25 Hot Health-Care IT Offerings To Check Out Right Now

What's Hot In Health-Care IT

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's (HIMSS) conference is the CES -- or the COMDEX, if you like -- of the health-care IT world, an annual gathering of the market's most influential vendors and a sizable sampling of the systems integrators, ISVs and other movers and shakers who keep the health-care IT space humming.

Here's a look at 25 of the most interesting product launches at this year's show, which took place in Las Vegas in late February.

Enterasys OneFabric Edge

Enterasys, which has posted impressive growth as a converged infrastructure alternative to the Ciscos and HPs of the world, said it has signed up more than 360 new health-care customers in the past year. At HIMSS, it was touting a health-care-oriented version of its OneFabric Edge architecture, designed for simpler edge networking and more facile mobile application delivery.

Wyse Enterprise Mobility Management

Wyse brought a full complement of cloud client hardware, desktop virtualization software and cloud mobility products to HIMSS, demonstrating how those products can create speedier care delivery and lowered energy usage for health-care customers. Among its showcase products were its Wyse T10 thin client, running Citrix XenDesktop 5.5, the Wyse Z50, a SUSE Linux thin client running VMware View, and its Wyse Enterprise Mobility Management software, an MDM product delivered as a service.

Avaya Mobile Activity Assistant

Avaya always has a solid presence at HIMSS, and at this year's show announced the Avaya Mobile Activity Assistant, a UC mobility tool for consolidating nurse call alerts, critical notifications and other forms of messaging into a single-view application on a mobile device, secured to HIPAA standards. Initial availability is for Apple iOS mobile devices, and Avaya also touted its Avaya Flare Communicator for iPad, which extends its Flare collaboration dashboard to iPad, and in a health-care context, allows workers to share data such as X-rays and lab results on iPad tablets.

Nuance eCopy Healthcare Solution Pack

Voice-to-text and speech analytics titan Nuance Communications was all over HIMSS. On the product side, it announced the eCopy Healthcare Solution Pack, a version of Nuance's eCopy ShareScan document-scanning and workflow product for clinical settings where easy and cheap scanning of patient records, historical charts and admission history forms make a big difference.

Konica Minolta Services

Konica Minolta was at HIMSS showing off a range of health-care IT services through All Covered, the managed service provider (MSP) Konica acquired a year ago and itself a frequent acquirer of smaller MSPs. It also had a health-care-specific managed print services offering and its Body Area Network (BAN), a collaboration with Ad-Sol Nissin to use BAN technologies for human body touch-access for authenticating devices.

Samsung Collaborations

Samsung brought a number of key products and services to HIMSS in collaboration with other vendors. There were Honeywell HomMed, a telehealth and remote patient-monitoring suite launched for Samsung's Galaxy Tab, a remote patient-monitoring offering launched with Intuitive Health, a home health-care offering with Homecare Homebase, a hospital virtualization suite launched with Cerner, and a point-of-care communication offering with Voalte.

Greenway Medical Marketplace

Integrated EHR and practice management application specialist Greenway Medical Technologies was at HIMSS for the first time this year, and launched Greenway Marketplace, which uses Greenway's partner services platform to deliver Greenway technologies to about 33,000 health-care providers. Specifically, Greenway partners can use PrimeSuite's API to build applications and services, deliverable via Greenway's platform. One example, EHR Solutions, provides EHRnotify technology for automating the text, e-mail and calling placement of patient reminders, along with other key items such as lab results and e-prescription submissions.

MMRGlobal PHR

Personal health record (PHR) specialist MMRGlobal came to the table at HIMSS with a new electronic medical records system that connects to its various PHR products and services, as well as a mobile app version of its MyMedicalRecords software for tablets and smartphones, and a new portal, 4 medicaLive, for connecting to pharmacy subscriptions, lab results and other pieces of data delivered right to a subscriber's PHR system.

Cisco Cius for Healthcare

Cisco tapped into a crucial niche with health-care versions of key products like TelePresence and WebEx, and at this year's HIMSS show, it also had eyes on Cisco Cius for Healthcare -- essentially, the Cisco Cius Android tablet dressed up with a variety of health-care-specific applications and security settings tailored for the compliance-heavy environment.

Nuvon Vitals

Clinical workflow vendor Nuvon's HIMSS launch focus was medical device data management, and its new products were Nuvon Vitals, a clinical flow sheet that allows physicians an aggregated view of patient care data using a workstation, tablet, smartphone or other Web-accessible device, and Nuvon Mobile Device Manager, a data capture device the size of a smartphone that includes a built-in bar code reader.

Code CortexRM

Code Corp.'s latest software product is CortexRM, a remote device management software interface that can offer visibility and control of a Code bar code reader regardless of where it is located. According to Code, it can work with third-party remote management applications as well, removing the need for health-care IT administrators to buy separate products to manage bar code readers.

ExpeData EDW Platform

Software company ExpeData focuses on how health-care organizations automate their mobile data collection using tablet devices and Anoto-brand digital pens. At HIMSS, the company presented with several vendor partners' products -- including Integrated Document Solutions' cloud-based clinical documentation materials, Nightingale Informatix's EMR and patient portals, and Centrix Group's cloud-based EHR systems -- and said it will continue to focus on broadening its partner ecosystem behind its EDW workflow platform.

GammaTech Durabook U12C

GammaTech Computer is a big player in the market for ruggedized laptops and mobile devices, and at HIMSS, it brought along its GammaTech Durabook U12C, which features a 12.1-inch WXGA touchscreen and can be converted into a tablet featuring I/O covered ports. It sports an Intel Core i5 processor and offers optional RS232 port, GPS, 2m-pixel auto-focus camera and other features. GammaTech also had its T10L2 Mobile Clinical Assistant, a slate-style tablet PC with a 10.4-inch TFT LCD display, on hand at the show.

IBM Watson

Big Blue is always out in force at HIMSS, and among its exhibitions this year was its Watson supercomputer, which gained international fame appearing on TV's "Jeopardy" last year. In September, IBM struck an agreement with WellPoint to create commercial applications behind IBM Watson technology, including patient care services derived from Watson's ability to analyze meanings and context in human language and process information into actionable data. IBM has also been releasing new health-care-oriented software of its own using content analytics similar to what's found in the Watson technology.

EMC VNX Unified Storage

EMC had good notices following the launch of its VNX storage line last year, and at HIMSS it had some key health-care vertical customer wins to crow about -- at formerly favored partner Dell's expense, to boot. According to EMC, MedWest Health System, a health-care provider based in western North Carolina that spans three hospital campuses and four outpatient facilities, swapped out 100 TB worth of Dell EqualLogic and standardized on EMC, including the VNX unified storage with EMC's Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) suite, and also EMC Avamar for backup and recovery, EMC Unisphere for management and EMC RecoverPoint for application recovery.

Fujifilm Medical Systems Synapse RIS 6.1

Fujifilm Medical Systems Synapse product line includes PACS, cardiovascular and radiology information systems (RIS). The latest version of Synapse RIS is 6.1., and includes Synapse Financials, which offers billing and management tools as part of a practice management solution, a module devoted to Meaningful Use regulations, a graphical dashboard for displaying information such as patient waits and patient volume in realtime, and a dose-management tool that provides everything from equipment-specific weighing to patient level dose estimates.

Peerless PeerCare

Peerless, which focuses on audio and video products, expanded into the health-care market this year and made a splash at HIMSS with its PeerCare line. PeerCare products include electronic medical record carts optimized for patient charting on iPad and Android devices, the PeerCare Enclosure Pod, a lockable, unibody design for securing PeerCare wall systems and PeerCare Antimicrobial Mounting Solutions, which are wall- and ceiling-mounted products using Agion coatings for infection control.

Notable Solutions NSi AutoStore

Notable Solutions focuses on document capture and workflow, and along with Konica Minolta at HIMSS, demonstrated its NSiAutoStore, which is built into Konica's bizhub multifunction printers and offers single-button control for prescription scanning into pharmacies or into EMR applications. Among Notable's well-known NSi customers are the U.S. Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Department of Defense, the latter of which uses NSi AutoStore for information capture in its Healthcare Artifact and Image Management Solution (HAIMS) project.

Dell UCA And MCC

Dell used HIMSS to showcase its Unified Clinical Archiving (UCA) product and talk about updates to its Mobile Clinical Computing (MCC) platform. The UCA builds on Dell's 18-month-old acquisition of InSiteOne, and also a partnership with Siemens, to provide cloud-data archiving for Siemens' Healthcare Cloud Computing Center, whereas the three-year-old MCC platform uses desktop virtualization, single sign-on and other authentication technologies with support services to enable clinicians to view patient-critical data on mobile devices but ensure that information is stored in a secure data center, not the devices themselves.

Dolbey DocAssist Documentation Guides

From Dolbey comes new DocAssist Documentation Guides, intended to help health-care organizations train physicians on how to document patient reports under the forthcoming ICD-10 PCS requirements. The much-discussed transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 is a big documentation headache for a number of organizations, and, much like the broader transition around paper records to EMR, is creating opportunity for savvy solution providers. What Dolbey's done is integrate DocAssist guides -- basically, short Q&A sessions teed up when a physician begins documenting a patient procedure using Dolbey products -- with its speech recognition and dictation wares, providing tools such as visual menus, or optional SMS text if it's a phone dictation.

CCI Tec TecEnterprise Claims

Business intelligence specialist CCI Tec used HIMSS to launch its TecEnterprise Claims product, which provides BI and analytics for claims status, claims process and claims management situations for customers using Edifecs Claims Validation. It's built on a Microsoft platform and uses BizTalk Server, SQL Server and SharePoint Server as underlying technology to provide rich claims reporting as well as easy management of claims and analytics tools such as pattern identification.

HP Alliance Program

HP's big HIMSS launch wasn't so much a product as a program: Healthcare Alliance, which brings together health-care providers and ISVs who want to package their wares with HP hardware. According to HP, Alliance members include Quest Diagnostics, Greenway Medical Technologies and Central Logic, and several partners were at HIMSS demonstrating combined health-care bundles with HP products. MedWeb, for example, showcased a PACS viewer running on the HP Slate 2 and virtual PACS imaging on HP Mobile Workstations, while Brainlab demonstrated medical software, designed for minimally invasive patient treatment, using HP's TouchSmart 9300 and digital signage displays.

VMware And Peake

VMware and Peake Healthcare Innovations were at HIMSS demonstrating an integrated, mobile security-flavored solution that combined Peake's cloud-based imaging technology with VMware View and VMware vSphere, enabling a way for clinical workers to view medical images via a range of devices from any location they need.

QlikView Business Discovery

While at HIMSS, QlikView touted strong growth behind its Business Discovery platform as a way for health-care organizations to view and manage all of their clinical, financial and resource-planning systems. Business Discovery can examine large volumes of organizational data and cut, consolidate, evaluate and present that data more efficiently, according to QlikView, which adds collaboration, social networking, graphical representation and integration with a host of applications and other analytics tools on top of existing BI applications and dashboards.

Verizon, Motorola Mobility And BoxTone

At HIMSS, Verizon Enterprise Solutions combined with Motorola Mobility and BoxTone for a mobile offering that takes BoxTone's automated Enterprise Mobility Management platform and secures various Motorola Mobility devices running Verizon's 4G LTE network, sold as a bundled solution to health-care organizations interested in Android-based devices and applications used in clinical settings.