eHealth, Dr. Kiosk – April 16, 2009

By John Feilen

Emerging technology is allowing the healthcare industry to develop applications, which not only care for patients more efficiently but also deliver healthcare to those who may not be able to easily visit a doctor’s office due to physical limitations or remote locations. In their Patient Safety and Technology Laboratory Massachusetts General Hospital has several new projects. Two of interest: 1) a Patient Care Kiosk, which allows for virtual visits between patient and doctor and monitoring of health indicators; blood pressure, weight, etc. 2) The Pill Bottle Reader sorts a person’s pills as though they were coins in a bank, determining what medication they are taking and what needs to be refilled through an online reconciliation process with patient records.

Following is more detail on both applications from the Mass General website as well as their URL chronicling other initiatives.

Patient Care Kiosk
Working with Dr. Ron Dixon, a primary care physician at Mass General, a Sims Lab team has been developing a health kiosk. This device supports both real-time (synchronous) and non-real-time (asynchronous) visits between a patient and a physician. The kiosk contains two-way video and audio links and can monitor blood pressure, heart rate, SpO2, peak-flow, weight and blood coagulation times. The objective of this project is to empower physicians and patients with more convenient approaches routine care as well as to provide access to traditionally people who are traditionally underserved by the conventional healthcare system.


Pill-Bottle Reader
This research project attempts to automatically determine what medications a patient is on through reading their pill bottles. The vision is that a patient brings all of their medication bottles with them in a small bag when they visit the doctor. The contents of the bag are dumped into a hopper that reads each individual medication bottle's label, reconciles the data with the meds the patient is known to be on, and prints an exception report for the physician. The objective is to get patient medication data in a more convenient, accurate way.

Massachusetts General Patient Safety and Technology Website:
http://www2.massgeneral.org/anesthesia/index.aspx?page=research_biomedical&subpage=patientsafety2

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