Mobile Healthcare Solution for BlackBerry Smartphones

A new application for BlackBerry smartphones provides several powerful features in one easy-to-use application, aiding healthcare workers to remotely update and retrieve information on their patients.

The "Patient in your Pocket" application solution combines several powerful features in one easy-to-use application, enabling community nurses, midwives, health visitors, and doctors on house calls to spend more time on patient care in the field. Care providers can use BlackBerry smartphones to receive a schedule of appointments for the day ahead. Once with the patient, they can retrieve up-to-date information about the patient's condition, and enter new data directly into the smartphone, dictating notes or filling in forms using a digital pen. Patient confidentiality is protected through the use of smartcard log-on and strong data encryption.

The solution also provides a layer of personal safety protection for healthcare professionals working alone. An activity monitoring system enables staff to register expected times for lone-working tasks with a call center; an alarm is raised if those activities exceed the expected duration without contact from the healthcare worker. In such an instance, a healthcare worker may be in need of intervention, or even be under personal threat. The alarm is sent to trained operators who assess the situation and engage the appropriate services. The "Patient in your Pocket" application was developed by CSC (Falls Church, VA, USA).

"Healthcare professionals need to be able to capture and send information as part of the patient record, whether that is narrative, structured data or images, allowing rapid advice to be accessed to benefit the patient,” said Paul Shannon, the CSC UK medical director. "This is as important in the community as it is in clinics or in hospitals. They need to be able to manage their diary, make patient related calls, raise alerts, contact team members, plan journeys, and make home visits in an efficient manner, which this new solution will enable them to do.”

"Mobile technology can be incredibly helpful in improving healthcare delivery and making healthcare services more patient-centric. When you are dealing with patient information, security is paramount,” said Daniel Morrison-Gardiner, the UK Healthcare director at Research In Motion (RIM; Waterloo, Canada), which manufacture the Blackberry devices. "The CSC solution runs over the BlackBerry Enterprise Server so updates and upgrades can be centrally controlled and information, such as appointments and patient details, can be sent out and received within a secure environment.”

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