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The finalists for the 2007 22nd Annual SIIA Codie Awards have been announced:

Best Healthcare Management Solution (Vertical)
• AdvancedMD, AdvancedMD Software, Inc.
• CodeRyte.com, CodeRyte, Inc.
• MediCompass Pro, iMetrikus, Inc.
• Kronos for Healthcare, Kronos

Best Medical and Health Information Product
• The AHA Core Instructor Course, Enspire Learning
• Quicken Medical Expense Manager, Intuit, Inc.
• VisualDx, Logical Images
• NetCompetency, NetLearning – a division of Thomson Learning
• Skyscape MedAlert(tm), Skyscape
• Anatomy of Care, WILL Interactive, Inc.

Electronic Medical Records systems could help reduce the more than 7000 people a year who are killed by doctor’s poor handwriting according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science’s Insititute of Medicine.

A coalition of health care companies and technology firms has launched a program that allows doctors in the US to write electronic prescriptions for free.

The National e-prescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) will offer doctors access to eRx Now, a Web-based tool that physicians can use to write prescriptions electronically, check for potentially harmful drug interactions and ensure that pharmacies provide appropriate medications and dosages.

Source: Time

I’ve been reading a lot about Nicholas Negreponte’s One Laptop Per Child project. If you haven’t heard about it yet, the idea is to give away as many $100 laptops to children in the developing world as possible. The laptops have been designed to be linux based (apparantly running Red Hat) with a dual-mode display - a full-color, trasmissive DVD mode and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight readable at 3x resolution. They will have a 500MHz processory and 128MB of DRAM and 500MB of flash memory. No hard disk but they will have 4 USB ports. The idea is for the laptops to connect to the internet via wireless broadband creating a mesh network with each laptop talking to other ones.

So, how will these devices improve health-care in developing countries? Indirectly, having access to a connected computer can increase skills and employability and therefore lift people out of poverty and away from the health problems associated with poverty. More directly though, this kind of project will allow communities to have better access to health professionals, via email, websites and VOIP communications. Patients isolated in remote communities will be able to keep in contact with health professionals in cities and have their condition monitored through the laptops. Health education campaigns could also be distributed via the laptops.