Wireless Home Devices Working at the Hospital to Monitor Patients in New Jersey With Pilot Program

Ocean Medical Center in New Jersey using technology to work with patients with monitoring patient vitals. This is a pilot program in use with an off the shelf wireless scale.

Every day the patient weight is sent to the hospital and the technician monitors the weight and if the weight goes up it could be a sign of congestive heart failure. If the patient gains 2 pounds or more weight, the hospital calls. The company has also joined with another company named Cypak that has a card that use cryptology to send the information back from the patient, a number of questions the patient answers.

We certainly have a lot of options with devices reporting data today and hopefully we will develop some standards here too so we are not over run with devices that require a lot of training. BD

FORTUNE -- Health care in the country is changing, but it's not the wholesale socialization of medicine that Obama administration critics have feared. Some of the best, most cost-effective changes are happening as states take their pieces of federal healthcare reform and tweak their own systems from the ground up, or reexamine their existing programs with an eye towards eliminating inefficiency. As it turns out, those little tweaks can add up to serious savings.

Several states have started "medical home" programs, which centralize patient information around one home base, and one primary care provider. So far, these programs have saved states hundreds of millions of dollars in medical costs.

Medical homes could also help with President Obama's project to computerize all medical records over the next five years. Obama just allotted $975 million to develop better technology in health care. Much of that money is going towards digitizing medical records. That'll be much easier to accomplish when records are held at a single point, like a medical home. In Illinois, medical home programs are partnering with a third-party company called Automated Health Systems, which organizes the information for the program, providing further savings.