Posts Tagged ‘iphone’

iPhone Can Tell You Which Pharmacies Are Open in Germany

12/31/2007 , 11:37 AM by Alex Sicre

It seems as if everyone wants to do eHealth for the iPhone! From the Website eHealth Europe:

A new Web 2.0 iPhone service has been introduced in Germany, which shows what pharmacies are open during Christmas and a map of how to get there.

The new service details Christmas opening times and locations for nearly all of the 21000 pharmacies in Germany. The service is offered by Apotheken.de, one of the biggest German-language pharmacy websites.

Opening the website prompts the user to enter their postcode, which then returns a choice of nearby pharmacies displayed, together with directions, using Google Maps.

As well as details and locations of pharmacies that are open, the service also includes details of GPs on duty, though this part of service is still under development and doesn’t yet cover the whole country.

Apotheken.de’s is one of the first iPhone specific medical services in Germany, where the iPhone has been available for two months. However, other online pharmacy services such as e-medication still remain at an early stage in Germany.

“Pharmacy networks and pharmacy marketing alliances are reluctant to even think about the possibility of using electronic medication services to help patients keep track of their medication electronically“, Harald Sondhof of the Tübingen-based health-IT company Careon, told E-Health Europe.

This, he stressed, was wrong because e-medication services not only improve medication safety and patient compliance but “also can be used to win or keep customers.”

Careon is offering a web-based, patient-centred personal health record (PHR). It is available in various forms dependent on the adoption scenario. One version focuses on medication issues, with services like interaction check or reminder functions for medication times. Pharmacists could offer it to patients as an additional service.

Sondhof managed to persuade ten German pharmacies to take part in a pilot project, due to start early 2008. The pharmacists will offer the e-medication PHR service to chronically ill patients. “It will be easy to use, because it is integrated into the enterprise resource planning software. So pharmacists can add medication to their customer’s PHR almost automatically”, Sondhof said. The IT partner in the project is ADV, and with around 800 pharmacies as customers it’s a medium size provider of pharmacy IT in Germany.

Given their affinity with the iPhone, pharmacists might be persuaded of e-medication services as soon as PHR are offered in iPhone versions. Indeed, the Walldorf-based company ICW has recently presented an iPhone version of its PHR ‘LifeSensor’.

Another reason to consider the iPhone a perfect e-health-present for Christmas 2007?

Links

iphone.apotheken.de/

www.careon.de

www.icw.de

Dr. First For The iPhone

12/18/2007 , 11:38 AM by Alex Sicre

With mobile platforms opening up to outside vendors more and more applications can be developed. For medication adherence, eprescribing plays a role – mostly with medication errors, which account for 12% of so of all medication non-adherence. Can you read your MDs handwriting? Dr.First is a great application and now an MD can send the prescription in while speaking to the patient and it will be ready for pick-up by the time the patient gets to the pharmacy. I am also a fan of tablet PCs, where MDs can also access their patients EHR, but I haven’t seen any news about them lately.

This is right off the BUSINESS WIRE:
ROCKVILLE, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–DrFirst™, the leader in electronic prescribing and medication reconciliation services, today announced that physicians will have access to an unparalleled e-prescribing experience on the Apple iPhoneTM through DrFirst’s RcopiaTM e-prescribing system. For the first time, physicians and their staff will be able to perform all of the essential functions of electronic prescribing in real-time on a mobile browser through a WiFi or wireless carrier’s broadband connection.

RcopiaMini is formatted for the smaller screen of today’s mobile devices and allows providers to easily navigate a full-featured version of Rcopia on this exciting new platform. DrFirst designed the application to provide a real-time interaction between physicians, pharmacies, and health plans, so there is no need to update or sync the device.

“Now physicians can quickly, safely, and securely prescribe from anywhere—through the always-on connectivity of the iPhone, the WiFi connection of the iPod Touch, or while seated at the desktop computer in the practice,” said Peter N. Kaufman, Chief Medical Officer of DrFirst, Inc.. “DrFirst’s goal is to ensure that its new web-based, mobile Rcopia experience delivers the same high levels of innovation and usability as the original Web version.”

To be useful to physicians, e-prescribing must be easily and securely accessible. With the addition of the iPhone and iPod Touch, DrFirst provides physicians with a broad set of eprescribing platforms, including Apple, Treo, and HP iPaq handheld devices as well as desktop and tablet systems.

E-prescribing on the iPhone with RcopiaMini allows physicians to provide a higher level of patient service and safety, streamline practice workflows, and save time and money through the efficiency of electronic medication orders, renewals and formulary checking. New prescriptions and renewals are sent electronically to the patient’s retail or mail order pharmacy.

RcopiaMini checks for patient insurance eligibility, formulary, and patient medication history. The application also offers clinical decision support tools to check prescriptions for drug-drug and drug-allergy interactions and appropriate dosing.

Busy doctors, large practices, and health systems require software that is adaptable to the practice workflow and that draws the practice staff into the prescribing process. To meet this need, RcopiaMini is designed to be accessible to all staff members, to be highly configurable and to accommodate workflow features that make it a perfect solution for
groups of any size.