Handheld Hospital Tech: State of the Art

Hospitals: Staffed by highly educated people, used to synthesizing new and complex information and making tough decisions on their patients’ behalf. But for all the cutting-edge research and the priority we place on patient care, hospital electronics in 2006 is still mired in decades-old technologies: Pagers. Centralized labs. Pyxis dispensers. Paper charting.
Why is it that hospitals have been so slow to adapt new technology?
We’re all too aware of the chaos and inefficiency on the typical hospital floor. Seeing house staff, nurses and techs running around checking vital signs, looking for phones to answer pages, logging into computers to jot down lab results, trying to get medications to patients in a timely but safe manner.
A single handheld device can now sweep away much of the inefficiency surrounding these old practicies.
Symbol Technologies has granted Medgadget unprecedented access (for us, at least) to their product development team and new devices. This week, we’ll be profiling two of their new handheld units. We’ll talk to Symbol engineers and marketers about the challenges and rewards of working in the healthcare field. And we’ll examine how these kinds of products will revolutionize the way nurses, techs and doctors work in hospitals.