Mobile healthcare news: June 26 - July 21, 2006

- Gary Thayer, editor

July 21, 2006 -- (MobileVillage) -- Following are mobile healthcare news items for the past month:

Skyscape has launched MedAlert, a specialized text messaging medical service for cell phone users. For a monthly fee and by texting the keyword "medalert" to 36637, medical professionals can subscribe to MedAlert and receive up-to-the-minute medical news alerts via their cell phone, with a clear and concise text message. Since MedAlert has full email integration, the subscriber can instantly have complete medical articles sent to an email address simply by replying to the text message.

MedAlert subscribers can identify Specialty Interest Groups to receive information for the following:

* Cardiology
* Emergency Medicine
* Internal Medicine
* Neurology
* OB/GYN
* Pediatrics
* Psychiatry
* General Surgery
* Family Medicine/General Practice

MedAlert is available to subscribers in the United States via cellular service providers such as Verizon Wireless, Cingular, Sprint/Nextel, Alltel and T Mobile for a monthly subscription of $1.99 per month plus standard message rates.

Skyscape also recently launched RxPlan, which contains formularies for over 4700 health plans, including Medicare Part D and Medicaid. It continuously updates the status of over 12,000 drugs, and enables RxPlan prescribers the ability to offer choices based on patient health plan coverage. RxPlan integrates with close to 50 Skyscape drug information resources and 300+ mobile information resources.

Designed for Palm, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile PDA's and Windows PC's/TabletPC's, RxPlan searches by drug name, drug class or clinical system and allows the prescriber to browse drug lists within each formulary, giving the status of the drug coverage and automatically selecting possible alternatives for a more favorable option for the given patient.

For additional information, see Skyscape.com or see the company's summary page on MobileVillage.

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USBMIS announced the release of the web and PDA Editions of The Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy 2006, and Basic Concepts in Pharmacology, published by McGraw-Hill. The PDA Editions are for Palm and Pocket PC devices. For more information or to purchase the references, see usbmis.com.

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MedQuist introduced DocQment Ovation, a web-based, enterprise digital voice capture and transport application for use with telephones, PDAs, and desktop computer-based dictation devices. Deployed at the customer's location such as a clinic, Ovation provides an enterprise view that allows transcription supervisors to manage users, documents and voice files from a single dashboard. Ovation's configuration options enable administrators to track work and share resources in order to get the right document to the right transcriptionist. For details, see medquist.com.