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Docterra

Background and Overview

According to a study in Colorado and Utah, at least 44,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical errors (1997). In addition, the results of a New York Study assume the number is estimated as high as 98,000.

"Even using the lower estimate, deaths due to medical errors exceed the number attributable to the 8th-leading cause of death. More people die in a given year as a result of medical errors than from motor vehicle accidents (43,458), breast cancer (42,297), or AIDS (16,516)."
("To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System," Institute of Medicine, 2000)

In addition, according to a NPSF (National Patient Safety Foundation) survey, 42% of the population believes that they had personally experienced a medical mistake. That means medical error is too common and these statistics are telling us that medical error is a problem we have to solve as soon as possible.

With the sentence "To err is human, but to really screw up, you need a computer" begins the report "To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System." All other statistics also says that medical information management is the key to prevent medical errors. However, we would like to point out problems on existing medical information systems such as lack of cost-effectiveness, extensibility, usability, informed-consent capability and so on.

Therefore, we developed the next generation medical information management system "Docterra" in order to achieve effective information exchange between medical staff and patients.

Docterra Web

Docterra Web is a Web application which allows medical staff to manage hospital information like patient information, diagnosis histories, general information about the hospital, doctor schedules and so on.
One of the notable capabilities is the extensibility of the system. It allows users to add, edit and remove content, plug-ins or templates via web browsers. Docterra Web allows developers to create own plug-ins for as an ASP .NET Web control. That means developers don't need to understand the architecture of Docterra in detail. They can develop it without special knowledge of CMS (Content Management System).

Docterra Mobile

Recently, "Informed consent" has become an important concept for both patients and medical staff. However, "bedside" medical treatments are out of it. As a result, it is impossible to get the information in real-time and have it available at the patient's bedside. That is why "mobile computing" is an important keyword in the stream.
In addition, "Medical imaging (esp. 3D)" has become an important keyword in the medical domain. (3D) Medical imaging systems, such as X-ray (CT), magnet resonance (MR) or nuclear (scanners), were revolutionary developed in the past. However, high-quality 3D graphics still remain beyond the computational capability of mobile devices because of the limitation of CPU, memory, battery, and so on. As a result, patient can't be given enough explanation at patient's bedside.
But now, our innovative technology solved the above problems and our solution can be used to enable a transform healthcare into a paperless, effective service in the wireless world. We are proposing the "3D Smart EMR (Electronic Medical Record)" system. This system provides patient management functions for doctors by XML Web service. In addition to this, the most important feature is the "3D imaging" function. Our innovative new technology "XAML 3D for PocketPC" enables mobile devices to render high-quality 3D graphics such as texture, radiosity, special effects, and other features supported by XAML.

Docterra AR

The importance of 3D graphics in both "informed consent" and diagnosis cannot be emphasized enough. A lot of research and diagnosis support systems has shown us the effectiveness and importance. Docterra AR mixes real world and virtual world on UMPC (like Origami UMPC) to provide a most effective way for both "informed consent" and diagnosis.

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