The Merlin™ Patient Care System is a new portable system that programs St. Jude Medical‘s implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and pacemakers. It is an interesting product that was actually designed with the help of IBM. And you probably didn’t know that IBM was in the health care business. The new system, designed by the same IBM engineers who captured the triple crown of the gaming industry, will better enable doctors and company reps to analyze and program St Jude devices.
The Merlin Patient Care System supports current and previous generation devices. It is a portable computer with an LCD touch screen that enables clinicians to retrieve and analyze patient information during routine follow-up visits and quickly and easily make programming changes to the implanted devices.
IBM helped St. Jude Medical integrate the large viewing screen with touch-point capabilities, an embedded keypad platform and a Linux-based operating system. The hardware platform supports Merlin’s graphical user interface, which supports improved workflow and dramatically enhances the user experience. St. Jude Medical partnered with its customers to build an intuitive and flexible system designed to meet clinician and patient care needs.
This is an excellent example of what IBM believes it can offer to the health care industry by capitalizing on its knowledge base to deliver real solutions, as the world of medical gadgets gets more complex, and increasingly, more high tech.
The press release at IBM…
IBM Technology Collaboration Solutions website…