3M Unveils Advanced Mobile Healthcare App

The software helps physicians keep track of patients’ whereabouts, manages dictation, and captures charges.

By Nicole Lewis InformationWeek
may 06, 2011 11:43 AM

3M has unveiled a health application that it says will enable physicians to better coordinate and manage their daily schedules, review patient information, dictate progress notes, and log accurate charges on their mobile devices.Announced Tuesday, company officials say the 3M Mobile Physician Solution was designed with features and functionality that address many aspects of a physician’s daily tasks, and will work with many devices including the iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile devices.

Recent research has shown that users of health apps want more information, and are looking for features that will help them manage and keep track of patient data.

The 3M Mobile Physician Solution offers four main modules:

– 3M Mobile Patient Lists allows physicians to sort through patient information to identify their room number, access scheduled appointments, or locate information that shows when the patient will be seen by other doctors.

– 3M Mobile Rounds enables physicians to access patient medications, allergies, vitals, and lab test results.

– 3M Mobile Dictation allows physicians to record and transmit dictated progress notes to the facility’s dictation and speech recognition systems. Physician voice files are automatically linked to the correct patient, eliminating the need to enter patient identifier numbers, and reducing errors and promoting faster transcription turnaround time.

– 3M Mobile Charge Capture enables physicians to capture professional fee charges for any patient encounter by selecting and pairing the correct billing codes with the appropriate diagnosis or procedure.

“3M Mobile Physician Solution is the first software we’ve released that integrates 3M’s coding logic and brings 3M’s coding expertise to the physician in real-time and at the point of care,” said Steve Retz, business manager, document creation products at 3M health information systems.

By integrating coding logic into the physician equation, doctors can access codes on their mobile devices instead of referring to the codes listed in a book. These codes provide information on professional fees for visits and consultations, as well as billing codes with the appropriate diagnosis or procedure.

Additionally, these codes can act as a guide to show when a charge isn’t appropriate given the patient’s demographics, for example, if a charge is coded for an adult procedure on a pediatric patient. Retz said the software also helps prevent lost or missing charges, so physicians receive the full reimbursement to which they are entitled. He also pointed out that the technology will assist with ICD-10 coding.

“We feel 3M Mobile Charge Capture with physician advice will ease the migration to the new ICD-10 coding standard, which will be disruptive to the current charge-capture process because physicians will have to record charges with much more coding specificity,” Retz said.

The 3M Mobile Physician Solution integrates with electronic health records and physician practice management systems using standard healthcare data exchange technology (HL7). The company declined to say how much the new system costs, but did say the software is being offered at a special introductory pricing through September 30 of this year.