MEDICAL MONITORS OFFER WINDOW INTO FUTURE HEALTH CARE
By Benny Evangelista

Nashua Telegraph
Sunday, August 9, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO – Sean Chai tapped the screen of the tabletop home
medical monitor, which began to talk.

"Put the blood pressure cuff on your arm as shown," the computerized
voice told a visitor to Chai’s research lab in San Leandro. "Please
relax and remain still while your reading is being taken."

After uploading data from the blood pressure cuff, the monitor asked
if the visitor had taken his daily medication.

In the future, the answers could trigger scheduling software for a
doctor’s appointment or initiate a direct video call to the physician.

Chai is the senior information technology manager for Kaiser
Permanente’s Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center. His
job is to imagine the future of medical technology and to test gadgets
to see if they’re practical.

"We focus a lot on what we call the human factor, how the technology
interacts with people," Chai said.

The 37,000-square-foot center, located in an office complex near
Oakland International Airport, celebrated its third anniversary
recently as the technology research and testing lab for the nation’s
largest nonprofit health-maintenance organization.

The center has a full-size mockup of a hospital floor, complete with
nursing stations and patient rooms, plus an operating room, simulated
home and mini-clinic. Kaiser employees can use the center to test
everything from new types of hospital floor material or workflow
adjustments to robotic nursing assistants and high-definition
operating-room video screens.

Sherry Fry, the center’s operations specialist, said the complex
intends to work out the bugs of a new system or concept before they’re
deployed to hospitals and patients. The center shares its findings
and has drawn 17,000 visitors from 29 countries, including health-care
workers, university researchers and tech innovators.

In the simulated mini-clinic was a prototype stainless-steel kiosk that
looked like a cross between a bank ATM and an airline self-check-in
machine.

"So, imagine in the future, you use a kiosk like this to quickly
check in by inserting your membership card and also do your co-pay
by inserting a credit card," Chai said.

A self-service kiosk is already being tried in about 100 Kaiser
hospitals in California. It can be programmed to respond in several
languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese
and Armenian.

Kaiser plans to add other functions, such as a way for patients
to check their blood pressure, weight, temperature, oxygen level
and pulse.

"The idea is to (have) a line buster," Chai said. "By the time the
doctor calls you in, you’re ready for that examination, you don’t
have to go to the nursing station.

"Imagine someday, we can locate that in a shopping mall or in a
community center. Then you add a camera, and you can literally project
your doctor onto the screen, so it becomes sort of a doc in the box."

Another area resembling a living room and kitchen has several desktop
self-care devices, including the talking Intel Health Guide made
by Santa Clara chipmaker Intel Corp. In April, Intel announced a
five-year, $250 million joint investment plan with General Electric
Co. to develop personalized home health-care devices.

"The idea is to leverage these technologies to help us stay connected
with patients, especially patients suffering from chronic conditions
(such as) congestive heart failure, hypertension," Chai said. "Those
handful of ailments contribute 80 percent of U.S. health-care costs."

The center is also testing lower-tech home monitors, such as one
made by Honeywell International that resembles a digital clock
radio. It’s part of a pilot project involving 600 congestive heart
failure patients.

The mock living room has a high-definition, flat-panel TV equipped with
video conferencing technology that can give a remote dermatologist a
diagnostic-quality picture of a person’s rash or other skin problem,
Chai said.

Another flat-panel monitor is testing biometric facial-identification
software. It allows health-care workers to log in to private patient
data without having to remove gloves or to scrub up again after
touching a computer keyboard, mouse or touch screen.

The system uses biometric software and "a $20 camera," Chai said.

Nurses or technicians log onto computers up to 80 times a day,
"checking e-mail, accessing patient records, looking at medical images,
digital pathology slides," Chai said. ". . . So, imagine if we can
save that time."

Some gadgets are already popular consumer products, such as Nintendo’s
Wii game console. The center is studying the Wii’s motion-activated
controls for medical uses, such as letting doctors explain an X-ray
image.

Chai gets to test other off-the-shelf devices when they come out,
such as the BlackBerry Storm or a laser-projected keyboard. He’s also
examining whether an iPhone application that monitors vital signs,
from AirStrip Technologies of Texas, could be deployed to patients.

Still, "a lot of these are cost prohibitive, so we’re just waiting
for the right time to bring back the technology," he said.

E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com. Distributed
by Scripps Howard News Service