A study presented earlier this week finds that text message reminders increase rates of timely flu vaccination in urban, underserved pediatric populations.  Vaccination rates were significantly higher in the text reminder group vs standard of care (45% vs 39%).

Coinstar, the developer of Redbox, makes an investment in SoloHealth, who’s developing self-service kiosks that will check blood pressure, vision, and weight.  The kiosks then do some type of automated health assessment. SoloHealth is targeting high-volume locations for deployment and I’m sure the relationships and experience of Coinstar will help with this.

Newton-Wellesley Hospital (MA) deploys a mobile facility app developed by MedTouch. This is one of a growing number of facility-specific apps that provide wait times and doc searching. This one also allows for pre-registration but again, unless it is very user friendly (not data entry intensive), I think registration might not make as much sense on mobile.

Mobile MIM, an FDA-approved mobile radiology image viewer app, is now approved for use in Canada with a Medical Device License.

The Wall Street Journal has a good discussion on the trends in mobile health and how they might impact the health system as a whole, with specific product examples. Eric Topol, MD, (cardiologist at Scripps and West Wireless Health Institute in San Diego) is featured, and as usual, discusses his very cool portable ultrasound from GE ($8,000). This is a lot more expensive than a stethoscope, but I see the return in reduced imaging/studies and additional support of clinical decisions at the point of care. I’m curious if any data exists for the ROI of these portable ultrasounds.

EMS Field Partner, the mobile app for first responders that we reported on a few weeks ago, is now available on Android. The app provides paramedics with clinical support in the field and also allows for contacting of local emergency departments.

Basis raises $9 million in its first funding round to help develop and deploy Basis Band, a wireless, wearable device that measures vital signs and activity. You can share your activities and compete with your virtual friends on Facebook.

Five reasons to buy the iPad over its competitors: 1) price, 2) design, 3) performance, 4) apps, 5) it’s the best, although maybe not the highest end tablet right out of the box.

I guess even the best tablet has some problems, with iPad issues affecting FaceTime, the camera, and bleeding of light.

Positive ID Corporation unveiled its iglucose mobile diabetes management system at the CTIA conference last week. It sounds similar to MedApps to me, as it collects information from glucometers, transmits the data, does analysis on the data, and provides access to caregivers and family members.

ZDNet UK has an article highlighting ten mobile health apps. There isn’t too much here, but it does give an overview of different offerings for both patients and providers.        

Travis Good is in his final year of an MD/MBA program and is involved with multiple health IT startups.

A survey finds that 85% of consumers would not use social media or IM for medical communications with providers. Specifically, only 11% said they would use Twitter or Facebook and 20% said they would use IM. The survey found more interest in using email for communication and online services for appointments, bill paying, and records access.

Healthagen and the American Academy of Urgent Care Medicine (AAUCM), which represents thousands of acute care providers, announce a strategic partnership that enables AAUCM members to have premium facility listings within Healthagen’s iTriage mobile app.

More news about Healthagen. The company announces a partnership with urgent care EMR/PM vendor Practice Velocity to integrate Practice Velocity’s remote registration tool ZipPass into Healthagen’s iTriage mobile application. ZipPass enables users to register and “get in line” from home, reducing the amount of time spent at the facility.

Fountain Valley Regional Hospital (CA) announces a free mobile app with facility info, ED wait times, and ED registration. Check out the image above of ED wait times. It looks like they simply load the hospital web page, which seems pretty pathetic for a mobile app.

OptumHealth announces its mobile health application OptumizeMe is now available for iOS and Android. The application uses social pressure, and virtual badges, to motivate people to accomplish fitness challenges.

A final rule from CMS to streamline telemedicine credentialing is sent to the Office of Management and Budget. Apparently this is the last step before the rule is published.

Online provider community Sermo announces a strategic partnership with Janssen Global Services, LLC, to develop “mobile and web services that allow physicians to move their patients more easily and efficiently through the healthcare system.” From the press release, it seems that Sermo will be developing tools to help with referral coordination and clinical communication between providers.

Two grants from the McKesson Foundation’s Mobilizing for Health initiative are awarded to George Washington (GW) University, which will explore mobile phone-based interventions for diabetes. We covered the Mobilizing for Health grants when they were announced last month, but this report goes into more detail about the GW programs. One will assess the use of SMS, both to and from patients, to improve patient education and care. The other is the continuation of a study testing a “scalable and sustainable care model centered on the cell phone based application” for diabetes.

The American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media, in reference to social media sites, urges pediatricians “to help families understand these sites and encourage healthy use and urge parents to monitor for potential problems with cyberbullying, ‘Facebook depression,’ sexting, and exposure to inappropriate content.” 

Researchers using computer simulation find that telemedicine, if properly coordinated, can significantly improve patient outcomes during national disasters.  Improvements were in terms of access to care, reduced hospitalization, and lower wait times.

Healthcare mogul Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, speaking at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference last week, touted wireless technology as a key enabler of personalized medicine. He also spoke of the power of wireless technologies to improve outcomes and lower costs for the chronically ill. We announced last month that Soon-Shiong had acquired Vitality, the maker of the GlowCap intelligent pill bottle top. I think it will be very interesting to see where Soon-Shiong goes with mHealth, or wireless health, as he’s had such tremendous success in the past and brings almost limitless resources

Amazon opens its Android Appstore as another place to find, test, and download Android apps. I’m a big Amazon user for basically everything and I usually like my Amazon recommendations for products, so app recommendations from Amazon will probably be more powerful than the Genius recommendations from Apple.  Also, here’s a post complaining about one-click shopping in the new Appstore because it makes it too easy to accidentally buy something.

Travis Good is in his final year of an MD/MBA program and is involved with multiple health IT startups

The above video demonstrates some of the capabilities of a medical textbook formatted for the iPad by a new company called Inkling, which just got investments and publishing commitments from educational mega-publishers McGraw-Hill and Pearson. It’s extremely impressive how they’ve taken advantage of the iPad beyond just using it as an e-book reader. This type of technology is definitely the future of educational content and I envy the med students that get to use it instead of PDFs and five-pound textbooks. A quote from Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis shows that Inkling clearly gets it:

We build every textbook from the ground up for the iPad to create a more engaging learning experience….The iPad is not a book, and any attempt to shoehorn book content into the iPad in our mind is shortsighted folly.

The Xbox Kinect is being used by surgeons in a Toronto hospital to access and browse through patient images without breaking the sterile field in the OR. That’s pretty cool stuff.

A recent Stanford Med forum recorded the above video on clinician and student use of the iPad. To be honest, I didn’t watch it as it’s 40 minutes long, but thought it might be interesting to some readers.

Digital technology, with mobile med reminders and remote monitoring as examples, can eliminate healthcare waste and improve overall public health.

Providers aren’t using technology the right way to connect to patients, at least this is author asserts. The most relevant section is the comparison to tech companies and the lack of customer service when customers are pushed online or to automated call systems. I think health providers — and this will probably only become applicable if they are collectively accountable — need to leverage technology intelligently, with a vision and a plan, to build relationships with patients.  Ultimately I think this will help drive down per-patient costs because more care can be effectively delivered outside of the office or hospital (four walls) and behavior change is more likely.

Sorry for the iPad-heavy post. It just seems to be everywhere right now. This CNBC story talks about how great the iPad can be for doctors for accessing records and patient education.

For those living under a rock, the iPad 2 is available, or at least on sale, and Apple says it will meet its promise to ship the new device to 25 countries this week.  Also, the iPhone 5 is slotted for release in Q3 of 2011 and is rumored to have Near Field Communications (NFC) technologies that might act as an iWallet, or mobile wallet. I wonder when iPHR will be announced? I remember reading a critique of NFC-enabled mobile wallets citing that it required 2 billion NFC readers to be installed at retailers. If you applied it to healthcare as a mobile PHR, I would think it would be less of an issue because you’d only need several hundred thousand readers for providers and first responders.

Theis & Associates announce My Crisis Record, a PHR that can be accessed by emergency personnel in the case of a personal crisis. The system can be read with a QR code scanner, which according to Wikipedia is a Quick Response code that can be read by camera phones and is commonly used in Japan.

Humana wins Best Medical App for its MyHumana app at the Appy Awards of the Online Media, Marketing and Advertising (OMMA) Global Conference and Expo.

Apple mobile-enabled Capzule EMR adds instant messaging and push notifications for user alerts. This seems like a communication feature, as long as it’s secure and doesn’t expose PHI, that should be standard on mobile EMRs. but maybe I’m wrong?

I thought the following story was interesting. Courage Center, a Minnesota-based rehab center, is looking for volunteers to help patients set up telemedicine conferences in their homes via Skype to connect to PCPs. Having a volunteer workforce is always nice, I guess.

Travis Good is in his final year of an MD/MBA program and is involved with multiple health IT startups.

A new survey finds that people are increasingly using social media and networks to access health-related information. Not surprisingly, Facebook is the most commonly used. Most health-related usage of Facebook relates to health education and connecting with patients with similar conditions.

Kaiser Hawaii announces increased usage of its online tools during 2010. The healthcare organization saw increases in emails between patients and providers as well as online prescriptions filled of 21% and 11.4%, respectively.  I’ve used Kaiser’s system and like it. I’m curious what others think.

Anthem Blue Cross is piloting remote monitoring of heart failure patients to hopefully reduce ED visits and admissions. The system collects weight and blood pressure daily and transmits it over a standard phone line to a portal, where certain triggers are set for alerting docs.

Mayo Clinic Arizona’s telestroke program is evaluating radiologist preference for the use of ResolutionMD Mobile vs other technologies — which I assume means a computer terminal — for viewing images. The study only has 65 subjects so far with images reviewed, but the results are that 80% of those remote images were viewed on a a mobile device using ResolutionMD. The time to view on mobile was 11 minutes less than those viewed on a terminal.

More about Fast Company’s list of the ten most innovative companies in health. We already reported that text4baby developer Voxiva (#3) made the list. The other mHealth companies are Epocrates (#1), GE for its Vscan mobile ultrasound (#7), and PharmaSecure (#8), which does SMS-based medication authentication in India.

A Pittsburgh paramedic and a German software designer develop a mobile app to support first responders. The app provides clinical reference information as well as links to local healthcare facilities and life flight in Pennsylvania.

University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago is testing a wireless hand hygiene system from Xhale Innovations. We’ve reported on the system in the past, which can detect alcohol-based hand sanitizer on the hands of health workers and then send an signal to the worker’s badge.

OnCallData adds mobile platform support (Apple, Android, Blackberry) for its e-prescribing and medication reconciliation solutions.

More than a dozen hospitals have rolled out Epic’s MyChart mobile PHR. Sutter Health has 400,000 registered users, but I’m assuming that is for the online portal and not the mobile PHR. With Epic’s market share increasing, it seems like more and more PHR users will be on MyChart.

The Georgia Hospital Association signs a purchasing agreement with Prognosis Health Information Systems to enable GA providers to get discounted pricing on certified EHR ChartAccess. ChartAccess Mobile will enable providers to have instant access to a mobile version of the EHR as well.     

A randomized study of depression follow-up care finds that online messaging with patients results in higher medication adherence, lower subjective depression scores, and increased treatment satisfaction.

Florida Hospital Zephyrhills announces that it will begin using emergency telepsychiatry services from Specialists On Call.

A New Zealand hospital is using the iPad to conduct surveys while patients are still inpatients. I remember reading about a California hospital that was doing this as well. It seems to make sense to capture this at the point of care instead of two weeks later through the mail.

Travis Good is in his final year of an MD/MBA program and is involved with multiple health IT startups.

The new iPad 2, in combination with other tablets and wireless devices, will make 2011 a banner year for mHealth. Layer in the FDA’s Innovation Pathway to speed device approval and the amount of investment money going into mHealth, and we’re going to see a lot of very cool products. The big question mark to me remains payment reform and how all this will be funded (individuals, payers, ACOs, pharma) once we try to go beyond the pilot stage. Obviously we’ll see some big winners, but we’ll also see some very cool products without viable business models.

This KevinMD guest post attempts to subdue the excited about and predictions for the iPad in enterprise healthcare. The reasons cited why the iPad won’t dominate are: 1) IT department unease with Apple products; 2) good, native iPad EMR software doesn’t exist; 3) interoperability; and 4) cost-benefit for execs. The points are valid in the enterprise and the author is writing as an ICU nurse, though these don’t really apply to outpatient or office settings where products like DrChrono already exist.

More DrChrono news, which seems to be getting more and more frequent. This story is about how DrChrono came to be and where it is going in terms of features and an app store platform. The video above shows the speech recognition feature of DrChrono. Have you ever heard a doctor speak that slowly, especially when dictating?

Stanford Hospital (CA) begins receiving remote, in the field ECGs from paramedics ahead of arrival at the emergency department. The system is built on Physio-Control’s LifePak.

Preventice is collaborating with Mayo Clinic to develop mobile apps for patients and providers. The first, called CARD, provides information about chemicals and other allergens contained in skin care products. It’s always nice when an mHealth developer can get the backing of a big name content organization like Mayo.It’s a big part of why I think Healthrageous will be very successful.  Starting a health-related company in Rochester, MN or Cambridge, MA is a very strategic move.

Akron Children’s Hospital releases Care4Kids iPhone app (free). The app lets you find information about doctors and facilities as well as store medical and insurance information. As an added bonus, you can use the app to earn one free parking pass.

Health-e-Access, a telemedicine service offered by the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Golisano Children’s Hospital, is found to reduce the number of missed school days for kids and consequently missed work days for parents. The program provides telemedicine access to schools, child care centers, and community centers.

A trial of telemedicine care for HIV patients finds it to be equivalent to standard, office-based care in terms of clinical outcomes and quality of life. The virtual study group felt they had improved access to clinical data. With HIV becoming a chronic disease, at least in developing countries, this might serve as a good alternative method for care, especially if cost is found to be equivalent or less.

The VMWare View video above depicts the use of the software to enable iPad access to MEDITECH at Children’s Hospital of Central California. According to the video, which is promotional for VMWare, this was the only way for the hospital to securely deploy iPads.

Community Hospital (NE) begins testing telestroke services provided by Great Plains Regional Medical Center.

GE and partner MedHelp have a suite of free apps available to consumers that GE hopes will “spark a healthcare revolution.” The data, whether about moods or diet or activity, is helpful, but needs to be analyzed if a doctor is going to be able to use it. In the limited time a doctor has with a patient, they don’t have time to walk through a journal from a patient — they need an intelligent summary.  

It’s hard to escape all the healthcare-related tablet talk out there. This post presents a platform, WebOS (formerly Palm) that hasn’t gotten much attention because it is not Apple or Google. HP now owns it and is building mobile tablet hardware that uses WebOS. The author thinks HP and WebOS has a real shot to take back some ground from Apple, citing the open source nature of WebOS and the lack of approval needed to distribute apps. I have to say I don’t agree, and as we covered last week, lack of app approval hurts more than helps in healthcare.

Travis Good is in his final year of an MD/MBA program and is involved with multiple health IT startups.