INTRO: Thank you for joining us. I'm John Farrell, Editor of MobileHealthWatch.com. With us today is Blaine Warkentine, MD…Dr. Warkentine, who is trained in orthopaedic surgery and sports related knee injuries, flourished in his role as health educator and clinical director for Brainlab, Inc…For the past 18 months, he has focused his energies on mobile health solutions through development, partnerships, and innovation. He serves as CEO of InnovationThrives, OrthoThinkTank, and RidRX, as well as medical advisor in his partnerships…We caught up with Dr. Warkentine for a better sense of how he sees innovation evolving at the mobile point of care…Welcome, doctor… 1. Dr. Warkentine, we hear a lot about what smartphones can offer healthcare with regard to cost savings and increased efficiencies, but there's always that caveat thrown in regarding how dirty the devices are at the mobile point of care, and the risks associated with spreading germs. Your efforts began with a focus on hygiene, so why don't you start by telling our listeners about what you've been doing with anti-microbial technologies as they relate to mobile devices? Cheers, and Happy New Year, excited to have the opportunity to speak with you and MobileHealthWatch.com's listeners. First let me say that ALL of my efforts are focused on forming solutions for the healthcare professional. From there I have perfect confidence that the patient will benefit greatly. With that in mind. As a developer of applications and as a doctor I was aptly cognizant of the hippocratic oath "first, do no harm". The issue is well reported that Personal devices and articles of clothing on caregivers are perfect breeding grounds for cross contamination of pathologic organisms that might be causative of nosocomial infection. It is also reported that as many as 5% of all visits to the hospital are fraught with a healthcare associated infection. Such events as surgical site infections or other catheter related events now represent more than 31 Billion dollars in healthcare expenditure annually, and to some extent, it can be avoided. The incentives are aligned for change as these expenditures are not reimbursable under medicare guidelines. Now it comes to finding the right solutions to adopt and create change. This concern lead to me to seek inexpensive, safe, and effective antimicrobial solutions for these surfaces for healthcare providers and so I went to market with these solutions at RidRx.com. The mobile device is of particular concern because 60-70% of all caregivers already use a smartphone for decision support, and heavy users will use them between each and every patient interaction on average reportedly 2.7 hours a day. Also, they can be particularly hard to clean. They run at a higher than ambient temperature and grow contaminants easily. And, ultimately they have been proven at least in one study, of 200 phones in the ICU with the annals of clinical microbiology in March of 09', to harbor pathologic organisms 95% of the time. To me, this is a valid concern, but more important than the antimicrobial coverings of which I do have testing and confidence, particularly in our treated cationic Silver solution, is that soon every caregiver will be walking around with these devices at the point of care. I am excited to report that most of these devices will have RFID integrated into them perhaps as early as 4Gen iPhone this coming year and I am looking forward to evolving our available free Germaphone app for the iPhone to include hand hygiene compliance and surveillance to help administrators understand and comply with these issues of healthcare associated infection and best practices both of which if done successfully significantly reduce healthcare costs and could decrease the incidence of what now represents one of the top five reasons for death in the U.S.
2. Now, after developing anti-microbial coverings for mobile devices and coming up with the hand hygiene app--Germaphone--you unveiled a pretty unique product that's received some press coverage, the iStethoscope. Tell us about that; what is it and how did it come about? Sure. I am not the first to think that a version 2.0 stethoscope would go digital. In fact, a patent dates back to 1984. I just didn't want to pay the current asking price of 769$ for it from Littman. It occurred to me that bisecting my current cardiology II stethoscope just below at the bifurcation and then attaching the tube to an adapter would create a sound proof channel to the microphone of the mobile device and allow me to convert the analog signal into a digital one. I could then use the computing power of the device to process the signal in effective ways as well as store the audio file for later reference and/or send to someone else for interpretation. That is simply what we have done, we have the ability to alter what frequencies we amplify and allow the user to shake the device to visualize the wave form and then email the file. This application will evolve in unique and interesting ways for the near future and our patented adapter is being shipped to early adopters this next week. I think most of your listeners will start to think of how this could be useful. I predict less than 10% of all stethoscopes being used in the field are in the hands of a professional that could pick up the varied murmurs and potentially this application could begin to help the professionals that do know interpret more of these audio files without actually being at the bedside. The scalability of a 60$ adapter and the real time nature of the solution with the ability to export to your Personal health record for later reference I think represents a fascinating way to evolve the concept. Currently I must report that this is not considered a medical device as the FDA has no formal process for dealing with mobile phones or apps as you know.