Healthcare Robots! – #HITsm Chat Topic

We’re excited to share the topic and questions for this week’s #HITsm chat happening Friday, 2/3 at Noon ET (9 AM PT). This week’s chat will be hosted by Mr RIMP (@MrRimp, Robot-In-My-Pocket), mascot of the first ever #HIMSS17 Innovation Makerspace! (Booth 7785) (with assistance from @wareflo) We’ll be discussing the topic “Healthcare Robots!” and so it seems appropriate to have a robot hosting the chat.

In a first, #HIMSS17 has a #makerspace (Booth 7785), in the HIMSS17 Innovation Zone. It has robots! They are rudimentary, but educational and fun. One of those robots is @MrRIMP, for Robot-In-My-Pocket. Here is an YouTube interview with @MrRIMP. As you can tell, little Mr. R. has a bit of an attitude. He also wrote the questions below and will moderate tweets about them during the #HITsm tweetchat.

From the recent “How medical robots will change healthcare” (@PeterBNichol), there are three main areas of robotic health:

1. Direct patient care robots: surgical robots (used for performing clinical procedures), exoskeletons (for bionic extensions of self like the Ekso suit), and prosthetics (replacing lost limbs).  Over 500 people a day loses a limb in America with 2 million Americans living with limb loss according to the CDC.

2. Indirect patient care robots: pharmacy robots (streamlining automation, autonomous robots for inventory control reducing labor costs), delivery robots (providing medical goods throughout a hospital autonomously), and disinfection robots (interacting with people with known infectious diseases such as healthcare-associated infections or HAIs).

3. Home healthcare robots: robotic telepresence solutions (addressing the aging population with robotic assistance).

Before the #HITsm tweetchat I hope you’ll watch Robot & Frank, about a household robot and an increasingly infirm retiree (86% on Rotten Tomatoes, available on YouTube, Amazon, Itunes, Vudu, and Google for $2.99) I’ll also note a subcategory to the direct care robots: pediatric therapy robots. Consider, for example, New Friends 2016, The Second International Conference on Social Robots in Therapy and Education. I, Mr. RIMP, have a special interest in this area.

Join us as we discuss Healthcare Robots during the February 3rd #HITsm chat. Here are the questions we’ll discuss:

T1: What is your favorite robot movie? Why? How many years in the future would you guess it will take to achieve similar robots? #HITsm

T2: Robots promise to replace a lot of human labor. Cost-wise, humanity-wise, will this be more good than bad, or more bad than good? #HITsm

T3: Have you played with, or observed any “toy” robots. Impressed? Not impressed? Why? #HITsm

T4: IMO, “someday” normal, everyday people will be able design and program their own robots. What kind of robot would you design for healthcare? #HITsm

T5: Robots and workflow? Connections? Think about healthcare robots working *together* with healthcare workers. What are potential implications? #HITsm

Bonus: Isn’t @MrRIMP (Robot-In-My-Pocket) the cutest, funniest, little, robot you’ve ever seen? Any suggestions for the next version (V.4) of me? #HITsm

Here’s a look at the upcoming #HITsm chat schedule:
2/10 – Maximizing Your HIMSS17 Experience – Whether Attending Physically or Virtually
Hosted by Steve Sisko (@HITConfGuy and @shimcode)

2/17 – Enough talk, lets #GSD (Get Stuff Done)
Hosted by Burt Rosen (@burtrosen) from @healthsparq

2/24 – HIMSSanity Recovery Chat
With #HIMSS17 happening the week of this chat, we’ll take the week off from a formal chat. However, we encourage people that attended HIMSS or watched HIMSS remotely to share a “Tweetstorm” that tells a #HIMSS17 story, shares insights about a topic, rants on a topic of interest, or shows gratitude. Plus, it will be fun to test out a new form of tweetstorm Twitter chat. We’ll post more details as we get closer.

We look forward to learning from the #HITsm community! As always let us know if you have ideas for how to make #HITsm better.

If you’re searching for the latest #HITsm chat, you can always find the latest #HITsm chat and schedule of chats here.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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