Nurses check on patients via Internet

This is my kind of medicine: Nurses check on patients via Internet. From the article:

Operated through a phone line, “home telecare” devices are hooked up to stethoscopes and blood pressure and oxygen readers that transmit results to a remote station monitored by a nurse or doctor. The technology saves providers time and gets patients timely attention without ever having to leave their homes, advocates say.

This kind of remote monitoring and care will only grow (and as soon as there are hard numbers to show cost reduction it will skyrocket). But, are we in health IT ready to track the information? How many of our systems have the fields or external connectivity to take the information and do something useful with it?

I’ve invited a guest blogger to write for us about connecting to medical devices (both remote and local) and how it might impact our IT apps. Keep an eye for a couple of his articles in the next few days.