Hi Chandana, Geoff. Sorry for my late reply. I fully agree with your concerns and the points from Chandana's PM. So let me give some information about myself.
I work for a biomed service provider that has contracts with hospitals, as well as with some vendors (incl Philips) for bench repairs. I am originally from Manchester, and have worked in Canada before, and now based in europe (but not in UK). I am attached to a hospital where I take care of the (mostly philips) patient monitors and (mostly draeger) vents. I had many trainings from philips, but I was never a Philips employee, and never part of bench repairs, so no conflict of interest there.
I work in a large privately owned hospital. Most of the ICUs have new philips monitors, except one where the old HP merlins are waiting for replacement, and a bunch of datex AS3's in OR (yes, I repair them too). Some of the datex is up for replacement as well (thank God).
Even though this place has no biomed dept of its own, they have a huge IT department. Sometimes it is quite a challenge to make them realize that medical PCs should be treated as such (esp the centrals). That is the reason why I was impressed with XDS, because unlike the central, it can run on a IT maintained PC (makes it easier for those simple folk to understand). The other thing that impressed me is the electronic printing to PDF, since we have a home-grown EMR that IT is so proud of, and they currently scan printed reports to go in to the EMR. Your PDF printing could take care of that easily. Like Geoff said, credit where credit is due.
If we get Philips monitors to replace the SICU and OR, I'll get a chance to play with the full XDS system. As I understand, I need to have a monitor with G software and xds options to do that, but all our current monitors are F and below. As biomed is not part of the hospital, we are never asked for our opinion in choosing equipment, so I have absolutely no influence on that, unfortunately. But IT does, and I think your xds did make an impression on them. They were not aware of printing until I showed them. My vested interest here is to influence them to buy philips so that I don't have to keep on servicing those AS3s
Thanks for all the detailed guides. They were very helpful, and easier to follow than your xds user manual. XDS was not covered in any of my trainings, and the manual was a bit tough to understand. I appreciate the effort you made, especially since you are probably not a techie (if those MD after your name stand for what I think they mean). It is great to have direct support from vendors in a forum like this, and I hope it will continue.
I apologize if I created any confusion in my earlier posts, that may have lead people to believe I am not who I appear to be. Chandaana, I fully understand the reasons behind your comments and PM, and no offense taken.
PS. ofcourse my real name is not runesmith. Those who play a certain famous MMORPG will know that Runesmith is a character class that can create magic through mechanical means (just like us biomeds).
