Delivering a SOA-Based Community Record to Caregivers Everywhere at UPMC with BlackBerry® Smartphones

This webinar was originally transmitted on April 28, 2010. A recorded version is available for viewing upon completion of the form at the bottom of this page. 

Don't shrug off ‘apps’, as suggested in the Business Week November 2009 cover story entitled Inside the App Economy: Beyond the goofy games is a world of useful programs that's making fortunes and changing the rules of business. UPMC, in conjunction with Research in Motion Limited (RIM), designer and manufacturer of the BlackBerry wireless platform, has created "dbMobile." This powerful, fun and easy-to-use application is the first of its kind to deliver an on-demand, shared community patient record to BlackBerry-using caregivers throughout UPMC's healthcare system. Enabled by the organization's interoperability platform, demand is on the rise from UPMC clinicians who are enjoying increased access to a single, comprehensive view of meaningfully organized key patient data anywhere and everywhere.

Dr. Bill Fera will discuss why UPMC chose the BlackBerry platform for clinical collaboration and Sheldon Hebert will present how mobile technology is being integrated throughout the continuum of patient care.

You'll hear about:

• How BlackBerry is becoming a driver for EMR adoption
• Mobile technology in nursing initiatives
• Where BlackBerry technology is headed for healthcare

Key take-aways:

• Learn about how BlackBerry smartphones effectively handle privacy and patient safety challenges
• Understand the integration of mobile technology into the continuum of care and why presenting clinicians with a semantically organized longitudinal patient record is critical to address current quality and cost issues
• Discover steps you can take toward making harmonized patient data available to healthcare providers anywhere and everywhere

Speaker Biographies:

William A. Fera, MD, UPMC   
Dr. Fera has provided over a decade of clinical and information technology leadership within the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and has been instrumental in redefining the model of healthcare through state-of-the-art information technologies to produce exceptional clinical outcomes.

Dr. Fera serves as the Vice President of Medical Technologies; Medical Director Interoperability, UPMC. UPMC is the largest integrated health care and finance delivery system in Pennsylvania and one of the leading nonprofit medical centers in the country. UPMC is an $8 billion, 50,000-employee organization that serves the health needs of more than 4 million people each year.

In his current role, Dr. Fera leads the interoperability initiative at UPMC as well as efforts to identify and develop UPMC intellectual property and associated internally developed solutions for commercial opportunities. Under Dr. Fera’s leadership, these emerging technologies have a direct impact on patient safety and care delivery, underscoring the UPMC mission of providing outstanding patient care.

Sheldon Hebert , Public Sector, Healthcare and Education, RIM   
As the Director of Healthcare at Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Sheldon is responsible for all go-to-market efforts into healthcare enterprise within North America.  Sheldon's team has a mandate to expand BlackBerry usage in healthcare by working with partners and carriers to enhance the already strong ROI that is native to BlackBerry.  Sheldon has been able to work with a multifunctional team and ecosystem of partners, to develop BlackBerry as a standard in the healthcare vertical within the enterprise. 

Sheldon has honors degrees in business and science and joined RIM in 2002.  Prior to joining RIM, Sheldon managed a sales team for a wireless application provider that was part of the ISV program at RIM.  In this capacity Sheldon was responsible for guiding product management to develop applications that could be used across many verticals, healthcare being the prominent one.