Nuance Communications releases mobile medical search app: Nuance released its Dragon Medical Mobile Search iPhone application today in Apple’s app store. The smartphone app shows medical reference and web-based information simultaneously from a variety search engines, including IMO, Medline, Drugs.mobi, Medscape and Google. The app also uses voice-search functionality, providing doctors with an almost hands-free interface. 
Epocrates is giving away its Essentials to medical students: Epocrates, one of the most well-known medical programs for mobile devices, is offering its Essentials version for free to medical students for a limited time. The app normally costs $159. Compared to the Epocrates Rx, which has always been free, this version includes an infectious disease treatment guide, alternative (herbal) medicines, disease monographs and diagnostic and laboratory tests. This version of Epocrates is available for the iPhone/iPod touch, Palm, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Although you have to study medicine in the United States to be eligible, there doesn’t seem to be any check for this during registration. The offer expires August 31. 
Take social media to a new level by sharing blood pressure online: The doctor/editors at Medgadget love web apps, but they’re not too thrilled about home blood pressure management, as it tends to drive a lot of people unnecessarily to the emergency room for what turns out to be an expensive educational encounter. A new alternative is the free web app at BP-Chart.com where users can log BP measurements to their hearts’ content, store them, plot them, export them to Excel or package readings for doctors. Users can even share blood pressure readings on Facebook and Twitter. The site’s programmer, Mateusz Mucha, made his data public (users can keep theirs private). He also pointed to new data that online physician monitoring of BP leads to greater reductions over time.
Computer Sciences Corp. report: Hospitals struggle to meet federal EHR requirements: A CSC study found that electronic health records will only be able to provide 35 percent of the data requirements for Stage 1 quality measures outlined in the final "meaningful use" rule. CSC wrote, "The industry focus on the functional requirements for HITECH meaningful use has led many to not pay enough attention to what will be required to capture the data for the 15 quality measures for hospitals. Meaningful use requires that every data element be available in the certified EHR, and measure specifications and data dictionaries are very clear about the type of documentation required." The global IT consulting and services firm studied the 15 hospital measures and found "that even hospitals with core systems such as reg/ADT and laboratory who have met the explicit data capture requirements for HITECH Stage 1 (CPOE for medications, problem list, etc.) will only have 35 percent of the data needed for the hospital measures," while the remaining 65 percent remain hidden despite meaningful use requirements. 
A weekly roundup of new developments in wireless medical technology and mHealth, by MedGadget.com.
