",' who was required to attend nightly 1 a.m. video conference calls" It happens... I remember when I was on a business trip to Seoul, South Korea and my managers insisted I attend a telephone conferance everyday starting at Midnight my time because they could not get everyone together in our US east coast office before Noon (give or take an hour, I forget...) Keep in mind I had to be at work locally at 6am, I emailed reports everyday, and we were ahead of schedule. I honestly believe some of the folks at home were simply upset we were not where they could see us in the office. Luckily the meeting was often cut short by lack of Home Office managers being available... :/

Slight technical correction, it uses a Micro-SD card, not a CF card... Loading up CyanogenMod7 on bootable uSD works great, and you can still use the Native OS and have not voided the warrenty...

Sounds a lot like a smart phone... Load Android and your done...

Yes, HL7... The problem is insurance companies aren't using it in general, because it doesn't meet their needs... Since they are in charge of the purse strings, medical centers will follow their lead... When insurance companies insist on a submital format for claims to be processed, it will be done...

VistA is an example of where things could go... Because it is the standard for all VA medical sites, it begins to use an economy of scale... The problem is not everyone likes VistA, but if you had a universal mobile medical record format, you could import or export you record between a system like VistA and another such as Nextgen or HARMONY. My personal feeling is CPT billing codes (which aren't free to use) needs to be replaced with something like HL7 before this will happen...

The thing most people don't realize is going digital does NOT necessarily save money or time for the local staff, but it does force conformity that lessens the chance of a misunderstanding or a lack of information when sharing a health record. It can also make tracking who has had access to your information more or less automatic. If set up correctly: The big advantage will be to large medical facilities where mutiple staff can access the same medical record from different locations doing different functions at the same time... The main advantage to small practices will be the ability to bill insurance companies faster, as procedures performed will already be in in the record in a standard form... Insurance companies will see less fraud... Of cource, this is a big "if"... The key will be defining the "mobile" medical record format... It really doesn't matter what form the data in local databases takes, as long as the local databases can import and export the yet to be defined "standard", as opposed to the mutiple, often conflicting standards already out... Until a single standard is selected and followed, most advantages just won't exist.