It's still a niche market, to be sure, but vendors are already predicting that patient bedside edu-tainment technologies could be ready for a growth spurt.

While segment leader Pyxis has had a foot in the door since its PatientStation was first installed at the Detroit Medical Center in late 2002, Siemens Communications USA and GetWell Network are mounting serious challenges to the San Diego vendor.

Both companies are optimistic about the market because, increasingly, hospitals are looking for ways to differentiate themselves as they compete for patients. The technologies, which usually provide Internet access, cable television, on-demand videos, music and games to patients, can also produce new revenue streams for cash-strapped facilities. But what could really light up the market is the potential for these interactive devices to serve double-duty as clinical devices.

Siemens' HiMED device got its start in European hospitals as a 10-inch flat panel television that patients could activate using prepaid smart cards. In addition to TV, the device evolved to serve as a radio, nurse calling station and room lighting control. The next step, says Scott Washburn, a healthcare industry marketing manager at Siemens Communication, was the development of a Linux-based browser that added Web surfing capabilities as well the opportunity to bring patient education online.

As shown at the 2005 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in Dallas, HiMED has evolved into a bedside computer with a 15-inch, hi-res unscratchable monitor with two smart card slots – one for patient entertainment, the other for clinicians. When a nurse or doctor accesses the system, the bedside device behaves less like cable TV and more like a high-powered clinical information system.

"Any clinical system that can be Citrix enabled or has a Web front-end is accessible," Washburn said. "This allows us to remove a lot of systems that have cluttered the bedside."

Although new in the United States, 28,000 individual units have been deployed in various sites in Europe already. Washburn said that while Siemens is trumpeting the clinical use of HiMED, it has its limits.

"Physicians have told us they don't like to input data at the bedside," he said. "Generally, my understanding is that they log in to the patient's EHR and use it for patient education … and conversation starters. Also, it's an information retrieval device. The monitor's resolution isn't good for diagnostics."

Nonetheless, feedback from a tiger team at HIMSS 2004 showed that some CIOs felt a dual-use station might be a good way to pay to bring clinical information systems access to the bedside.

GetWell Network's founder and CEO Mike O'Neill doesn't dispute that kind of thinking, but believes his system generates more value to the hospital as a patient-centric information device than as a tool for clinicians. "Everything we do begins with the patient experience, and not on the clinical side," O'Neill says. "We're coming at it from a different angle. Even when a nurse uses our system, it's all about the patient."

Another difference between GetWell and its competitors, O'Neill says, is that his company is not device-centric. "It'll run on anything from a 17-year-old CRT to touch screens and tablets," he said.

That's not to say GetWell, already in 25 hospitals in the United States, is ignoring clinicians. Right now, the company is developing "pathways" that will pull critical information from education resources, medical devices and other clinical systems and push it to patients when appropriate.

The GetWell Networks system was recently installed at the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital, says Mary Beth Williams, RN, primarily for patient entertainment (the system features 42-inch LCD televisions). "But our next phase is getting a strategic plan together for how our patient education efforts can be improved with it."