In discussing the National Broadband Plan in a public forum we got on the subject of the opportunities in healthcare 2.0-type services.

Often we get into the M2M of pills that are used to help track digestive problems and other cool equipment that takes advantage of sensors and networking, but the medical profession would benefit from better systems in general.

Anecdotally, my doctors are paperless. They carry tablets and everything they do they record on the tablet.

They bought their systems by working with a managed healthcare insurance company. Their practice was a flagship for working with the medical insurance to get the claims automated and the doctors are optimized based on patient’s normal needs for specialists. They were optimized and ironically had a dispute with the insurance company over price and guess what they no longer take one of the insurance company’s plans.

The optimization aggregated the treatment and saved time on processing claims.

However, their paperless system is still a data entry system. The nurse takes my temperature with a digital system. She reads it and types it into my chart. The blood pressure is also electronic and she reads it and types it into my chart. Obviously some networking would save a step and guarantee accuracy.

Except of the scale at my doctors office (why is that?), almost every system is now being done with some silicon involved, but still has a human factor for editing.

Now the charts are e-mailed and in my records for my sleep apnea study and the doctor loves showing me the flow (or lack thereof) as calculated by the 20+ sensors that slept with me for a night.  In this case the system was automated in processing records from online to my records.

Lots of the charting systems are now coming into the online world with middleware bridging the gap between patient record systems and specialized equipment.

When the Obama administration talks about automation of the medical record its that backend data they are talking about, but for me the devil’s detail is the integration of charts to medical records.

I have seen lots of great M2M for medical, I have not seen a consensus on how it is all managed.