Last week, the national healthcare IT coordinator, Dr. David Blumenthal, predicted that the industry will need at least 50,000 new health information management professionals to support the transition to electronic health records.

A clear plan and coordinated approach to electronic medical records years ago would have made the transition much easier but the vast array of systems, the inability of those systems to talk to one another and the sheer scope of the project is daunting. While we all wait for the time when we carry our medical records with us on a thumb drive, there are small and important improvements in health care communications that can be implemented right now.

A number of companies are solving communications and data management problems for healthcare professionals with new applications for smart telephony. One of them is Magpie Healthcare, a spinoff of Magpie Telecom Insiders. I knew this great group of developers back in our AT&T (News - Alert) days…I was on the Communications side of the house and they were the brainiacs at Bell Labs. After a transition to Lucent, they launched their own company and have been doing custom communication software ever since.

After working on a number of healthcare projects, Magpie found a consistent theme. Simple things such as communications between health care professionals and hospital departments was inefficient and, in some cases, unsafe. In many hospitals, doctors and nurses still rely on traditional phone systems, hand written notes and manual scheduling that do not adequately track and chart their activities. Valuable resources were being pulled from patient care to make phone calls and track down specialists. Trained professionals were spending much more time at the nurse’s station than at the patient’s bedside. Not only is this type of communication amazingly inefficient, it also seriously compromises the quality of care.

 The developers at Magpie, leveraging their experience with traditional phones, VoIP and wireless technology came up with a solution that is smart, easy and elegant. Called “CareConnect,” the software works on existing phone systems and provides each department with one touch access to the vital information it needs. On-call schedules are automated, updated and distributed on existing desk and wireless devices. A new unified communications platform allows for efficient call outs, freeing personnel to concentrate on the patient, not sitting on the phone. Calls are logged and reported to meet hospital requirements. It works well, healthcare professionals love it and patient outcomes are improved.

Smartphones are also playing a bigger part in streamlining health care procedures. Recently Stanford Hospital entered into a trial with Apple (News - Alert) and Epic Systems, another provider of healthcare information systems, which allows medical staff access to patient charts on an iPhone. More and more, physicians are using smartphones to access reference guides, lab results and view patient’s vital signs. At the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, doctors and nurses are using Blackberry phones to communicate with each other instead of using pagers. In fact, market research firm Manhattan Research of New York reports that about 64 percent of U.S. physicians are using smartphones.

Other interesting applications that leverage today’s smartphones include one from mVisum Inc., of Cedar Brook, N.J., which lets ambulances send EKG images and patient data directly to doctors' BlackBerrys and AirStrip OB, which lets obstetricians access maternal and fetal data remotely on the iPhone (News - Alert) through a special server.

There are some privacy hurdles to overcome with smartphone applications and hospitals are rightly proceeding cautiously. In the meantime, if I’m in the hospital, I sure hope the nurse is by my side and not tied to the old-style phone at the nurse’s station.