Healthcare Career Blog, Physician Blogs

Thinking of creating a new medical device to save lives around the world? Read how one MIT graduate asked the question differently…

Author Healthcare Career Blogger | 03.10.2009

Instead of saying, ‘I’m a mechanical engineer, what kind of device can I build,’ I should be saying “Who are the people working in the settings I want to work in?’”

MIT graduate student Joaquin Blaya, went back to his native country, Chile, to figure out how he could best apply his education and help the people he loved.

What he found was an outdated system of tracking patient information that took on average three or more weeks to reach the doctor. This is the way it worked: four healthcare workers went out in the field to visit 100 healthcare centers. They would document the patients’ progress, return back to their offices to transcribe the results and then forward these written reports to doctors for follow up. These efforts took on average three weeks and up to an incredible three months time to reach the physician!

Blaya’s solution? Simple, he helped launch a research project in Lima, Peru where the tracking data was recorded by healthcare workers into a hand held PDA. Once a week, these traveling healthcare workers would download their PDAs into their office computers and send the reports directly to the physician.

This process reduced the average reporting time from 23 days to 8 days! And also, reduced errors and lost paper trails.
“You can monitor patients in a more timely way. It also prevents results from getting lost,” says Blaya, a PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST).

Researchers reported that getting timely and accurate lab results “is essential to determine if a patient is responding to treatment and, if not, to alert physicians to the possible need for medication changes.”

Peruvian health care workers enthusiastically embraced the program, which started in two of Lima’s districts and has now been expanded to all five. In addition to saving time, the handheld devices are also more cost-effective than the paper-based system, the researchers reported to Infectious Disease Specialists and Pulmonologists in the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

Locum tenens physicians in the U.S. today are using PDAs for patient tracking and more. With software purchases of $75 or less, a medical doctor can purchase software for nearly every professional specialty. Consider this:

“Anesthesia ToolBox 7.0” provides invaluable medical information necessary for Anesthesiologists who work in the Emergency, ICU/CCU, Pre-Hospital, or Critical Care setting. It enables the user to perform instant calculations for drug dosages, administer anesthetic or sedation during medical procedures, monitor patients before, during, and after anesthesia and counteract adverse reactions or complications.

Besides ongoing education, professionals today count on PDA resources with advanced medical doctor job software and technology.

Check out this consumer report on PDA features that do more than just record data.

With so many great technology products on the market today, this story enlightens many of us, that sometimes asking a question differently, creates an opportunity to apply what we already know works. In today’s online world and community, the simplest questions often hold the answers to solving existing problems. That’s why we blog and share information with our friends and co-workers, it is to create ‘community’ and to get involved. And who knows, maybe some of these ideas will make a difference in the lives of many along the way…In the mean time, if you are working in the healthcare field, there are some great new medical gadgets out there to check out!