Connecting Mobile Devices With EMRs

Coming on the heels of news that the patient monitoring system market will reach $9.3 billion in 2014, IBM has announced it's expanding its Health Analytics Solution Center in Dallas. Company officials say teams there are working to help physicians connect smart phones, tablets and other devices to electronic medical records, while also helping healthcare providers build new solutions for remote patient monitoring.

As part of this expansion, the center is incorporating some of the same technology used in IBM's Watson, the experimental computer system that bested two human contestants in the game show Jeopardy! earlier this year.

Using sophisticated analytics to determine the meaning and context of medical information, advanced health analytics increasingly are being used to help healthcare organizations gain new insight from the flood of health data that is swelling at a rate of 35 percent per year, according to a recent study by Enterprise Strategy Group.

By employing clinical voice recognition from Nuance Communications, Inc. and medical terminology management from Health Language, Inc., Big Blue is working to improve the mobile EMR experience through voice recognition and technology that provides understanding of medical text, similar to the way Watson analyzed hundreds of millions of pages of text from books, encyclopedias and periodicals to compete on Jeopardy!.  Ultimately, this should enable caregivers to derive more insight from medical notes, exams and pathology reports that now can be evaluated and compared electronically.