The National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) convenes a group of representatives to help develop strategies to increase consumer engagement in health through use of IT. In light of the recent survey that found only 26% of mHealth apps are used more than 10 times, more needs to be done specifically to build consumer-friendly mobile health applications that people use regularly. Ongoing use is the key to behavior change and current apps are falling short.

Based on ratings and downloads (assuming they were done by providers), the seven most popular iPad apps for providers are: (1) Calculate (med calculator); (2) drcrhono (EMR); (3) Medical Spanish; (4) Micromedex (drug info); (5) Mobile MIM (imaging); (6) QuantiaMD (provider education); and (7) Skyscape Medical Resources (reference). I’m kind of surprised that Epocrates was not on the list.

The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) urges CMS to change the rules around telehealth services for ACOs to allow physicians to choose which virtual services should be provided. As it is currently written, permission for telehealth services for ACOs has to be obtained by individual billing codes.

Baptist Hospital East (KY) is doing wireless EKG transmission from EMS as well as enabling mobile access to providers over both iOS and Android tablets and phones.

Remote monitoring company IDEAL LIFE partners with MedMinder to integrate the MedMinder wireless medication dispenser (video above) into the IDEAL LIFE portal. MedMinder seems to already have the tools to do alerts for patients and caregivers, so this seems to be just a nice marketing deal for both companies.

What does mHealth do for doctors?  According to this article, and I tend to agree, not a whole lot at the moment. Offering more work without more pay is not a great way to sell something.

Celebrity fitness trainer Danny Musico (has anybody heard of him?) gets into the mobile fitness app arena with his own mobile app for training and  dietary tips.

A new pilot finds readmission rates for CHF and COPD to be 3% (compared to the national average of 20%) with the use of timely patient education, tools for reduction of medication errors (not sure what that means specifically), and daily vital sign collection from patients using devices from Philips. 

Apollo Hospitals, a large network in India, launches Hipaar (Healthcare India pharmaceutical registry). A patient can text their name, diagnosis, and drug name to get information back over SMS about the efficacy of the drug for the specific diagnosis as well as side effects. I imagine problems with unstructured diagnosis and drug names, but it seems like an interesting way to get fast and easy information about medications. No price info is listed, but I’d bet there will be a very low fee for each SMS.

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

More information on the SMART Diaphragm, which came in second at the recent Vodafone and mHealth Alliance awards. The diaphragm sits on the cervix of high-risk pregnant women, measures collagen levels, and transmits results via Bluetooth to a phone and then into the cloud, detecting potential pre-term births before any symptoms would be noticeable. Very cool stuff.

Telehealth solutions company American Well launches Online Care for Providers. The new services allows providers to easily incorporate virtual visits into existing practices. The virtual visits can take place using video, phone, or chat. Virtual appointments can be on-demand or scheduled. The name, Online Care for Providers, seems like doctors anonymous, but I’m not a marketing or brand guy.

mHealth can deliver better preventive care at lower cost by simply using the mobile technology commonly used by consumers. Several speakers at a conference last week touted the power of mobile technologies to revolutionize care by leveraging the technology that they claim already is present in the patient population. There needs to be consideration for non-smart phones, which I consider to be essential to target the aging (expensive) population.

The first near field communication (NFC) enabled mobile phone app is announced by iMPak Health. The app, call SleepTrak, analyzes sleep data. I’m confused why NFC would be better than Bluetooth for transmitting data from a device, in this case a sleep monitoring device, to a phone?

The list of speakers for the upcoming GSMA-mHealth Alliance Mobile Health Summit, to be held in South Africa in June, is announced.  Not surprisingly, the list is very different and less star-studded than last year’s US Summit.

A new study of the use and efficacy of lithium in ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) was conducted using the medically-oriented social media site PatientsLikeMe. The study used the social network to recruit patients and collect subjective data, resulting in a cheaper, faster trial. The conclusion from the article is that social networks may serve an increasingly important role in clinical trials, but will not replace more rigorous trials.

A survey of consumers finds that of those who download health-related smart phone apps, 26% use the app ongoing, while another 26% stopped using apps after only one try. The rest use health apps under ten times. This seems to make sense for all apps that I download, so I’m guessing that health-related apps are no different. There are just too many apps out there, so you download and try them to filter them.

The video above is a side-by-side comparison of the iPad 2 and the new Blackberry PlayBook tablet. The PlayBook seems very small, almost too small for healthcare.

The iPad seems to be increasing traction within the autism community. Children on the autism spectrum use the device for all sorts of things beyond just communication.

To address some of the $100 million Medicaid shortfall in Kentucky, the State Government asks CMS if the state can use Medicaid funds to cover in home monitoring services. The article says the remote care is half the cost of in-home care.

The ONC is looking for vendors interested in developing solutions to help with patient consent and trust in health information exchanges.

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

Wayne Memorial Hospital implements EXTENSION’s HealthAlert for Nurses to replace the hospital’s existing pager system. EXTENSION provides a smart phone-based unified communication platform that integrates with Meditech and patient-initiated nurse call.

This article, which includes lots of healthcare use cases and videos of the iPad, calls the iPad the driver of Mac computer sales in the future. Maybe more Mac-based EMRs, like Mac Practice, will be on the horizon.

Thomson Reuters announces Micromedex Drug Interactions for the iPhone. The app allows providers to assess risks of drug interactions.

The VA and DoD launch PTSD Coach mobile app for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The app is available on Apple iOS and helps connect veterans with local sources of support as well as rate and deal with various symptoms of PTSD. Unfortunately, this could be a very popular application these days.

A Rhode Island ED doc fired last year for posting patient-related information on Facebook is reprimanded by the state’s medical board and fined $500. The physician did not post the patient’s name, but apparently posted enough information about a trauma patient that the patient could be identified.

Ottawa Hospital orders 1,800 iPads for clinical use. This is on top of the 500 iPads that the hospital already has. The application being used for clinical documentation is Adatpiv Clinical Viewer, though I can’t tell what EMR is actually installed at the hospital.

Jewish Hospital and St. Mary’s HealthCare, which is probably my favorite name in healthcare because of the religious acceptance it portrays, starts publishing ED wait times via web, text message responses, and by its mobile application.

John Halamka lists the five most popular mobile apps for Harvard med students this year: 1) Dynamed, 2) Unbound Medicine uCentral, 3) VisualDx Mobile, 4) Epocrates, and 5) iRadiology.  This data is based from download traffic from Harvard’s Mobile Resources webpage. I’m curious about the percentages of different mobile platforms in use by students as well. I’m betting it is over 80% Apple.

Eyemaginations launches the LUMA ENT iPad app to assist otolaryngologists with patient education. The app is designed to “help patients visualize doctors’ explanations.”

Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project and the mHealth Alliance Award winners are announced. The three winning projects, two of which were developed at MIT, address key international health issues related to eye disease, high-risk pregnancies, and medication compliance, particularly focused on the long-term and complex treatment of multiple drug resistant TB (MDR-TB).

A new app from the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) helps users figure out how safe all those hard-to-pronounce food ingredients are. This seems cool academically, but I think the people that would actually use this are the same ones that already shop at the stores that don’t carry products containing these ingredients.

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

The West Wireless Health Institute (WWHI) announces the winner of its $10K Developers Challenge. Congratulations to Steven Palmer MD, whose app is designed to assist veterans with self assessment of melanoma. Dr. Palmer is a veteran and a melanoma survivor.

American Medical News has a story on the appeal of tablets in medicine as well as the more popular uses for them. After the standard salute to Apple for being #1 in mobile healthcare, the authors cite the recent Knowledge Networks survey that found drug reference to be the most popular mobile function. It then goes on to say that doctors are not fans of electronic communication from pharma sales reps, still preferring in-person meetings. Face-to-face will probably remain preferable with drug reps as long as the iPad doesn’t start delivering free meals and office supplies.

Another survey of doc preference, though this one much smaller, finds that providers prefer communications from pharma to be digital and mobile, either smart phone or tablet. I think this survey only assessed preference between paper materials and digital materials, not digital delivery vs. in-person.

ZigBee-based RTLS supplier Awarepoint acquires Patient Care Technology Systems (PCTS), the developer of the Amelior visibility platform. The new venture extends the reach of Awarepoint from its present installed base of 93 hospitals to PCTS’s 60 hospitals. I wonder what this means for other Awarepoint visibility platform partners like Intelligent Insites?

The Institute for Health Technology Transformation iHT2 formalizes its panel on security and privacy in mHealth. The panel will be a part of iHT2’s Summit in May in Fort Lauderdale. The panel has a HIPAA security officer, a PhD HIS professor, and a director of IT security. I wouldn’t expect too much excitement at that talk, but Barry Chaiken, MD/MPH is moderating, so you never know.

OhioHealth releases a mobile app for women’s health in general, but specifically targeting pregnancy. The app provides weekly advice, facility information, and education about different conditions and tests. I downloaded the app and it is actually pretty good. It is built for use beyond OB, though none of those departments are currently available within the app. The app will be available to all OB patients at OhioHealth at the end of April. My favorite part of the article was the mention of five dozen current users? Dozens, really?

The Government of Australia announces a $467 million plan to provide all citizens access to medical records online or over mobile. I guess it helps that they are able to agree on a national, 16-digit healthcare ID.

This collection of reviews of the new tablet from Research in Motion (RIM), the PlayBook, are not exactly glowing. The consensus seems to be that this will not likely compete with other tablets, especially the front-running iPad.

Qualcomm announces a 3G-enabled remote monitoring and education project called Self Quality Care in Korea. The program will “provide participating patients and health workers with educational health information and reminders to help manage the chronic disease and live healthier lives.”

text4baby, the text-based message system for expecting moms, is expanding to Russia. Hopefully we’ll get some data soon on whether this service has any value and whether it is worth the cost to administer.

MedHelp, which claims to be the world’s largest social health network, passes one million users. The story makes MedHelp out to be somebody that I should have heard of, but I haven’t. They offer online forums and tools to collect subjective data from patients, both online and over mobile. The story claims that users can leverage the vast dataset that MedHelp has built up to compare progress, treatment, and symptoms against others. That would be cool if they had the necessary data, but I think integration with EHRs and probably pharmacy data systems would make it more useful to map progress across follow-up, compliance, and refill status.

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

The mHealth Summit gets an injection of domestic mHealth flavor this week when HIMSS became a strategic partner of the Foundation for the NIH, the sponsor of the event. Last year’s event was internationally focused, but having HIMSS involved should bring more exposure and weight for mHealth projects taking place domestically. The 2011 event will be held December 5-7 in DC.

iRx Reminder, a new mHealth startup which we’ve featured before, is targeting researchers and providers as customers, with consumers as users. The app is tailored to assisting with research and care of chronic diseases.

Aptilon, which provides a channel for biopharmaceutical companies to communicate with providers, launches Aptilon Mobile. The mobile app allows providers, more specifically in this case prescribers, to access live, local sales reps with questions or issues about medications and devices. I imagine the pharma sponsors would love (and would be very willing to pay for) a mobile channel to Aptilon’s network of over 500,000 providers.

I missed this critical blog post from February about the much-touted text4baby program. The author’s conclusion, which is well articulated with data to back it up, is that the program is overpriced, not innovative, and has no chance of meeting its subscriber targets (winning multiple awards aside).

REACH Health launches tele-stroke, tele-neurology, and tele-ICU services. REACH helps alleviate specialist coverage problems for providers. They have over 140 hospital clients in 10 states.

A new teleradiology app for the iPad is launched in the European App Store. The app from aycan allows for transmission of DICOM images from OsiriX PRO systems to the iPad.

A new tablet from Acer, the Iconia Tab A500, seems like a pretty good option at $449. The devices runs Android Honeycomb OS, supports Adobe Flash, and has dual-facing cameras.  But alas, as the article points out, it’s going to take a whole lot of buzz to pull potential tablet buyers out of Apple stores.

This article highlights the changes mobile is bringing to healthcare, with lots of good stats and references (67 total). The paper has a case study of wearable sensor technology.

The AMA launches a free, limited CPT code app for the iPhone. It will release a paid version with additional CPT codes.

Telemedicine for emergency medical care to will address shortages of specialty trained docs, including pediatric emergency docs.

A team of US graduate students develops a smart phone tool to aid in the diagnosis of malaria in areas that have limited lab access. The device has a microscope and can automatically identify and quantify parasites.

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