For those unable to attend the FutureMed program this week at Singularity University, you can catch daily recaps and in-depth pieces about key medical tech unveiled at the event on Medgadget. Here's a taste of day one:
We heard from Health IT [Information Technology] guru Christopher Longhurst, who rolled out the EMR [Electronic Medical Records] at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, and Daniel Riskin from Vanguard Medical Technologies....
Two pieces of information stood out most from Christopher’s talk. One was that Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital was one of the first to publish direct evidence of the reduction of all-hospital mortality after implementation of an EMR. The other was how insanely expensive it is to implement EMRs in an in-patient setting, and how he hopes and believes that these systems will become less expensive and more like commodities in the near future.
Daniel described how the most powerful analytics in health care will come from fully structuring a patient's record. To this aim he spoke about and demonstrated an application called DocTalk that uses speech recognition to automatically translate a doctor’s dictation into structured clinical data. This allows physicians to avoid the painful process of categorizing and organizing every piece of information on patients by him- or herself.
Also presenting on the first day of the program were Wired executive editor Thomas Goetz, MPH, and Lawrence Sherman, MD. Goetz and Sherman are both scheduled to speak at the Medicine 2.0 Conference at Stanford on Sept. 16.
Up-to-the-minute updates on FutureMed can be found under the Twitter hashtag #FutureMed.