Wireless

BlackBerry solution aimed at home care workers

WATERLOO, Ont – MedShare, a provider of home healthcare information and communication technologies, has launched its electronic health record software on the BlackBerry wireless platform. The company says the solution is ideal for home healthcare workers, and could reduce their paperwork burden by an estimated 10 percent.

“We believe this mobile technology really is a transformation in the way home healthcare professionals will deliver medical services,” says Barry Billings, president of MedShare. “It will eliminate duplicate data entry and paper transactions that consume so much time, it burdens healthcare professionals.”

Remote healthcare professionals engage in manual record keeping, which adds an hour or two per day, on top of the home visits they’re involved with. They often do not have electronic connections to a central database because they are too remote to have a persistent electronic signal. Moreover, because the healthcare industry has been slow to switch from paper records to electronic records, healthcare professionals may not have access to an electronic database.

MedShare for BlackBerry solves both problems. First, it provides a home-office based electronic records database, through the increasingly popular MedShare HC software designed especially for home healthcare professionals.

As well, in combination with the BlackBerry platform, the MedShare solution accommodates for what Billings calls “occasional disconnection” – that is, healthcare professionals in the field or in remote locations without wireless coverage can continue to enter information on their BlackBerry smartphone, which is automatically cached and then transferred to their larger database when back in coverage. It provides transparent, seamless and secure access to essential health records.

Billings calls the current home health environment a “perfect storm” for MedShare.

“We’ve hit a critical mass,” he says. “We have electronic health records available through MedShare, wireless access through the BlackBerry platform, and society needing better healthcare access. Those three elements are combining to prompt the sector to re-invent how it delivers healthcare, and MedShare is the answer.”

“Wireless data solutions are being successfully implemented by organizations of all sizes in a wide variety of industries,” said Jeff McDowell, Vice President, Global Alliances at Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. “MedShare’s healthcare information solution on the BlackBerry platform can help facilitate better collaboration and improve administrative efficiencies for home care professionals and other healthcare professionals in the field.”

Five clients have signed on to pioneer this technology. Four are medium-sized regional healthcare agency groups with 25 to 250-employees, and one is a large national agency with 4,000 staff.

“The home care industry’s greatest challenge is that it must deliver the best home healthcare services possible while maintaining operational efficiency. I believe we can only meet this challenge through advanced technology solutions” says John Schram, president and CEO of We Care Health Services Inc., which services Canadian clients from coast to coast from 50 locations. “We Care will join the new initiative with MedShare and BlackBerry to pilot the new technology.”

Home care is the fastest growing segment of the North American healthcare sector. In 2005, 2.1 million healthcare professionals provided medical services and daily-living assistance in their clients’ homes.

About MedShare
MedShare is an award-winning provider of information and communication technologies to the North American home healthcare sector, which is the fastest growing segment of the healthcare sector. MedShare delivers electronic health record and agency management solutions to meet the clinical and administrative needs of home healthcare professionals. For more information, visit www.medshare.com.