should shape it. Health care professionals
should be leading the development of apps that are going to work best for us
and for our patients, while protecting patient privacy.
We
also need to make sure we are not overloading clinicians with data. There is a growing
collection of apps that monitor blood pressure and other physiologic
parameters. But we have to be mindful about how we harness and summarize this
data so we can use it in the most effective and meaningful way.
What
has been the most exciting part about working on this project?
I
am excited to work with an all-star, interdisciplinary project team, including
Anne Bane, RN, nurse director, BWN Clinical Systems Innovation, Stephen Miles,
MS, research affiliate at the MIT Auto-ID Laboratory, and Pamela Neri, MS, Partners
Clinical & Quality Analysis Project manager. I am grateful to the BRI for their generous support enabling
us to work on this early-stage technology innovation. It's a great advantage to
be part of the BWH research community.