Satellite - A Part Of The Toshiba Laptop Arsenal

Toshiba is the developer of the toshiba satellite laptop, a pen-based point-of-care system for homecare. Toshiba satellite laptop was founded by a group of clinicians with extensive backgrounds in clinical medicine, medical-information systems, and healthcare administration.

The company's clinical software utilize new pen-based, portable tablet-computer technology to give clinicians a powerful new way to gather complete, accurate, structured data at the point of care. It also gives administrators the ability to access and use this information in dynamic ways. The overall thrust of the system is to place in homecare providers' hands a powerful process-analysis tool which pays for itself:

* In the short run through productivity improvements.

* In the long run through providing the strategic power gained through the analysis and management of cost, quality, and outcomes.

The Toshiba satellite laptop is designed to meet high standards of both clinical and administrative relevance. The System makes sense to clinicians in terms of both content and usage. Care Centric software integrates seamlessly with the patient-care process because it emulates the way clinicians think and work. At the center of the software design is an awareness that clinicians, at the point of care, execute tasks within a framework -- a dynamic sequence of steps that provides procedural structure -- with enough flexibility to cater to individual patient needs. Behind this is a philosophy that technology should assist in patient care by freeing the clinician from the tedium of documentation yet not increase the clinician's cognitive load at the point of care.

The nursing-process model, combined with the System's intuitive clinical interface, ample display space, and the capabilities of pen-input, makes learning a matter of hours. Short training times mean clinicians can be brought up to speed on the system quickly and inexpensively.

The System's ease of use means: * High utilization by staff not familiar with computers * Robust data collection * Time savings at the point of care * complete documentation of the care episode * No barrier between patient and caregiver In short, effortless integration of care giving and data gathering.

This seamless integration means that when a clinician leaves a patient's home all data gathering and the resulting paperwork are complete, virtually eliminating nursing documentation time and dramatically reducing the resulting administrative-review requirement. Such reductions mean a quick payback for investments in our technology, when combined with the elimination of data transcription and reduction in billing-cycle time. (The payback is even quicker in agencies where more cases could be accommodated through the addition of time from trained personnel.) This contrasts sharply to other point-of-care technologies which are either hard to learn and use (such as small, keypad-entry handhelds) or are nearly impossible to use in the home (such as laptop computers).

The Toshiba satellite laptops are powerful 486/75 mhz systems typically configured with 16mb of RAM and 260mb of storage capacity. With this processing and storage capacity, all longitudinal data relating to active patients, including careplans, protocols, and educational and reference materials, are kept in a database on the clinician's table for easy access. The powerful computers also store updatable drug, ICD-9, and agency-specific databases -- access to all of the information a clinician might need at the point of care.