Hold the phone.Kshitij Shankhdhar, MBBS, Dip. Diab., DDM, PGDND, FAPWCA, regularly uses his Nokia camera phone to photograph various foot lesions of patients visiting the Lucknow Diabetic Foot Care Clinic and Research Centre, LK Diabetes Centre, in Lucknow, India, where he serves as Medical Director and Diabetologist. He recently submitted some of those photographs to an international competition organized by Nokia and the Discovery TV Channel. Dr Shankhdhar not only received a positive response for his use of the mobile phone in medical research and data keeping but he was also selected to compete as a semifinalist in New Delhi, India. As an added bonus, he was awarded a high-end Nokia N90 mobile camera phone for is efforts.
Best practices. Stephen L. Harlin, MD, has become the first physician director of an ambulatory wound care center to receive national Recognition from the Physician Practices Connection (PPC) Program for using information systems to measure practice-wide clinical quality and improve clinical outcomes at the point of care. Dr Harlin is a reconstructive plastic surgeon and medical director of The Wound Clinic, Broomall, PA. He is also on the clinical faculty at Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA.
To earn the PPC progam's Recognition, which is valid for 3 years, Dr Harlin met key program measures in the following areas: full use of electronic systems; structured care for patients with chronic conditions; provision of educational resources; practice-wide quality measurement and improvement efforts; and screening, referrals, and follow-up for at-risk patients.