Motorola Expands Mobile Hardware, Services Lineup For Health Care
It's intended for managing patient information, including tracking vital signs and medication, and capturing 1D and 2D bar codes for transmitting patient data.
It also sports a 3.5-inch VGA display, interoperability with Motorola's integrated voice solutions, including its TEAM express voice client, a 3.2-megapixel autofocus color camera, and disinfectant-ready casing. It offers MIL-STD 810 G- and IEC-grade drop and sealing specifications, and is also certified under Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 Level 1 for encryption and authentication.
"It's positioned as a clinical tool primarily for nurses and lab technicians," said Vivian Funkhouser, principal, global healthcare solutions, for Motorola Solutions. "Our strategy is one device that's multifunctional. We talk with facilities about their mobility strategy to help them maximize their ROI, and they want to be able to stage applications and pack in as many things and functions as they can into one device."
The mobile computer comes on the heels of two other recent Motorola health-care releases, the DS6868-HC cordless 2D imager and the DS6707-HC corded 2D imager. According to Funkhouser, solution providers looking to offer a well-rounded mobility solution to health-care customers need both a range of setting-appropriate devices and the services to back them up. Motorola's Mobility Services Platform offers centralized management of the new devices, she noted.
A device like the new EDA is less cumbersome than competitive tablet computers, Funkhouser said, because it packs a lot into a smaller form factor and much like a PDA or smartphone, can be carried in a lab coat.
"When you have a tablet, where do you put it down?" Funkhouser said. "We need to push work to where work is being done. Clinical work is being done at the bedside. We have to be the least intrusive to patient care as we can be."
With the health-care opportunity for the channel growing at a rapid clip thanks to adoption of electronic medical records (EMR) and the infrastructure needed to support them, VARs are still stumbling when it comes to purpose-built mobility solutions, she said.
"The prediction is that the bottleneck for adoption will not be the demand or interest, it'll be the systems integrators unable to step up to the plate to deploy fast enough," she said. "Now is the right time to get into this."