Intermec, HeathWyse, Data Capture Solutions: Team for Health Care

Intermec Technologies has announced a partnership with HealthWyse and Data Capture Solutions. The goal? Proliferate technology in the hands of health care professions so they can reliably access electronic health records on the go. VARs might be interested in this unique partnership, especially if you’re working in the heath care vertical.

It ties together like this: Intermec is using it’s CN3 ruggedized handheld computers (pictured). HealthWyse runs their mobile clinical software on it. Data Capture Solutions is there for service and tech support. The reason for this joint venture is because  traditionally, consumer-based PDA failures caused problems and reduced mobile clinicians’ productivity.

According to Intermec’s announcement, VDC Research says the “average annual failure rates for non-ruggedized handheld computers are 38 percent, compared to just 11 percent for ruggedized models.” With the increase in reliability, doctors can avoid having to take notes and then popping them into a computer later, or transcribing them somewhere else while waiting for a broken PDA to be replaced.

Not sure the CN3 is for your customers? The hand held comes with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and WAN (3G CDMA/EV-DO or GSM/EDGE) for electronic media records nearly anywhere within the HealthWyse software. Simultaneously, it’s being touted as small enough for use at point-of-care, while large and usable enough enough so procedure codes, notes and other activity can be added to electronic medical records in real-time.

Caritas Home Care, one of the first home care providers that adopted the technology, noted that their old-consumer based devices:

Interestingly, the CN3 has an integrate camera that can shoot video, too. Caritas said they plan on using that to help make diagnosis easier for on-site doctors who confer with a specialist elsewhere.

Worthy of note here: however interesting and new this product and partnership sounds, there’s no word of what Caritas Home Care was using in the past. What kind of consumer-based devices? What were they running? Was it consumer based software as well as hardware? Never the less, this seems like a trend that’s increasing more and more as mobile PCs tablets and hand held devices look to revolutionize healthcare and make it more efficient.