Flatvision Industry News

Digital signage saw dramatic growth across virtually all industries over the course of 2011 as businesses and institutions recognized innovative ways to produce revenue, promote brand initiatives, disseminate information and better manage their employees. According to a recent white paper by Healthcare Tech Decisions, “ROI Digital Signage,” 2012 is expected to see a 16.9 percent revenue growth in healthcare alone.

Technological advancement in healthcare has seen a healthy boom in recent years with the adoption of electronic medical records and greater use of telemedicine. Now with digital signage, patients and medical staff alike can benefit from a more efficient and professional means of communication.

There are three significant patient needs in these facilities including to be informed, to be put at ease and the ability to properly navigate the facility. Digital signage can assist with all three of these patient necessities.

Medical offices and hospitals alike have begun implementing LCD displays in high-visibility areas to provide up-to-the-minute wait times, registration information, way-finding directions and even public safety alerts. These advanced displays can reduce patient anxiety, manage expectations and efficiently save time by eliminating repetitive questions from patients. Some hospitals have even implemented displays in individual rooms to communicate more efficiently with patients.

Another significant function of these LCD displays is for education purposes. In high-traffic areas of these medical facilities, displays can distribute infotainment content including healthy eating tips in the cardio ward, infant care in the maternal ward and radiation facts in the X-Ray ward. Patients can benefit from the educational information and hospitals further their messaging of health preservation.

“ROI Digital Signage” also states that operating costs for digital signage in healthcare are generally low at about 1 percent of capital investment. As medical establishments continue to go digital and the benefits of digital signage become more apparent, we expect to see a large uptake in the deployment of digital signage solutions in the healthcare industry in the near future.

(For full article please see: http://www.digitalsignageconnection.com)

Medical image displays are required to maintain high image quality with consistant accuracy over a long period of time. It is also critical that their quality control can be easily performed. Current challenging and innovative medical techniques rely on access to accurate information at all times.

With this in mind and to satisfy an increasing demand for higher-resolution DICOM-calibrated medical displays we have recently developed our ‘Ultra Medical Range’ of monochrome and color diagnostic displays, designed to provide the most stable and consistent image quality possible.

For further information on our range of DICOM compliant displays please click here.

A new innovative imaging method, recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is not only expected to play a critical role in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but in drug research, and the design of clinical trials leading to a cure.

Researchers from Mount Sinai Medical Center (New York, NY, USA) are using in the clinical setting the newly approved imaging technique to identify AD in individuals who are cognitively impaired. Until now, physicians have been limited in their ability to diagnose AD, guided almost exclusively by a patient’s mental and behavioral symptoms and family history.

Under the new procedure, patients are injected with a radioactive agent called florbetapir, which binds to the plaques that are hallmark symptoms of AD. The physician then uses a positron emission tomography (PET) scan to highlight the plaques that are bound to the agent. If a large amount of florbetapir is seen on the image, the patient may have AD. If no plaques are found, this could eliminate AD as a possible cause of the patient’s cognitive impairment.

“Until now, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease could only be pathologically confirmed at autopsy,” said Samuel Gandy, MD, a professor of neurology and psychiatry and director of the Mount Sinai Center for Cognitive Health and NFL Neurological Center at The Mount Sinai Medical Center. “Coupled with traditional clinical examination, florbetapir is a promising tool in helping confirm the diagnosis of a patient who is dealing with cognitive impairment. While we cannot exclude the presence of very low levels of amyloid, a negative test means that a memory problem is likely due to some other cause.”

Alzheimer’s disease is one of several possible causes of cognitive decline. Symptoms may overlap with other causes of cognitive impairment including memory loss; loss in visuospatial ability and executive function; and behavioral and language difficulties. The imaging technique will be used as an adjunctive tool with conventional techniques of diagnosis to help determine if these symptoms are related to AD and if not, eliminate it as a likely cause of them.

“From a research perspective, this imaging technique is a major advance that will propel us forward in designing clinical trials and determining drug efficacy for this debilitating disease,” said Dr. Gandy.

(To see full article: http://www.medimaging.net)

According to some studies, 70-80 percent of medical errors are related to interpersonal interactions. Another study by professional nurse associations reported that poor workplace communication has contributed to medical mistakes, even when preventive measures were taken.

To combat this, communication must be improved at the point of care, where healthcare providers are actively engaged in caring for patients. Even with checklists and hand-off protocols in place, clinicians and patients need supportive messaging and reminders to help prevent mistakes. Internal communications via digital signage monitors in patient rooms, nursing units, blood labs, staff lounges and more can provide critical safety information to foster more effective communication and help reduce the chance of error.

Here are three ways digital signage can improve communication and increase patient safety:

* Implement digital signage at the point of care. SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, and Recommendation) is an important form of communication among nurses, physicians, and others. Breakdowns in communication can occur when clinical staff is hurried or stressed, and during shift changes or patient hand-offs when caregivers might forget the important elements of following process and protocol. A digital signage monitor in a nursing unit can be effective to ensuring the proper transfer of patient information, highlight process changes and more.

* Use digital signage to reinforce patient identifiers. Hospitals all have their own protocols regarding identifying patients. Messaging can inform patients about a hospital’s policy so they understand why nurses and physicians will be checking wrist bands, for example. Relevant content can also empower patients to ask nurses and other caregivers to see identification badges. Patients and families faced with illness are often in anxiety-ridden situations and need to feel they are in charge of their own care. Simply reminding people it is okay to ask questions can go a long way towards improving the quality of care and eliminating mistakes. 

* Empower individuals to remind caregivers to wash their hands. With the hospital hand washing compliance rate at less than 40 percent nationwide, this is an issue that is not going away any time soon as improving compliance is vital to saving lives. To be effective, communication and reminders about hand hygiene needs to be direct, engaging and sustainable. The right content, in the right location, at the point of care can make it easier for patients to take a stand when they see a provider NOT washing their hands.

Miscommunication often stems from lack of communication at the right place or the right time. Digital signage monitors located throughout hospitals where patients wait, where caregivers work and rest, and where visitors and families congregate can provide information vital to improving patient safety and the quality of patient care.

(To see full article please see: http://www.digitalsignageconnection.com)

Routine mammography screening, widely considered crucial in early breast cancer detection, may in fact be doing its job too well.

It turns out that as many as a quarter of the early cancers detected by mammography would not progress. That suggests early detection results in a great deal of unnecessary treatment and stress, according to a Harvard School of Public Health analysis of a nationwide screening program in Norway.

“Radiologists have been trained to find even the smallest of tumors in a bid to detect as many cancers as possible to be able to cure breast cancer,” lead author and visiting scientist Mete Kalager said in a school news release. “The present study adds to the increasing body of evidence that this practice has caused a problem for women — diagnosis of breast cancer that wouldn’t cause symptoms or death.”

The researchers had at their disposal a wealth of data from the Norwegian Breast Cancer Screening Program, launched in 1996 for women ages 50 to 69. Nearly 40,000 women participated in the program, one in five of whom were diagnosed with some form of breast cancer.

But of the 7,793 women diagnosed through the program, as many as 25 percent (1,948) were overdiagnosed. The team goes on to estimate that for every 2,500 women invited to screening, only one life will be saved, while 6 to 10 women will undergo unnecessary treatment for a cancer that never would have progressed.

Put another way, regular mammography screening may result in 6 to 10 women undergoing great physical and emotional stress in order to save one life.

(For full article please see: http://news.cnet.com)

Using a high-powered diffusion magnetic resonance imaging scanner, scientists led by Van Wedeen, MD, of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, have determined the way the brain is wired is actually quite simple.

According to Wedeen, instead of fibers traveling through the brain in a chaotic, “spaghetti-like” pattern, they run in a grid-like pattern that is “quite elegant.”

“The crucial anatomy of the brain, unquestionably, is its connectivity,” said Wedeen. “That is the defining anatomy of the brain.”

The problem has been that the technology didn’t exist that could demonstrate what the three dimensional structure of this connectivity is.” Instead, said Wedeen, “We’ve been looking at a mess.”

“So what was needed was a way to see into this mess,” he said. To that end, Wedeen and his colleagues have been working on developing MRI technology that can map the fiber architecture of the brain.

Funded by the NIH Human Connectome Project (a collaborative effort to build a network map of the human brain), researchers at MGH, along with Siemens AG, co-developed the human connectome scanner, which is, according to Wedeen, 10 times as sensitive as existing clinical scanners.

“It’s most startling characteristic is a gradient that is 10 times stronger than the average clinical scanner,” Wedeen said. “But it’s balanced so well, it’s extremely quiet, although it is a bit of a beast from an engineering point of view. It has four parallel power supplies, so building these things and keeping them alive and well is not yet a trivial matter.”

With diffusion MRI, scientists are able to map the three-dimensional motion of water molecules in the brain. Those maps can then be run through a series of mathematical algorithms that infer from the water motion pattern the fiber architecture in question.

What are the implications of his research for diagnostic imaging? Wedeen pointed to what he calls the “800-pound gorilla in the brain boat, which is mental disease.”

“So the idea of having quantitative imaging that would be beneficial for mental health would have a revolutionary impact on the relationship between diagnostic imaging and healthcare,” he said.

(For full article please see: http://www.diagnosticimaging.com)