Nearly a year ago, Dr. John Halamka, chief information officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told U.S. News & World Report how Google Glass might help medical professionals do their jobs a little better. "Just as the iPad has become the chosen form factor for clinicians today, I can definitely see a day when computing devices are more integrated into the clothing or body of the clinician," he wrote.
Since then, Google Glass has not exactly gone mainstream, but some — including Halamka's colleagues at the Harvard-affiliated hospital — are finding innovative ways of adapting the head-mounted computer to healthcare environments.
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Late last year, Beth Israel Deaconess starting employing Glass in its emergency department. In January, project champion Dr. Steven Horng saved a life by pulling up the patient's medical record on Glass to learn which drugs the man was allergic to in time to stop a brain hemorrhage; in April, the hospital decided to expand its Glass pilot program to the entire ED.
BIDMC has integrated a Glass communications platform from San Francisco-based Wearable Intelligence into its electronic health record, allowing data to flow in both directions between the device and the EHR. "It's all about putting the information in the right place at the right time," Horng says.
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According to Horng, an emergency physician and clinical informatics specialist, Glass is helpful in streamlining workflows and making sure physicians keep the attention of their patients.
A common critique of PC-based EHRs is that doctors often have to look away from the people they are treating in order to type something into the computer. With Glass, which is operated by voice command, Horng points out he can look up information without having to break eye contact, even in sterile environments. "You can do all this while fully gowned," Horng says.
The hands-free aspect makes Glass particularly attractive for surgeons.
Shortly after Google announced its Glass Explorers testing program in mid-2013, Dr. Pierre Theodore, a cardiothoracic surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, connected with Dr. Nate Gross, co-founder of physician social networking site Doximity, and the two wondered how they could use the visor-like device in healthcare. "There are not a lot of instances in healthcare where you can't use your hands," Theodore says. "Surgery comes to mind immediately."
Theodore now occasionally pre-loads medical images into his Glass prior to surgery, then brings up the images in the heads-up viewer in order to compare CT and X-ray scans to actual surgical sites. "Effectively, you can have a real-time view of what you're trying to accomplish in the operating room," he says.
UCSF says Theodore is the first surgeon anywhere to receive clearance from a local institutional review board — essentially a medical ethics committee — to use Glass as an "auxiliary surgical tool" in the OR. He has used it for more than 30 patients to date. "It does work really well," Theodore says.
Still, the device does have its shortcomings. "The battery life sure is an issue," Theodore says. (At Beth Israel Deaconness, the four pairs the ED currently has are all fitted with external battery packs to extend usability.)
Theodore also says the verbal commands are rather rudimentary, though they work for what he needs Glass for. "It's not like you're going to type out your memoirs over Google Glass," he notes.
Orlando Portale, chief innovation officer at Palomar Health, a public health district in San Diego County, California, has found that it often can be difficult to give voice commands in noisy healthcare environments such as EDs. He also worries about privacy with Glass, specifically the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations that all U.S. healthcare providers must follow.
That has not prevented him from being bullish on Glass and other wearable computers; Portale expects to see similar products soon from companies such as Epson, Sony, Apple and even Facebook, which spent $2 billion in March to acquire Ocular VR, maker of a gaming headset.
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