News & Updates
- Team Maya took first place at the DC Code-a-thon! Maya used USDA info about Food Deserts to build a platform allowing consumers to order fresh food deliveries from local farmers via text message. Congratulations is also due to Team BlueMeter who created a mashup of Blue Button and Health Indicators data based on game OPower. Check back with Health2News later this week for a recap of the event and full demo videos!
- Patrick Soon-Shiong, buys Cambridge based Vitality Inc. Vitality, most known for it’s smart pill packaging, Glow-Caps, has plans to develop new products (like cute wireless pedometers for kids) and improve their existing pill-bottle design. You can read the full story at Boston.com
- The publisher of The Wall Street Journal filed suit to overturn a court order barring public access to a confidential Medicare database. Dow Jones claims the 1979 ruling has hampered the paper’s reporting while The American Medical Association argues that physicians have the right to privacy. Read more at the WSJ.
- Massive Health, co-founded by former Firefox Creative lead Aza Raskin and Sutha Kamal, announced $2.25 million in venture and angle funding. The company is still in stealth mode but is expected to surface sometime this year. A full overview is available on TechCrunch.
- Whyville, the 2D game-based virtual world for children, officially opened the “Great Books Roundhouse.” The Roundhouse is a virtual space created in partnership with the Great Books Foundation. Resources include discussion space, teaching support, and rooms specifically devoted to different stories. Whyville hopes to make the human experience captured in great books equally relevant to children in both their real and virtual lives. Check out Whyville’s on going challenge if you’re interested in similar educational gaming.
Keep Reading for more on: Resilient Network new CEO | Healthline and MedHelp | New PCMH standards | iTriage and AppointmentCity | 1 in 250 Chance of Cancer after CT scan | text4baby turns 1 | Child Birth Connection | Limeaid in WSJ
- Resilient Network Systems announced former Epocrates CEO, Kirk Loevner, as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer. Resilient Network Systems built the Trust Network which enables secure, sensitive information to move freely around the Internet. The press release can be found on Marketwire.
- Healthline, a health advertising network announced the new terms of a partnership with MedHelp, a community site for consumer health. The partnership aims to provide pharma and health marketers new options to reach consumers without stepping into the privacy debate. Read the full Businesswire press release for more details.
- Brian Ahier’s provides a lightweight overview of the new standards outlined in the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) program. The new standards call on medical practices to be more patient-centered, and reinforce federal “meaningful use” incentives for primary care practices to adopt health information technology. Read the full piece at the Healthcare, Technology & Government 2.0 blog.
- Healthagen makers of iTriage (which recently hit 1M downloads), announced the acquisition of AppointmentCity, a mobile-enabled service that helps consumers more easily book appointments at hospitals, urgent care facilities, physicians’ offices. See MobiHealth News for more details.
- Check out Bob Wachter’s edgy post which looks into the statistic, “A 20-year old woman who gets an abdominal-pelvic CT scan (i.e., just about any young woman coming to the ED with belly pain) has a 1 in 250 chance of getting cancer from that single scan. The post was featured on our sister site The Health Care Blog.
- text4baby, the free text messaging service that delivers timely health information during pregnancy, turns one year old this month. Launched on February 4, 2010, by U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, text4baby has collected over 135,000 followers and sent millions of text messages. You can read more at OSTP.
- Amy Romano of Child Birth Connection writes about the recent launch of their Health 2.0 Challenge. The post provides an overview of what big data could mean for the future of maternity care and what their non-profit hopes to accomplish by engaging developers. You can read more and see short videos on the Science and Sensibility blog.
- The Wall Street Journal featured our friends, Limeaid, in the article, “Wellness Programs Get Creative.” The article examines why so many employers are looking towards wellness incentive programs to reduce costs.
Health 2.0 Developer Challenges