Kaiser Permanente's unique lab tests tech products

San Jose Mercury News (MCT) - With tech companies offering a growing assortment of health-related gadgets for hospitals and patients, Kaiser Permanente executives have developed what they say is a unique laboratory to test the products' usefulness.

By simulating how health care personnel and the general public might use the devices, the executives say they hope to identify technologies that can help patients, while also reducing hospital-related expenses by making medical services more efficient.

"Rising health care costs are a major concern," said Dr. Yan Chow, a Kaiser physician who works with the center. "The costs are only going to go up and up, and become increasingly unaffordable. ... We believe that technology will be part of the answer."

Located in a San Leandro, Calif., industrial park near Oakland International Airport, the Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center has examined products from Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems and about two dozen other companies since it opened in 2006, Kaiser executives said during a media tour this month.

Intel has two products under study at the center. One is a notebook-sized lightweight computer for nurses to document their assessments of patients and the medications they give them. Intel was eager to have the center evaluate its early designs for the computer, according to Charles Goodwin, an Intel marketing director involved with the company's health products.

Some companies develop a product and "throw it over the wall to the hospital," without much consultation with medical experts about how it will work in practice, Goodwin said. "We decided to take another approach," by having it extensively tried out in the development phase.

The patient-assessment device Intel came up with in conjunction with Motion Computing in Texas, called the Motion C5, has a convenient handle, is easy to disinfect after each patient visit and has a built-in camera to take pictures of injuries.

The Motion C5 has graduated from the center's testing phase and is being used on a preliminary basis in a few Kaiser hospitals. Goodwin said similar computers using Intel's chips and design are being introduced by other companies as well, including Panasonic.

Another Intel device the center is reviewing is called Health Guide, which is designed to let patients at home communicate with their doctors. It can be hooked up to blood pressure monitors, glucose meters, weight scales and other medical equipment so the physician can get regular updates on a patient's condition.

During the recent media tour, center executives simulated use of a teleconferencing system that Tandberg has developed, which patients also conceivably could use to communicate with their doctors. Similar equipment developed by Cisco Systems as well as a portable nurse's computer from HP are under study, too.

Among other gadgets the center has studied are robots, face-recognition devices for accessing hospital computers, and Nintendo Wii video games, which the center believes can provide valuable physical stimulation for children with mobility disorders.

But not everything the center studies has to be high-tech.

In seeking a way to alleviate the potentially dangerous interruptions nurses often encounter when giving patients their medications, it found the best solution was to have the nurses simply wear a yellow reflective strap around their chest that warns others to leave them alone.

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© 2008, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).