Google Glass is now available in the U.K.

United States physicians have had the advantages of Google Glass for the past year.  Glass just recently was released for use in the U.K.

Kathi Browne of BrowneKnows, a well known social media moderator on Health Care Talk had the opportunity to discuss the promise of Google Glass for users and developers in the U.K.  In this Google Hangout several medical developers discuss their use and plans for Google Glass.

Now that Google Glass has been made available to the UK, we are seeing many new Glass explorers stepping forward in  +Giannis Anastasiadis  is interested in developing healthcare Glassware. If you have an idea you wish someone would develop for Glass, share it. For those of you who wish to become Glass Explorers,

While Google Glass is not yet  HIPAA compliant there are  developer plans to make it so. Currently Glass users must receive permission from patients if it is used for them. The potential for use of Glass in Healthcare is enormous, more than I want to cover in this post, and will be listed elsewhere (as of September 30, 2014. 

The current iteration of  google glass has some limitations for medical use. It currently has not been cleared as a 'biomedical device', requiring specific adminstrative consent for use in a health facility, for reasons of legal liability. It is a small and powerful computer, generating much heat and was designed for very short bursts of information rather that a continuous use video recorder.

If you are a physician,  surgeon or a google glass developer, we would like to hear from you, for either a post or a Google Hangout Conference.

Let's Hear it for Google Glass !

Indian physicians are often on the 'cutting' edge' of developing technology. Especially surgeons (no pun intended)  

OK, Glass, say docs at city hospital’s operation theatre

One of our social media gurus #kathibrowne of Health Talk Community group on Google + while visiting India had a glass glimpse of how surgeons are adapting Glass. Formal training sessions with Glass and  Doctors in Bangalore will soon make wearable technology a permanent feature of their surgical attire — several surgeons at Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences at Whitefield are being trained to perform surgeries wearing Google Glass.

Will this new technology be integrated into medical training here in the United States?  Like most innovations in surgical technique a few brave doctors will begin using Glass.  If it proves to be effective, reduce operating room time, improve outcomes, and yes maybe even save money, the early adopters will begin formal 'skills' courses at national meetings.

Kathi Browne, a healthcare-focused social media consultant from the United States who helped co-ordinate the Google Hangout on Air for the three-day ASEF project in Bangalore, said hundreds of doctors were trained by representatives of the Google Glass community for healthcare, thereby turning them into Google Glass 'explorers'. 

Kathi, who specialises in using Google Glass and other contemporary tools in healthcare, told Bangalore Mirror, "In addition to recording a live operation, Google Glass also helps to access medical records online or through the intranet. In case of a doubt one can stop the procedure and take advice and consultancy from other physicians during a surgery." 

Google glass eventually will become a main stay in many industries for education, training and archiving events. 

The next application may very well be in law enforcement, adding to the 'dash cam'.

Glass To Get HIPAA Compliance, Surgery Ready!

If you are a practicing physician, it woul be hard to miss all the changes due to EHR adoption, and Health Information Exchanges.

The HIT space is also being invaded by other applications and consumer hardware/software platforms easily adapted to medical practice.  Some innovator surgeons and medical physicians also have taken available platforms and adapting them to patient care.  HIPAA has prepared the innovators for security and privacy of patient medical information.

Google has many apps that can be used in a medical environment.

Google glass has been used by  some surgeons to teach and/or get consultations in real time.

Google Glass has been of interest to the healthcare industry for a while, and while performing surgery with Glass is nothing new, complying with HIPAA standards while doing it is. Video streaming software company CrowdOptic has teamed up with University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) to produce streaming software that lets surgeons share their live recording with others off site. But now they are looking to include a feature to that software that allows for HIPAA compliance.

The video shown here illustrates several real-time uses for google glass.  These are actual real-time uses for google glass. The system offers an effective user friendly interface of both video and audio communication 

Just five or less  years ago this would have been science fiction, or featured as a futuristic view of medical care.  How quickly things advance.  By the time many of these advances become published or well known...another new wave of innovation occurs.

We’ve heard of the uses of Glass within the hospital before, and the team at Beth Israel is part of a specific pilot program that uses heavily modified Google Glass units to help with scenarios like this one. The Google Glass units that the hospital uses for this program are tweaked by a company called Wearable Intelligence, which removes the stock Google Glass software from devices and puts a reworked version of the Android OS on the units. The software is completely locked down so the only use applications for Glass here is for Hospital purposes only. This is just one of the many different instances where Google Glass is being used in the workplace, and is part of the Glass at Work program that Google is driving heavily forward.