Medicine has increasingly become a mobile practice. The millions of doctors and residents in the United States are always on the move treating patients in offices, satellite locations, and hospitals. Every day, physicians, residents, nurses and other medical practitioners must sift through large amounts of constantly changing information-regarding numerous topics such as the diagnosis of diseases, drugs, and drug interactions-in order to make correct decisions.
Additionally, while the growing mobile nature of doctors has brought qualified care to many areas where it was previously not available, it also has created new issues - with the number of prescription errors increasing and the time doctors have available to spend with patients decreasing. This translates into a rise in medical and prescription errors and misdiagnoses and translates into increases in litigation and liability costs for doctors and hospitals. The now often-cited National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine study estimated the prevalence and severity of these medical errors by stating that between 44,000 and 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals annually as a result of medical mistakes-more than half of them preventable.
Preventable medical errors have been estimated to cost the American economy (in the form of additional healthcare costs, lost income and household production, and disability) from $17 to 29 billion annually . Specifically preventable adverse drug reactions cost the average 700-bed hospital an added $2.8 million . Extrapolating these statistics to the nation as a whole, preventable in-patient drug mistakes alone cost the American economy more than $2 billion a year, and result in untold, mostly avoidable adult and pediatric suffering.
New solutions are needed to bring critical information to doctors, in a context they can use. More than $31 billion will be spent on Healthcare IT in 2003 states Gartner Dataquest, and IDC Research predicts this spending will have its greatest impact with the individual doctors. Research has shown that the ability to capture and retrieve information at the point-of-care can decrease the time it takes for delivering care in half and can significantly reduce prescription and other errors. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has noted that insufficient or erroneous point-of-care treatment information is a frequent and significant cause of medical errors . In an address to Congress, AHRQ stated that clinicians must have sufficient evidence and information to close the potentially gaping chasm between medical fact and medical practice.
Historically, healthcare professionals consulted various medical books to gather the information they needed to make informed decisions. But with the increasingly mobile nature of professionals and the rapidly changing information in healthcare, this is becoming more difficult. And with the increasing discovery of new treatments, the pace of approvals of new drugs by the FDA and warnings of drug interactions-the FDA recalled 5,025 products in 2002, it has become more and more difficult to stay informed. Practitioners need the ability to access dynamic content which is updated frequently. Dynamic medical information is now readily available from disparate sources such as the Web, journals, newsletters, etc. and includes traditional reference content as well as peer-reviewed content, drug notifications and FDA or CDC alerts. Today, practitioners need centralized access to not only the information they learned in school and in daily practice, but also the new information that is generated daily.
According to industry analysts and doctors themselves, handheld devices are one of the best answers. Handheld devices solve a major medical hurdle by enabling quick and easy access to critical information-giving medical practitioners the capability to retrieve information about a disease on the spot or evaluate the effectiveness of different drugs based on a certain patient profile within seconds. Today, more than two in four doctors use handheld devices, and the number is projected to grow to 350,000 physicians in 2004 and 500,000 in 2007 . In addition to individual physicians, students and residents, more and more physician group practices, hospitals and other healthcare organizations, including managed care and public health organizations, are implementing handheld technology for their medical practitioners. Over 90 percent of Health Systems today are engaged in a handheld project or are considering one.
Handheld devices are the tools, but it is the software solutions that will provide the answer to better healthcare. According to Forrester Research, sales of handheld devices and applications used by doctors will grow from $201.6 million in 2003 to $1.65 billion in 2007. The market opportunity for these solutions is outstanding, and one company- Skyscape of Hudson, Mass.-has developed the technology to benefit medical professionals and to capture a growing share of this burgeoning market.
Since its founding in January of 2000, Skyscape has delivered the largest portfolio of medical and nursing handheld references available in the market today. Through its patented technology to translate and integrate reference books onto handheld devices, Skyscape gives doctors the power of a medical reference library in their pockets.
Using Skyscape applications, physicians diagnose illnesses, determine treatment, prescribe medication, determine drug interactions, calculate dosages, and perform all necessary steps involved with quality patient care right at the patient's bedside using their handheld device. Today, Skyscape applications include traditional medical and nursing references. But as envisioned, the market has become more sophisticated in the use of medical reference content on handhelds and the need for more dynamic content with frequent updates is a requirement. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that having dynamic content that SmartLinksT (provides the ability to link from one reference to another in the context of a physician's thinking) is critical to improved decision making at the point of care.
Skyscape's strategy is to provide medical practitioners with the actionable information they need, when they need it, and in a method that anticipates doctors' mode of thinking. Skyscape's vision has always recognized that high quality decision making is enabled when static information (such as that found in medical references) is integrated with more dynamic information such as lab results, journals and drug alerts. In this way, practitioners making decisions are able to come to conclusions based on both information they have known since medical school as well as on the latest information they obtain in the process of doing their work. The next step in Skyscape's technology direction is fully aligned to provide this capability to individual and communities of practitioners through the introduction of a networked platform that updates dynamic content while retaining an integrated repository of information that can SmartLink between dynamic and static content. Skyscape now delivers this capability through its intelligent mobile messaging channels platform, ARTbeatT.
In delivering on this vision, Skyscape has made significant enhancements across its systems architecture, server technology, communications infrastructure and handheld platform. The goal of Skyscape's next generation platform is to provide dynamic information utilizing a channelized approach to deliver up-to-date information within a hierarchically organized set of channels (each for a specific content source - such as MedWatch and Drug News Weekly) on the user's handheld. Each time the user syncs his device, the system checks the channels on the handheld and provides any updates from the content sources contained in the channels.
Skyscape technology is unique in its ability to SmartLink dynamic content in channels with other more traditional 'powered by Skyscape' handheld references thus providing the ability to view dynamic information in context during the decision making process. And Skyscape's unique, patented solution is intuitive and easy to use. Solutions that have not incorporated in context capabilities are counter-intuitive and cumbersome as the user has to always refer to information in each channel separately to identify whether there is any new information that is pertinent to his decision making. Furthermore, this approach does not allow the incorporation of dynamic information in context at the point of care which is the greatest need for the practicing medical practitioner. If you compare this approach to how a person processes information, it is clear that information implemented this way does not align with the way a person thinks. When you read something, it does not get memorized as one chunk of information but instead what you learn gets parsed to all the appropriate areas of your brain for easier recall when the information is needed. Skyscape's patented ARTT (Advanced Reference and Transaction) solutions provide an easy to use and rapidly adopted interface to meet these requirements.
Skyscape's ART Engine is the only technology available today that integrates information and puts it in context-reducing the time doctors need to spend searching through information and adding value by enabling complex information queries and access to the latest disease, drug, and interaction information. The company's new ARTbeat intelligent mobile messaging platform takes the functionality to the next level, enabling users to access dynamic content in context such as FDA alerts, journals and hospital guidelines via intelligent mobile channels on the handheld.
Skyscape's ART Engine also features SmartLink, which intuitively cross-indexes information to mirror the thinking patterns of doctors. The resultant solutions aggregate information from diverse data sources, integrate reference and transaction information under a common paradigm, enable real-time navigation and exploration of huge, growing data sources, and deliver relevant information in a very rapid fashion.
The ability to dynamically access the right information quickly and easily is what makes Skyscape solutions so powerful. Unlike companies that create their own content, Skyscape has formed strategic partnerships with the world's leading medical publishers including Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Springer-Verlag/Bertlesmann, Facts and Comparisons, F.A. Davis, Thomson, eMedicine and the CDC to bring trusted gold-standard content to its customers. This continued approach of developing cognitively-based management solutions is what sets Skyscape apart as a standout solution for the medical community.
The results have been overwhelming. In less than four years, Skyscape has developed the largest installed base of paying customers in the industry, with a total registered user base of more than 200,000. The company is continuing to increase adoption through its introduction to leading residency programs, and today, physicians and medical practitioners at the country's leading medical institutions - including Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, University of Louisville, Stanford Medical School, Partners Health System, Duke University, Mayo Clinic, and Kaiser Permanente - rely on Skyscape's trusted solutions. Epitomizing the power of mobile technology in medicine, Skyscape is helping doctors bring healthcare to the far reaches of remote Africa and other countries.
Until now, Skyscape provided the most extensive collection of medical and nursing reference software available for Palm® and Windows CE®/Pocket PC devices. Now, Skyscape expands its offering by providing the ARTbeat infrastructure for handheld users that enables them, both within their enterprises and singularly, to create real-time custom views of dynamic medical information within their own personal information repositories. As a result, users will be able to intelligently customize mobile channels of real-time medical information right on their PDAs.
Channel content can take the form of journal, newsletter subscriptions or other content types which the user downloads for free or are fee-based, free pharmaceutical sponsored information that the customer chooses to receive, notices or guidelines that are made available from the customer's institution or enterprise or any other custom content or data source which would benefit the user. More specifically, having the ability to bring information in context is appealing to those who are: targeting their brands at specialists at the point of prescribing, sharing enterprise information, communicating messages to unique subsets of constituents or alerting users of updates or changes. This information may come from a wide range of sources including the Web, computer databases and enterprise transaction systems.
This is just the beginning for Skyscape. Skyscape pioneered and embraces the revolution in the use of mobile devices in the medical market. Extending from the individual practitioner to communities of mobile professionals working collaboratively, transacting, and referring, the PDA today is connecting medicine throughout the healthcare enterprise. These high-value professional communities will greatly benefit from even more dynamic information access at their fingertips that will improve both the quality of care as well as their efficiency in handling the administrative overhead that is part of today's rapidly changing business environment. Additionally with Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Patient Management Systems (PMS), Patient Scheduling Systems, e-Prescription writers, and other enterprise functionality being more widely available, Skyscape's ARTbeat platform will play an integral part in providing the complete decision-making solution practitioners need to practice medicine.
Skyscape is the only company positioned to provide a single, unified enterprise-wide technology platform to address the individual interests of these various stakeholders by providing powerful, real-time value-added solutions that will create the leaders in this rapidly changing competitive landscape.
