TOMBALL, TX – Physicians at Tomball Regional Medical Center are using mobile devices to receive real-time data about their patients. They say the technology will improve the quality of care by helping them to respond quicker to patients' needs. 

Physicians are using Clinical Xpert Navigator, from the healthcare business of Thomson Reuters, to receive data via their BlackBerry, smartphones, Palm and Windows Mobile-based mobile devices and desktop computers.

The technology will allow the 358-bed facility in Tomball, Texas, to monitor patient data and identify high-risk patients based on laboratory results, vital signs, medications, diagnoses, age, gender and other factors.

The Navigator will notify physicians via mobile devices if a patient is at "high risk."

"Using CareFocus and CareDiscovery (Thomson Reuters' benchmarking solution) together gives us a powerful, end-to-end quality improvement solution that not only enables our clinicians to take direct and immediate action to treat at-risk patients but also allows us to monitor and measure our progress on an ongoing basis," said Bonnie Brown, Tomball's director of quality improvement. "This gives us a great opportunity to make tremendous strides toward raising the standard of care across our entire facility."

According to a 2008 Manhattan Research survey, more than 50 percent of all U.S. physicians own PDAs or other mobile devices, and half say the device is essential to their practice.

"Using this clinical surveillance tool, CareFocus, to monitor our patient population and help identify the high-risk patients is a tremendous resource for our staff," said John Butler, director of pharmacy at Tomball.

"It will enable us to respond quicker to these patients, saving time and money," he added. "And having immediate access to our patient's information on our PDAs means we can spend more time on rounds treating patients - and not combing through charts searching for the relevant clinical data."