Telehealth and the VA

In this age of rising fuel and healthcare costs, telehealth is becoming more important.

The VA (Department of Veterans Affairs) health system is using telehealth both for convenience and greater access to care for US military veterans. The Office of Care Coordination discusses the various telehealth initiatives of the VA.

Here is some feedback about the VA's telehealth model: http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9491&page=1

Tech in the news

Here are a couple of interesting articles in the news of interest to nurses.

Microsoft is targeting nurses for versions of its online applications (from http://www.bloomberg.com/ 7/8/08)

On another older note, Microsoft talks about the role of nurses and technology.
Nurses want technology that works the way they do

What is that orange pill I found?

When in doubt, it makes sense to check out the monographs, if available, in your drug guides. Print ones are not often updated as quickly as online ones, so for a recent question on my floor, we headed to the internet.

First, we checked http://www.epocrates.com/ and searched through their medication lists based on what a couple other nurses thought the mystery pill was. ePocrates will give you a picture of the pill if you know which drug you are looking for in a list. You cannot search for a drug by color or shape of the pill or capsule.

For testing purposes to see if there was a database to search by color, we used LiveSearch and found this site: http://gsm.about.com/pid/main.asp on http://www.about.com/ which allows you to plug in pill shape and color. Once complete, you will get a list (also with photos, if available, and markings) which can help you identify your pill. This helped us identify the mystery pill as a generic Xanax 1mg tab. The markings also helped us hone in on the exact pill, even if the photo was not available.

Another web site of interest we encountered today was http://www.pdrhealth.com/. It is another web site from the PDR desktop folks with information specifically directed to consumers. In particular, there is an interesting section on drug trials and recently FDA approved medications.

Alas, the old adage to check it out really is true, and the internet makes the resolutions even faster.

Unbound Medicine on iPhone

Correction:
Unbound Medicine does have titles available for iPhone on their web site now, including Nursing Central.

Decisions, decisions....now all I have to do is get an iPhone.

iPhone link

I found this link while surfing around the other day:

iPhoneMedicine

Dr. Salvatore Volpe has lots of information regarding various products and services available for iPhone. The latest news, which was really interesting to me, is that ePocrates is working on a version for iPhone. You can access ePocrates online version on your iPhone right now. You can see what it looks like at the ePocrates site.

And yes, Dr. Volpe, if they port Unbound Medicine and Skyscape apps to iPhone, I'm gonna ask Santa for one.

The latest news on IT for nurses

I've been busy myself learning the ins and outs of the VistA computer system for nurses. Here are some of the latest stories I've found about IT and nurses.

More nurses embrace IT (from nursezone.com)

CIN Computers, Informatics and Nursing - abstracts and links to articles available free at www.medscape.com

Nurses prefer contact to computers (from whatifpost.com)

An oldie but goodie that warrants a second look:
The potential use of blogs in nursing education (also from CIN)

Articles of note

It was a busy end of the year for me, both personally and professionally. My resolution this year is to work further on this blog and point the way to some of the better articles out there.

As I mentioned before, I find a lot of good things in my mailbox via listservs. Here's one from the nrsing-l listserv

Infection control and mobile devices
Time savers or harbors for infection? This article brings up some pretty valid points about infection control and IT collaboration.