The following is a guest post from Elyse Rossler, National Director, Health at mobileStorm.

With close to 9 million members, treated by 180,000 employees and 16,000 physicians — and as the fifth largest hospital system in the U.S. generating $45 billion a year in revenue — Kaiser Permanente shines.

George Halvorson, CEO and Chairman of Kaiser, gave an inspirational talk to a select audience during the mHIMSS conference in Las Vegas last week.  He outlined KP’s strategy and success very succinctly with simple principles; treat each Kaiser member in totality, with a comprehensive wellness plan, using a toolkit for addressing their health and well being.  KP shies away from treating their members in “silos.”

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As the HIMSS Conference in Las Vegas starts to wind down it’s been announced that as of this morning, total attendance reached 37,032 attendees — easily surpassing the previous attendance record of last year’s event which drew 31,500.

“Sessions on Stage 1 and Stage 2 of meaningful use, ICD-10, mobile health and mHIMSS, business and clinical analytics, and more kept attendees busy during the week,” HIMSS officials said in a just published press release.  ”HIMSS12 also included HIT X.0 and Leading from the Future, two conferences within a conference introduced last year.  In addition, Virtual HIMSS12 provided health IT professional unable to travel to the conference access to the keynote and other educational sessions.”

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It was announced during this week’s HIMSS conference that Verizon, Motorola and BoxTone are teaming up to develop secure solutions for Android-based devices and applications with the aim of making the platform suitable for health IT implementation.

The jointly created offering leverages BoxTone’s automated “Enterprise Mobility Management” (EMM) software platform on select Motorola devices,such as the DROID RAZR and DROID RAZR MAXX smartphones, as well as DROID XYBOARD 10.1 and 8.2 tablets, all of which leveraging Verizon’s 4G LTE network.  As such, healthcare organizations can now “reliably deploy Android-based mobile devices and apps that are designed to help them meet strict compliance requirements, including privacy measures outlined in the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).”

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The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) has awarded Kaiser Permanente with two awards; the Davies Award for Organizational Excellence and a Stage 7 award for “Excellence in Health IT” for its Moanalua Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The Davies Award recognizes “excellence in the implementation and value derived from health information technology,” with Kaiser Permanente named 2011′s sole winner.  ”The implementation of our world-class electronic health record, Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect, has shaped and improved how our physicians and care teams treat patients,” said Phil Fasano, executive vice president and chief information officer, Kaiser Permanente.  ”The Davies Award recognizes the important role of health IT in improving care and the overall patient experience, the same goals we had in mind when beginning the KP HealthConnect project almost 10 years ago.”  Kaiser currently has the largest private-sector EHR system in the world.

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GE Healthcare and AirStrip Technologies have debuted a new wireless patient monitoring solution during the HIMSS12 conference on Wednesday.

Dubbed AirStrip PATIENT MONITORING, the new solution securely delivers patient monitoring information to critical-care physicians through iOS devices including iPhones and iPads, while helping physicians interact with, manipulate and zoom in on more than 100 clinical measurements and access physiologic data anytime, anywhere.  AirStrip received FDA clearance for the platform that drives the new patient monitoring solution back in 2010 and announced it obtained the CE Mark just last month.

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GlobalMed, a company providing real-time healthcare delivery systems, has introduced a new enterprise-wide cloud-based solution that delivers visible and invisible light medical images to any Web-connected computer, tablet or smartphone.

Showcased during the HIMSS conference, the new solution — dubbed CONi — allows a physician to enter a SOAP Report that can be saved for later modification or “Finished” and placed into the patient’s medical record.  Once finished, the doctor’s notes cannot be altered or deleted.  In addition, patients and their guests can be given passcode access to their medical images with a limited amount of information.  The images are never resident on computers or mobile devices for security and patient confidentiality.

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Yesterday during the HIMSS healthcare IT conference in Las Vegas, mobile network infrastructure provider Aruba Networks released results of a recent survey showing that 85% of hospitals are currently providing access to personal mobile devices.

In addition, the results show that 83% of healthcare IT professionals allow iPads on their enterprise networks and 65% support iPhones and iPod Touch devices.  Interestingly, 52% of hospitals currently support Blackberry devices as well, which is interesting considering RIMs quick decline in the enterprise space over the last year.  The healthcare industry seems to be one last shining spot for RIM’s fledgling enterprise business.  Lastly, Android is gaining major momentum as well, with 46 percent of the IT professionals surveyed allowing enterprise use of the Google OS on personal phones and tablets.

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