Stanford engineers have developed a flexible, skin-like heart monitor that can be worn under an adhesive bandage on the wrist. The device functions as a pressure sensor and is sensitive enough to help doctors detect stiff arteries and cardiovascular problems.

AdhereTech won first prize and $50,000 at the Healthcare Innovation World Cup, an international diabetes innovation challenge. The wireless, smart pill bottles earned the top spot by demonstrating impact, innovation, feasibility and financial sustainability.

Ringadoc, a San Francisco startup that helps doctors manage patient phone calls, has raised an additional $700,000 in seed funding, which brings its total round of funding up to $1.9 million.

A tech accelerator called The Iron Yard in South Carolina launched its own digital health accelerator. Startups will receive $20,000 in seed funding and other benefits in exchange for 6 percent equity in their company. The demo day for the first class will be at Health 2.0’s fall conference at the end of September.

PathCentral, a pathology oriented cloud technology company, is a finalist in the Health and Medical Technologies category for the 2013 TechAmerica Foundation American Technology Awards (ATAs) for its web-based anatomic pathology laboratory information system (APLIS).

The U.S. House of Representatives approved $344M in preliminary spending for developing a joint EHR system between the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense.

TigerText, a secure mobile messaging platform, and Airwatch, a mobile security and enterprise mobility management provider, partnered to offer a HIPAA compliant communication platform for hospitals and health care organizations. The solution is being implemented by Community Hospice of Texas.

According to a report released by the Institute of Health Technology Transformation(iHT2),  data analytics is crucial for population health management and the success of accountable care organizations. The report also featured critical findings and recommendations for using data to reduce cost and improve efficiency.

PingMD, an app facilitating communication between pediatricians and patients, raised $2.5M in new funding from angel investors, as reported by GigaOm. The company recently expanded the scope of this app to include patients from other disciplines as well as allow peer-to-peer communication.

Lean Six Sigma isn’t actually a formal campaign. It’s a managerial strategy meant to help businesses eliminate process waste, and it’s the basis for a proposed course at the College of Nursing at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The curriculum is being developed by two UAH associate professors, one in the nursing school and one in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Engineering Management.

Lean Six Sigma incorporates ideas from both the Lean and Six Sigma methodologies. Lean’s goal is to eliminate waste while Six Sigma aims to streamline processes. In the context of health care, it’s easy to imagine that these manufacturing methods promote conveyor belt medicine, encouraging nurses to see patients one by one without paying attention to the individuals and their varied needs.

On the other hand Lean Six Sigma applied to health care is, by definition, patient-focused. That’s because the strategy calls for identifying what customers, in this case patients, define as quality and then using that as a performance measure. For example, since patients value shorter wait times, part of a medical facility’s success would be determined by how well they keep wait times low.

“The worst thing I could do with doctors and nurses is to talk about widgets. They appreciate every patient’s uniqueness. But this system can show them how to be more efficient while they treat that patient,” Sampson Gholston, PhD, an engineer and one of the developers of the proposed course, said in a news release.

His co-developer, Peggy Hays, DSN, of the nursing school said that the goal of the course is to make use of the wealth of data now being collected by medical institutions. It will train administrators and nursing staff how to interpret data and then implement the necessary process changes in order to improve patient satisfaction.

“Nursing staff today have more and more duties,” Hays said. “How can they make their job more efficient so they can focus on patient care, which is why they got into the profession in the first place?”

Computer Models

It sounds like something from a Sci-Fi film: a frightening dystopia where our care is devoid of human interaction and reliant on cold, unfeeling machines. But studies show new algorithms used in cutting-edge computer models may be better at diagnosing a course of treatment than the most-seasoned health professional. Over the course of two years, researchers at Maastricht University in The Netherlands monitored the progress of 121 lung cancer patients. In the three cases it was used, the computer model outperformed the experts with a blistering degree of accuracy.

The results are unsurprising: we now know that cancer is a complex thing, its growth dictated by a patient’s genes and a host of other factors. In the same way meteorologists now trust computers to predict weather systems more than their own intuition, we’re starting to realise that cancer is too complicated to be beaten by a harassed professional. The day soon may come when this predictive treatment is the standard method used.

Breath Testing

In a recent article on the BBC, it was reported that Israeli and Chinese scientists had developed a way to diagnose stomach cancer simply by analysing patient’s breath. From a study sample of 130 patients, the method was found to have a 90% accuracy rate – suggesting future research may yield a simple breathalyser test hospitals can deploy. Unlike most conditions, cancer appears to have a signature smell – leading one group of German researchers to claim sniffer dogs may one day be capable of detecting it. But smart money currently lies on a robust new form of breath-analysis, perhaps allowing the early diagnosis that so often eludes stomach cancer sufferers.

Gene Sequencing

As cancer research improves, we’ve come to realise how near-unique most cancer types really are. For example, breast cancer is now thought to be comprised of 10 entirely separate diseases – with each variant responding differently to different treatments. Although it remains expensive, gene sequencing is currently our best hope for cataloguing all the different permutations of cancer and personalising treatment.

In this story for the New York Times, reporters reveal how a complete DNA/RNA sequencing managed to isolate the single gene flooding a patient with enough protein to trigger leukaemia. Thanks to this knowledge, doctors were able to recommend a drug previously thought only suitable for cancer of the kidneys. While sequencing each and every patient remains prohibitively expensive, by analysing the genes of hundreds of thousands of cancer sufferers and comparing them to healthy individuals, scientists may be able to break cancer – and its treatments – down into narrower ‘types’; allowing far more targeted treatment than we’re currently capable of.

Crowdsourcing Research

In October last year, tech-site Wired carried a story that made health-watchers sit up and listen. As part of an attempt to crowdsource research into cancer types, a new website has been launched allowing internet denizens to analyse images of cancer – with the end goal of identifying and treating whole new types of the illness. By farming out millions of pictures to Internet users to compare and report on, researchers are cutting the time they would otherwise have to spend doing it themselves. In the same way that NASA routinely allows the world at large to trawl their data for signs of new exo-planets, researchers are hoping this will return within day’s results that would otherwise take weeks or months. Could this be the start of a whole new method of diagnosis? Preliminary results are looking good.

Visit the Cancer Research UK website for more information and help on breast cancer and other forms.

Through this challenge, we are calling on developers, researchers, and innovators to use the new TXT4Tots message library by integrating it into new or existing applications that will reach parents and caregivers of young children. There will be a total of $25,000 in prizes awarded to the top three winners, including $17,500 for the first-place challenge winner.

Like TXT4Baby, the TXT4Tots message library can send caregivers appointment reminders, health alerts and parenting advice.  The messages provide information about nutrition and physical activity for parents of children between the ages of one and five including:

• tips and recipes for healthy snacking, and
• ways to encourage physical activity among children through games and play.

While the goal of this app challenge is to integrate the TXT4Tots library and messaging functions into existing or entirely new applications, we aren’t looking for a typical smart phone application. We want to see how the parenting advice content in the TXT4Tots library can be integrated innovatively to reach users.  A submission that only delivers the TXT4Tots messages is not enough to win the Challenge.

A winning application must be able to distribute messages to a wide audience along with other functionalities that make it indispensable to parents and caregivers of young children.

The TXT4Tots API
To give flexibility in this developer challenge, the Application Programming Interface (API)-enabled TXT4Tots library is available at http://healthdata.gov/data-api. Our data liberation and innovation initiatives already prioritize the development and use of these APIs to help in building software applications. As many developers know, APIs make it easier for data to be accessed, updated and used; by enabling automatic content updates, the actual person-hours spent manually updating content can be markedly reduced.

The TXT4Tots library houses approximately 250 short, evidence-based messages on topics targeted to parents, caregivers, and health care providers of children between the ages of one and five. The messages are available in both English and Spanish. Content for the TXT4Tots messages was derived from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Bright Futures: Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children and Adolescents, which uses a developmentally based approach to address children’s health needs in the context of family and community.

Enter the Apps4Tots Health Challenge
The winner of the Challenge will be announced at Health Datapalooza IV on June 3-4, 2013, in Washington, D.C. A total of $25,000 in prizes will be awarded to the top three winners, including $17,500 for the first-place finisher.

To learn more about the Challenge and to enter a submission, please visit http://challenge.gov/ONC/513-apps4tots-health-challenge.

See the Health IT Buzz blog post here: http://www.healthit.gov/buzz-blog/health-innovation/developer-challenge-oncs-apps4tots-health-create-toddler-parenting-tool/.

HHS has had a series of developer contests that have spawned the creation of tools and apps to help patients and doctors better manage care. Some past app challenges include:

• the Million Hearts Risk Check Challenge
• the Blue Button Mash Up Challenge, and
• the Ensuring Safe Transitions Challenge.

Cancer patients need more care coordination

The number of cancer survivors in the United States is currently estimated at 14 million people. With improvements in cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment, as well as the aging of the United States, this number is expected to rise.

While celebrating advances in cancer care, there remains a need to help patients manage their health after they have completed their primary treatment. Cancer survivors experience a host of physical and psychosocial long-term and late effects of the disease, and it’s the treatment of this that requires coordinated follow-up care.

Despite significant progress in cancer treatment, the complex and often fragmented state of end-of-treatment care may lead to harmful breakdowns in patient-provider communication. This can result in unmet health care needs. Better communication, data exchange, and care coordination have been shown to help the patients.

Participate in the developer contest to help improve communication for cancer survivors

ONC and NCI are calling on app developers for innovative solutions to address specific challenges that cancer survivors encounter when managing their care.

The following examples illustrate just a few potential ideas that an app could address:

• Help survivors use information from their providers and survivorship care plans to improve communication within their care teams (i.e., families, friends, and members of their primary and specialty care teams)
• Address follow-up care needs such as helping patients track their medications and medication adherence, upcoming appointments, and healthy lifestyle recommendations
• Implement key sources of health data and interoperability standards such as Blue Button+ (http://www.bluebuttonplus.org/).

We also encourage all app developer applicants to consider different ways to seamlessly integrate tools and information into the daily lives of patient. The intention is to help them in the communication and coordination of care with all members of their care team.

Win up to $30,000 in the Crowds Care for Cancer: Supporting Survivors Challenge
The Challenge will consist of two phases.

• Applicants will submit wireframes and supporting documentation that details the proposed functionality of their tool or application, and how these address the goals of the Challenge. At the end of Phase I, up to three applicants will be awarded $5,000 and will receive feedback and support to optimize their application proposal for promotion on MedStartr’s crowdfunding portal as they transition to Phase II.
• Phase I finalists will post relevant details of their application on MedStartr for public feedback and support. At the end of Phase II, the finalists will submit a functioning application to be judged for the $25,000 grand prize.

Enter this developer contest

To learn more about the Challenge and to enter a submission, please visit http://challenge.gov/ONC/529-crowds-care-for-cancer-supporting-survivors.

Sorin Group announced that the FDA cleared SmartView, a remote monitoring application for implanted cardiac rhythm management devices. The technology allows physicians whose patients have a Paradym device, Sorin Group’s implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD), to monitor them outside of the office.

Zephyr Technology, a wearable remote monitoring company, raised $2.4 million from undisclosed investors. Zephyr makes the BioHarness 3 for which the FDA granted 510(k) clearance in 2010.

Preventice announced the commercial launch of the BodyGuardian Remote Monitoring System. The device, a small sensor attached to the body via a peel-and-stick patch, received FDA 510(k) clearance in August 2012.

The White House unveiled policy requirements calling for all federal government agencies to make information resources easily accessible. Data liberation efforts are already underway and have long been a priority for the CMS and ONC.

TrialReach, a UK based clinical trial search platform, raised £2M in Series A funding. The round was led by Octopus Investments along with Amadeus Capital Partners, who previously invested in the company in 2011.

Hunt Psychiatric Innovations recently unveiled MedOptimizer ADD/ADHD, the first app in the planned series of psychiatric apps to convert patients’ experience with medicines into actionable data for doctors.

According to the Surescripts’ National Progress Report on E-Prescribing and Safe-Rx Rankings, in 2012, 69% of U.S. doctors used e-prescribing, 44% of all prescriptions dispensed were routed electronically, and 47% of patient visits resulted in electronically generated medication history requests.

MyPsych, a HIPAA compliant real-time monitoring and analysis tool, launched MyPsychTES.com. It streamlines patient-therapist communication, and connects practitioners with clients via the MyPsych smartphone applications.

Mana Health won The New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) Design Challenge for the Patient Portal for New Yorkers, followed by iHealthNY and MyHealthProfile. NYeC hosted a Lightning API Workshop on Day 1 of the Health:Refactored Conference.

Day one of Health:Refactored is officially in the books much to the relief of many tired shoulders. After all, there was hardly a panel or speaker who didn’t resort to the tried and true crowd favorite: “Raise your hand if …” And no, the sore shoulders are not a jab at our target audience (read: developers). Rather, the fatigue stemmed from the simple fact that people require a lot more hand raises these days to describe their experiences and occupation(s).

The hand raising got started bright and early with Health 2.0 CEO Indu Subaiya’s opening remarks where she felt out the crowd with a series of questions. Health:Refactored is branded as a conference for designers and developers working in and around the health care space, but it’s hard to tell who exactly makes it into the auditorium for the event.

If Subaiya’s survey is any indication, the Health:Refactored crowd is pretty heavily weighted on the technical and entrepreneurial side with maybe a slightly smaller representation of designers. Attendees also seemed evenly distributed between health care veterans and health care newbies (exciting, welcome new friends!). These buckets were hardly mutually exclusive though as most everyone seems to dabble in business, and the brave seem to dabble in everything.

The questions continued throughout the day, and with the right combination of imagination, lighting, and squinting you could almost see the raised hands shape shifting into ven diagrams. We are software developers and MBAs, but on a broader scale we are patients and stakeholders interested in fundamentally changing the world. All these questions and more were on tap in day one, which revealed the Health:Refactored crowd to be a bunch of chameleons. It’s hard to tell what day two will bring with this crowd, but in the meantime, we should probably all get our shoulders loose …

In preparation for Health:Refactored, our code and design focused conference taking place May 13–14, we sat down with Vice President of Innovation & Engineering at Spaulding Clinical, Brock Heinz. He will present a demo on the panel “Dreaming of Data: Big, Open, & Interoperable – Part I” on May 13. Follow the Health:Refactored speaker interview series here.

Spaulding Clinical is a clinical research organization based in Wisconsin. Heinz discusses the technicalities of making use of and managing clinical trials data. Here he talks about his migration to health care from a more general IT background and how he got over thinking that his lack of experience was a liability. He also gives us his predictions for Pharma 2.0.

Note: there is an audio file embedded in this post. If the player doesn’t appear, try loading the post in a different browser, or listen here. 

Kaiser Permanente Northwest (KPNW) joined the Oregon Health Network (OHN). The partnership allows for the free flow of health care data between KP and non-KP providers. OHN will facilitate this data flow, providing connectivity to the entire health care continuum statewide.

A new company, Maxwell Health, launched in March in 7 cities to help employers and employees make health insurance decisions from the first step of buying a policy through picking providers to becoming healthier.

The New York Digital Health Accelerator (NYDHA) announced the graduation of its inaugural class at its first annual Demo Day. The eight participants are developing technology solutions in care coordination, patient engagement, and analytics.

HealthSpot partnered with Nationwide Children’s Hospital to expand access to affordable health care for children via four HealthSpot Station units in and around Columbus, Ohio. The HealthSpot Station brings patients face-to-face, via high-definition videoconferencing, with medical professionals from Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

A Toronto based pediatrician along with his team, developed a new children’s medication app called Snap’n'Dose. It allows users to take a picture of the drug identification number with their smartphone and calculate the correct dosage for that particular medication based on the child’s height & weight.

The Mount Sinai Medical Center adopted a care-coordination app called Cureatr across the enterprise. This cloud-based mobile app provides a HIPAA-compliant group text messaging system that aims at improving communication between team members coordinating care for patients with complex medical conditions.

Doctor Q&A startup HealthTap raised $24M in Series B funding. The round was led by Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures, who joins the company as an advisor. Other investors include Mayfield Fund and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

MTBC, an electronic health record (EHR), practice and revenue cycle management company, launched ChartScribe. It is a fully integrated transcription service that allows health care providers to avoid lost productivity when adopting an EHR as well as fulfill the requirements of Meaningful Use Stage 2.

Tennessee Oncology, a physician-owned oncology practice, adopted Navigating Cancer’s cloud-based Patient Engagement Portal that enables providers to securely connect patients to their personal health information and educational resources. Navigating Cancer presented on the Health 2.0 stage at the 2010 San Francisco Conference.

Q. Your particular segment within this panel is about how an obsession with data can create problems. So now data is getting in our way? How did we get here?

A. I think part of the problem is we’re still not sure what data we need. Being appropriately opportunistic geeks like many of us are, we get good at analyzing the data we have. It’s important to take a step back and remember that in medicine, we still don’t have a very good understanding of exactly how to measure quality.

What we sometimes end up doing, I think, is measuring what we can measure and making assessments of it and not quite often enough asking the questions: are we measuring the right thing, how do we know, and why does it matter?

Q. Can you specifically talk about your approach to data with your new startup Smart Patients. You made a point of saying that you’re collecting unstructured data. 

Our site isn’t designed to collect data per se. It’s designed to help cancer patients and caregivers have conversations with each other and learn from each other. But ideally the technology gets out of the way from the users’ perspective and just facilitates conversations, provides some tools to help people have richer conversations.

One thing I think we’re going to try to resist is asking people a lot of questions that are essentially asking them to fill out structured data forms. And instead help people have more and richer conversations, and of course, there’s a lot of data — explicit and implicit — within conversations. It just doesn’t have to happen to be in a super structured way.

But over time it’s getting easier and easier to pull structured data out of conversations. So our bias is going to be, let unstructured data flow, and force ourselves to be smart and spend the appropriate resources to learn what we can from that data, even though it wasn’t delivered in a pretty structured format.

Q. And what would be wrong with asking people to fill out structured data forms?

A. I think it’s fine to ask, but I think most humans are appropriately selfish, really. And the question is, if you’re asking me to fill out some data, the question I’ll ask myself as a user is, what am I going to get out of it? And I think too often, certainly in the health space, we build systems that say, OK answer these 16 or even six questions and then something good will happen.

But it’s not clear yet to the user what that good thing is or whether it’s going to be worth it. And so a lot of people walk away at that point. What we really want to do is, while there are of course more clever things we could do if we knew even more structured information about somebody’s context, we’d really like to start with a much gentler, cleaner slate, We want to say, look there are rich conversations going on here. Really smart people are answering others’ questions, so ask a question and someone will answer it.

And over time, you can imagine that we might say, oh look, you’ve mostly been looking at questions about melanoma, it seems like you might also be interested in x,y, and z. People with melanoma are often talking about these other topics. Then over time we can say, we can provide you additional value if you give us a little bit more information. But from the beginning, we want to ask people for nothing and start giving them value. I think we forget to do that sometimes when we build products in the health space.

Q. One of the main features of your site is a clinical trial search engine. Can you talk about some ideas you have for making clinical trial search more effective?

A. This actually wasn’t our intent. We started just building the conversation platform the way we thought it ought to be, and one of the first pieces of feedback we started getting consistently from the initial community was, because this is oncology and because we’re doing as much homework as we can about what our treatment options are, we’re talking about clinical trials a lot. We’re frankly unsatisfied with what we can do with clinical trials.gov. It’s hard to use and there are a bunch of things that we want to do that it doesn’t support.

And we took that to heart and built a clinical trial search engine into the conversation platform. And we built it so that it works as a standalone as well. But the real idea is that we want to make it easy for cancer patients to find trials and discuss them. It’s what they’re doing anyway, and we want to facilitate that.

The idea is that, from any clinical trial page that you might find through the search engine on Smart Patients, you can start a conversation about that trial, and before too long, join an existing conversation about that trial. And we think there’s an interesting intersect in there between the somewhat structured and more officially sourced data about the clinical trial, combined with the less structured narrative from informed patients.