News & Updates
Aetna has started sending free mobile medical alerts, providing e-prescribing services, and offering access to clinical and patient information from Aetna’s claims department to network physicians in Florida. If successful, Aetna is looking to scale the program nationwide. You might just hear more about this type of program from CEO Mark Bertolini at Health 2.0 this Fall
The emergency medicine staffing and management firm, Schumacher Group, announced that it will use Healthagen’s iTriage mobile healthcare platform at over 180 of its hospital clients to promote in-network emergency rooms to iTriage users. iTriage is a free mobile app that helps patients locate nearby medical providers for a specific condition.
A report commissioned by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recommends that “human factors” be taken into account in the design of home health devices. Among the report’s recommendations include: “establish[ing] design guidelines and standards…for content, accessibility, functionality, and usability guidelines” for technologies such as personal health records and patient portals.
Facebook announced a policy change barring pharmaceutical companies from blocking public comments on their Facebook pages. Pharmaceutical companies are expressing concern that the the new policy will make it difficult to monitor negative comments (such as adverse event reports) posted on the page.
The University of Missouri School of Medicine offers tele-psych services to individuals affected by recent tornadoes in rural Missouri. The program uses video-conferencing technology so that participating psychiatrists can diagnose, treat and manage patients suffering from anxiety, depression or other mental health problems after losing loved ones, homes and jobs. In related news there is a a veritable deluge of early stage start-ups doing online psych consults or automated cognitive behavioral therapy-at least 10 (including Empower Interactive, Abilto, Breakthrough & more) by our latest count. We’ll have a special breakout on them at Health 2.0.
This week Health 2.0 saw two interesting new “patient relationship management” systems HealthyCircles and Avado, both aimed at helping physician organizations communicate with and manage patients-including chronically ill ones. Interestingly both founded by ex-Microsoft health division leaders.
New York Hospital Queens recently launched a new multi-lingual mobile version of its website, after noticing an increase in mobile traffic to its website. The Flushing hospitals serves a primarily immigrant community, and the new mobile platform is available in English, Spanish, Chinese and Korean.
A new report by ABI Research estimates that the market for Wi-Fi healthcare services will grow to $1.34 billion by 2016. ABI posulates that the primary growth drivers will be Voice over Wi-Fi (wi-fi based voice communication), RTLS (real-time location systems) and “medical body area networks” (wi-fi based mobile monitoring devices).
And in related news, hospital VOIP (or VOWiFi) vendor Vocera filed for IPO.
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