News & Updates

February 16, 2023 - By Connie Chen

The Cellnovo wireless diabetes management system launched this week in the United Kingdom in tandem with a usability trial in 100 patients who have type 1 diabetes. The Cellnovo system includes an insulin pump that wirelessly connects to a touchscreen, cellular-enabled handheld glucose monitoring device.

Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a mobile app called Mobilyze that uses nearly 40 phone sensor values, such as GPS, ambient light and social contacts, to predict the user’s mood. Based on its predictive model, the app prompts patients to take actions designed to stave off depressive episodes. An initial 8 person evaluation published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research showed significant benefit from use of the app.

The Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT launched another app competition challenging software development teams to create an app that makes it easy for disabled people to access the data in electronic health records.

Mobile telemetry provider CardioNet which provides outpatient cardiac monitoring servies announced the acquisition of ECG Scanning & Medical Services, another cardiac monitoring provider, for $5.8 million.

DSS, Inc., a VistA software developer, debuted a new Mental Health Kiosk solution designed to collect clinical information including psychological evaluations directly from patients during check-in. The Kiosk integrates with the existing DSS Mental Health Suite, an EHR module already available at all Veterans Affairs’ Medical Centers.

HIPAA-compliant messaging platform company TigerText has raised $8.2M in a Series A round with participants including Easton Capital and New Science Ventures. The company offers a SaaS-based Web-to-mobile, device-to-device communications similar to that offered by Doximity.

Doximity, a mobile phone-based physician social network and communications platform founded by Epocrates co-founder Jeff Tangney, unveiled its new iRounds platform this week, which allows doctors and medical students to chat in a HIPAA-secure forum in real time about patient cases and new research.

A new study by Deloitte Access Economics finds that using hospital-in-the-home programs in lieu of inpatient care could cut governmental healthcare costs by a third. The study looked closely at programs in Australia already providing acute, sub-acute, and post-acute care in the home. Hospital-in-home care was cheaper for all AR-DRGs examined (cellulitis, venous thrombosis, pulmonary embolus, respiratory infection, inflammation, COPD, and knee replacement) with an estimated cost savings of $108.6M for those conditions alone.

AGNITY Healthcare debuted a new platform bringing disparate health care communications streams. The APTUS platform unifies communications (paging, voice, video, presence, location, alerts and other notifications) with real-time mobile access to clinical information (EMR, CPOE, PACs, etc.) on widely used smart phones and tablet devices.

HealthyCircles has partnered with ICLOPS and will offer the ICLOPS Registry and Analytics portfolio solution as part of its care coordination and management platform. The partnership will layer enhanced analytics capabilities on top of the current HealthyCircles data sharing tools facilitating quality reporting and quality improvement activities.

The Department of Veterans Affairs announced that is has collected genetic information from about 23,000 veterans at 40 health care facilities with an additional 30,000 veterans having agreed to participate in the program. Launched in May 2011, the Million Veteran Program seeks to enroll one million veterans and study their genetic material in tandem with clinical information stored in their electronic health records.

UnitedHealth Group announced that its Optum health-services unit will launch a new cloud-computing platform to facilitate the exchange of electronic health data across multiple devices and locations. The platform will allow health providers and insurers to share data, as well as access health applications from outside developers. Optum is also developing an app market for apps aimed at hospitals, physicians and health plans. Optum plans to charge for data storage, as well as collect fees for putting developers’ apps in the cloud. A beta launch is planned for June 2012.

Lumeris, provider of cloud-based services and software for accountable care delivery, is joining Highmark, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, Independence Blue Cross in buying NaviNet, a healthcare communications network used by physicians, payers and hospitals. The deal would combine Lumeris’ care coordination and integration platform with NaviNet’s network for secure provider communications.

Royal Philips Electronics announced a partnership with eHealth Global Technologies (eHGT), provider of IT solutions for medical record retrieval. eHGT’s services are specifically designed to reduce the time cancer patients spend waiting for their first oncology appointment by gathering diagnostic imaging and other data and presenting it on demand at the oncologist’s point-of-care.

AirStrip Technologies announced a strategic investment from Qualcomm’s recently announced $100M Life Fund. Qualcomm launched its 2net platform at the mHealth Summit last year, where AirStrip was named as one of its partners.

The West Wireless Health Institute, a healthcare technology not-for-profit, announced a newly created wireless framework for hospitals and health systems. The wireless installation standard is intended to ensure reliable and secure transmission of medical data over wireless networks. The reference architecture has already been deployed at six hospitals and health systems.

Apixio, provider of clinical data integration, search and analytics in healthcare, has joined Open Health Tools (OHT). OHT is an open source community that builds standards-based interoperability tools for applications used by patients and their care providers to access vital and reliable medical information.

Acting CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner signaled that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid may re-examine and consider an extension of the ICD-10 implementation timeline. Details on the extension are forthcoming.

WellPoint will use Health Language’s LEAP I-10 tool to facilitate its transition to full ICD-10 compliance.