CompuMed to provide EKG, telemedicine to California schools

Remember when the school nurse could do little more than take temperatures, check for sore throats and patch up playground scrapes? Well, some school infirmaries in California are about to go high-tech, with portable electrocardiograms, telemedicine and EMRs.

CompuMed, a telehealth company in Los Angeles, is partnering with the California School Health Centers Association (CSHC) to provide free equipment and low-cost service to hundreds of schools throughout the state. CompuMed will offer its CardioGram and CardioGramKids wireless EKG readers--with a retail price of about $3,500--free of charge to the more than 150 CSHC health centers, serving at least 800 California primary and secondary schools, InformationWeek reports. In return, the not-for-profit CSHC will help promote CompuMed's telemedicine technologies to potential commercial customers.

ECG readings from the portable devices are sent over the Internet to a CompuMed lab for immediate interpretation by a computer algorithm. If necessary, CompuMed will offer school health centers follow-up readings by pediatric cardiologists for $15 each. (The commercial price for the service can run as high as $150 per reading.) Data then gets transferred into a proprietary CompuMed EMR that can be exported to the patient's regular healthcare provider. 

For more information:
- take a look at this InformationWeek story

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