Samsung doesn’t only develop TVs and DVD players. The company is also making moves in the healthcare space.
Specifically, Samsung has news to report out of Aurora, Colorado-based UCHealth.
The news begins with a closer look at Samsung’s Knox mobile platform, which Samsung Electronics America Chief Medical Officer Dr. David Rhew describes as the “underlying platform that’s unique to many Samsung devices.” The company initially rolled it out in the government space, and it eventually moved to the financial realm as well. Knox is known for its security features — in fact, it recently obtained the most “strong” ratings of any platform in Gartner’s “Mobile Device Security” report. On top of that, Knox enables organizations to add a certain level of customization to their devices.
Knox has also made its way over to healthcare through the use of Samsung tablets in hospitals. “Many hospitals have been using Samsung tablets for the Epic MyChart,” Rhew told MedCity in a phone interview.
One such organization? UCHealth.
UCHealth is currently utilizing approximately 260 Samsung devices across a variety of its facilities, Kyle Toburen, UCHealth’s senior engineer of desktop and mobility integration, informed MedCity via phone.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“With the use of a tablet, we wanted to give the patients the opportunity to become part of their own medical record and their own healthcare, especially for inpatient stays over two to three days,” Toburen said.
Patients can use the tablet not only to access their medical records, but also to watch Netflix and play games. And as Toburen pointed out, the tablets are even utilized by patients’ family members or friends who are visiting them in the hospital.
However, the use of the tablets did bring about one minor issue.
“Every time you give a tablet to a patient, there’s a tendency for the patient to want to enter their own personal information,” Rhew said. And after a patient is discharged, their data can’t remain on the tablet. Thus, there’s “a certain amount of reconfiguration that hospitals need to do,” according to Rhew.
Wiping and getting rid of all of a patient’s personal account information after he or she leaves the hospital can be extremely tedious, often requiring up to 45 minutes of a staff member’s time, Rhew noted.
So Samsung created a standalone application, called data eraser, that speeds up the process. In fact, Rhew said it decreases the time needed to eliminate all the patient’s data to 90 seconds.
“Data eraser really removes everything but a few applications,” Toburen said.
Through the use of tablets, Knox and the data eraser application, Samsung is helping UCHealth make the healthcare experience better for both patients and hospital staff members.
Photo: coffeekai, Getty Images
