As Program Director for the Stroke and Neuroscience Program at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring Maryland, Andrew Barbash MD, is actively working to convince others on how to effectively use mobile chat and texting via smart phones to practice medicine in today’s world.
As a keynote speaker at the mHealth Networking Conference on February 3, 2010, he discussed how texting and using mobile chat via his smart phone enables him to treat stroke patients at Holy Cross hospital more efficiently especially during emergency situations. He uses text chat and secure document and message services to share important information with colleagues, staff, patients, and family caregivers.
In today’s medical world, communicating via virtual consultation rooms provides an efficient means to meet “face-to-face” online. As long as the physician, nurse, care manager, or the patient’s family is in a location with a computer, a web cam, and a connection to the internet, a virtual consultation can take place. Using this technology facilitates not only timely consultations, but at the same time, the doctor is able to review the patient’s history and immediately insert the new data into the patient’s electronic medical record.
As Dr. Barbash pointed out, the reward for using the right technology is to advance healthcare communication, workflow, and efficiency. This can all be easily accomplished by having the right clinical expertise available online by voice, text, or video or whatever it takes to have information at the doctor’s fingertips anytime or anywhere 24/7.
As Dr. Barbash emphasized, the result in using effective technology enables busy clinical practitioners to take complete control over what information and tasks they need to capture, how they want to view and organize the data, and how they want to share the information.
To promote the use of technology, Dr. Barbash is one of the founders of the NowDox community which can be found at www.apractis.com. NowDox is a free professionally supported community to simplify health collaborations. For more information, go to Dr. Barbash on Google Talk at abarbash@gmail.com.
