Expecting a baby? … there’s an app for that.
The smart-phone application allows doctors to multitask while keeping a close eye on their patients, specifically the unborn baby and its mother. “We can be anywhere — at a restaurant, running errands, in the office between patients, in the operating room between surgeries — and we can pull up the fetal heart tracings to see what a baby is doing, what a mom’s doing.”
Dr. Erik Schulte is an OBGYN at Divine Savior in Portage, which is the first hospital in Wisconsin to use AirStrip OB. The software has been in use for just a few months there, but Dr. Schulte has several years of experience with this app from his previous job just before coming to Wisconsin. “It was extremely useful in my prior practice, because we would cover five hospitals and kind of keeping track of what patient is doing what where and trying to manage our time accordingly.”
Women who are hooked up to monitors at the hospital have their information transmitted directly to their doctor’s phone, which is password protected to comply with HIPAA laws to prevent access to personal information if the mobile device should end up in the wrong hands.
The AirStrip Technologies application is now in use at hundreds of hospitals throughout the nation.
AirStrip also makes applications for cardiologists, giving them access to ECGs, and for overall patient monitoring. Essentially, anywhere in the hospital a patient has monitoring equipment hooked up, they can be monitored via mobile device. Doctors can also use the app to access data regarding a patient’s medications.
AUDIO: Jackie Johnson report 1:29