Your new post is loading...
I believe that clinicians can successfully use Google Glass to improve quality, safety, and efficiency in a manner that is less bothersome to the patients.
Few examples:
1. Meaningful use stage 2 for hospitals. Electronic medication admission records must include the use of “assistive technology” to ensure the right dose of the right medication is given via the right route to the right patient at the right time. Imagine that a nurse puts on a pair of glasses, walks in the room and Wi-Fi geolocation shows the nurse a picture of the patient in the room who should be receiving medications. Then, pictures of the medications will be shown one at a time. The temple touch user interface could be used to scroll through medication pictures and even indicate that they were administered.
2. Clinical documentation. All of us are trying hard to document the clinical encounter using templates, macros, voice recognition, natural language processing and clinical documentation improvement tools. However, our documentation models may misalign with the ways patients communicate and doctors conceptualize medical information per Ross Koppel’s excellent JAMIA article. Maybe the best clinical documentation is real time video of the patient encounter, captured from the vantage point of the clinician’s Google Glass. Every audio/visual cue that the clinician sees and hears will be faithfully recorded.
3. Emergency department dashboards. Imagine that a clinician enters the room of a patient – instead of reaching for a keyboard or even an iPad, the clinician looks at the patient. In “tricorder” like fashion, vital signs, triage details, and nursing documentation appear in the Google Glass. Touching the temple brings up lab and radiology results. An entire ED dashboard is easily reduced to visual cues in Google Glass. At BIDMC, we hope to pilot such an application this year.
4. Decision support. Imagine that a clinician responding to a cardiac arrest uses Google glass to retrieve the appropriate decision support for the patient in question and visually sees a decision tree that incorporates optimal doses of medications, the EKG of the patient, and vital signs.
5. Alerts and reminders. Imagine that Google Glass displays those events and issues which are most critical, requiring action today (alerts) and those issues which are generally good for the wellness of the patient (reminders). Having the benefits of alerts and reminders enables a clinician to get done what is most important.
