There's no shortage of testimonials about how wireless technology is making impressive strides in the effort to make healthcare less cumbersome and more efficient. Through various applications, wireless devices are helping providers be more productive in clinical, operational and administrative functions.

Greater efficiency is certainly the goal of a paperless office and wireless technology has been instrumental in helping the Front Range Center for Brain and Spine Surgery in Fort Collins, Colo., reach a 98 percent paperless status.

While Administrator Nancy Timmons cautions that benefits such as patient safety, return-on-investment and operational improvement levels have yet to be quantified, she sums up the value of wireless this way: "Our surgeons are happier, more productive and less frustrated."

As it has throughout healthcare, wireless technology is evolving rapidly at the Front Range surgery center, which serves a primarily rural population in northern Colorado, western Nebraska and southern Wyoming. Starting with digital dictation in 2003, the clinic eventually moved toward a paperless environment and "wireless naturally came along with it," Timmons said.

Center personnel  -  including four surgeons and support staff  -  use Motorola Symbol PDAs and are connected by Intergy software from Tampa, Fla.-based Sage Software Healthcare. Among the functions available are electronic charts, prescriptions, charges and scheduling. Timmons concedes that when traveling to satellite centers across the rural region, coverage can be thin in places, but that "wireless connectivity is spreading."

Timmons sees the next step for the center as adding smart phones and integration of voice recognition to the system.

Critical data access
The Center for Bone and Joint in West Palm Beach, Fla., has seen wireless "make a great impact on the practice," notes Executive Manager David Klebonis. From 2004 to 2007, he said technology adoption helped the practice grow 30 percent a year.

With 19 physicians and 15 PAs at the center, Klebonis said the doctors split their time between the OR, hospital and clinic and need reliable connectivity to the network for electronic medical records access and real-time data.

"Real time access to data is absolutely critical and has produced the biggest benefit," he said. "Orthopedic surgeons have large support teams, up to eight people working for them and through wireless technology they can stay in touch and keep everyone in sync." Updates, such as surgery schedule changes, can be made on the fly and everyone at the hospital is kept in the loop."

The center is still in the formative stages of its long-term wireless strategy, which includes using tablets with point-and-click encounter documentation, high-resolution monitors in place of wet or film X-ray and have docking stations in each room for digital imaging, Klebonis said. What's more, he said physician adoption of PDAs and iPhones has spanned generational boundaries.

"Physicians may be averse to change, but if something increases efficiencies for them, they'll accept it," Klebonis said. "Now they use it to manage their lives when six months ago, 15-to-25 percent didn't even use e-mail."

Bar coding passion
Wireless technology also plays a pivotal role in the advancement of bedside bar coding in healthcare, says Mark Neuenschwander, co-founder of unSUMMIT, which he says has a mission of "getting the nation off its butt on bar coding." Neuenschwander is sponsoring a nationwide forum on the bar coding issue, May 6-8 in Tampa, Fla.

By effectively utilizing bar code technology at all points of care, he contends patients can be properly identified along with all the products and services administered to them. Widespread adoption of bedside bar coding would also fully address the Joint Commission's national patient safety goals, Neuenschwander said.

"For the last eight years the number one goal, the top problem has been improving the accuracy of patient identification," he said. "The number three goal for that period has been to improve the accuracy of medication administration. By the Joint Commission's definition, these are problematic areas that need to be addressed with proven processes and technology.

Nothing will have greater impact on advancing those goals than point-of-care bar coding technology."

The primary obstacle to industry-wide adoption of bar coding is what Neuenschwander calls "healthcare attention deficit disorder." In essence, he sees electronic health records and comparisons to radio frequency identification as distractions from the real issue.

"We need to strive for EHRs, but the scope is huge and we shouldn't let that grand vision keep us from incremental gains with more achievable processes like bar coding," he said. "EHRs are like world peace  -  you can't vote against it, but it's tough to achieve."