Cisco Cius tablets running on a San Diego hospital's private mobile cloud allow doctors to monitor patients' vital signs, study radiology images and view EHRs.
In advance of the July 31
launch of the
Cisco
Cius enterprise Android tablet, Palomar Pomerado Health System in San Diego
has deployed the Cius in a pilot trial to enable doctors to access mobile
health applications from a private cloud.
Palomar has built a set of
applications called MIAA (Medical Information Anytime Anywhere). MIAA allows
physicians to view electrocardiogram wave forms, heart rates and other vital
signs. Doctors can also study EHRs and radiology images.
"All of those things
you would see on the monitor connected to a patient, we can now present that
out to a Cius device in real time," Orlando Portale, chief innovation
officer for
Palomar, told
eWEEK.
The 7-inch Android touch-screen
features swipe gestures that enable easy scrolling through images and records,
Portale added.
MIAA incorporates a vital
signs monitoring system from
Sotera
Wireless, a startup company funded by Intel and Qualcomm. Patients wear
sensors that send information wirelessly to the MIAA applications on the Cius.
To date, Palomar has rolled
out 15 to 20 Cius tablets to doctors, with another 30 to 50 units to be
distributed soon, Portale said.
On its back end, MIAA
incorporates Cerner's Millennium EHR (electronic health record) application,
from which doctors can pull data in real time from Cerner's servers. MIAA also
pulls EHRs from the VistA platform run by the
Department
of Veterans' Affairs.
Palomar decided to work with
Cisco because of the company's enterprise security capabilities, Portale said.
The Cius allows enterprise users to log in to a VPN, and the IT departments can
wipe the device if necessary, Portale noted.
In addition to the
enterprise-level security of the Cius, the health system prefers the Android's
open platform to the consumer-focused Apple iPad.
"You can really
innovate on the platform any way you want, whereas with Apple it's very closed
and proprietary," he said.
Cisco's AppHQ platform,
introduced June 29, may host Palomar's cloud-based MIHH apps. The enterprise IT
vendor performs validation testing on all AppHQ applications and evaluates
their interoperability.
In addition to allowing
companies to manage applications, AppHQ serves as a
private
online storefront for enterprise Android users. Palomar would use AppHQ to
roll out new features to doctors' tablets.
Palomar makes use of the
voice and video collaboration tools of the Cius for telehealth. With the
tablet's ability to run Cisco applications such as TelePresence, WebEx meeting
applications, Cisco Quad social software and Cisco Jabber messaging, it's
equipped to hold telehealth sessions between doctors and patients.
"Not only can the
physician view all of this data in real time, but then they can kick off a
video-conferencing session from their tablet," Portale said.
Doctors can use the Cius
inside or outside the hospital. "If they were to get a call from a patient
in the middle of the night, they'd be able to start up their Cius, kick off our
apps, get authenticated in and be able to view all of the patient
information," he said.
In another scenario,
patients may be in a hospital's intensive-care division communicating
electronically with doctors located outside the hospital.
Although the Cius' enterprise
security features appealed to Palomar,
hospitals
are widely adopting iPads for enterprise use, with 75 percent of physicians
preferring the Apple mobile products, Manhattan Research reports.
The version of the Cius available
on July 31 will be WiFi only, but Cisco plans a 4G version on Verizon and
AT&T networks for the fall.
The Cius will sell for less
than $750.
Meanwhile, on July 7,
benefits-management company CareCore National announced CareCore TouchMed, an
application for the Cius tablet to streamline how physicians obtain prior
authorization for diagnostic tests. Doctors can then share the data with
insurers from the exam room.
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