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In This Issue:
Adam Landman, MD, Director of Clinical Informatics, Emergency Medicine
You may have seen the television commercials of people exchanging multimedia and other content by simply bumping their smart 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 to create and test mobile device software that may make a common task in patient care more efficient. Landman recently sat down with BWH Bulletin to answer some questions about his work.
Could you 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 currently use workstations-on-wheels and barcode scanners to administer medicine to patients. 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 userfriendly experience. 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, meaningful way.
What has been the most exciting part about working on this project?
I’m excited to work with an all-star, interdisciplinary team, including Anne Bane, RN, nurse director of 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.