Thursday - March 18th, 2010 - 05:59am EST by Brian Dolan | CMS | CTIA | eCare | FCC | FDA | HHS | National Broadband Plan | reimbursement | smartphone apps | wireless health | wireless sensors |
One federal agency suggesting ways that another federal agency might better do its job is commonplace in Washington D.C., but it’s of particular interest for this editor when the topic is mobile health. Within the FCC’s 360 page National Broadband Plan, which it unveiled earlier this week, there is a full chapter and some two dozen pages about healthcare. The FCC calls connected health “eCare” but often refers to mobile health, smartphone apps, wireless sensors and telemedicine.
The FCC had a few suggestions for how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could help eCare services, including mobile health, get to market quicker. As we have noted many times in the past, the business model question is one of the biggest hang-ups for wireless health, especially since reimbursement has been slow to come for many wireless health services. The FCC has a few ideas about that. Here are four suggestions from the FCC: Continue >>
Thursday - March 18th, 2010 - 05:00am EST by Brian Dolan | 4G | Dan Hesse | HIMSS | Sprint | video conferencing | WiMAX | wireless health |
Sprint’s wireless health efforts include clinician offerings, patient tools, ambulatory care connectivity and home health solutions, Sprint’s VP of Industry Solutions Tim Donahue told MobiHealthNews in a recent interview.
“For telecoms, the focus used to be all about the healthcare provider,” Donahue said. “It’s not now and it shouldn’t be. It’s about the patient. That’s what [Sprint CEO Dan Hesse] said during his keynote [at HIMSS earlier this month]. Patients with chronic illnesses have a lot of uncertainty in their lives and what they want is a lifeline for when they are feeling uncertain.”
With wireless health they can enter biometric information or take a reading and check to see if it’s outside their normal range, Donahue said. They could contact clinicians and establish a video chat session to put their minds at ease; Patients could use a connected stethoscope to allow clinicians to remotely listen to their lungs, he said. Continue >>
Wednesday - March 17th, 2010 - 07:58pm EST by Brian Dolan | Ben Rubin | personal sleep coach | sleep coach | sleep therapy | Zeo |
In the fall of 2003, during an introductory psychology class at Brown University, a group of students learned that when an alarm clocks wakes you up during the wrong sleep stage, you wake up feeling groggy. If the alarm clock happens to wake you during the right sleep stage, however, you awake feeling refreshed.
“It is a very powerful idea,” Zeo co-founder and chief technology officer Ben Rubin told MobiHealthNews during a recent interview. “College students wake up feeling horrible everyday and the opportunity of waking up feeling refreshed everyday is one that has a lot of appeal to it from a consumer perspective. So, after that class a group of us got together around a kitchen table wondering how we could make this work.”
Zeo co-founders Jason Donahue, Ben Rubin and Eric Shashoua and half a dozen others brainstormed ways to find a way to wake someone up feeling refreshed. The group first wondered whether they could predict which sleep stage the sleeper was in based on a timer — based on what time they fell asleep. After consulting the research, however, they quickly realized that the alarm clock would have to know which sleep phase the person’s brain was in and they set about interviewing sleep scientists at Brown and Harvard to see if it was possible. Continue >>
Wednesday - March 17th, 2010 - 04:34pm EST by Brian Dolan | clinical trials | Don Casey | FCC | FDA | mhealth | reimbursement | West Wireless Health Institute | wireless health | wireless health regulation |
This week MobiHealthNews had a chance to discuss wireless health trends and activities at the West Wireless Health Institute with the Institute’s new CEO Don Casey. We asked Casey to list five things the WWHI will accomplish in 2010, to point to some of the key challenges facing the wireless health industry and more.
MobiHealthNews: Name five things the WWHI will accomplish this year.
Casey: 1) We now have our management staff in place following my recent hire and Mitul Shah, but also in a few weeks will be announcing a really exciting new addition to the team around the Chief Medical Officer. A real world class hire.
2) You have heard about our Corventis clinical trial, but we will also complete a number of other clinicals over the course of this year.
3) By the end of this year we will announce 10 new partnership agreements with major players in this space. Obviously, I can’t name names but think about the large medical device makers and telecoms interested in mHealth. We can serve them in a unique role as a not-for-profit. We can put them in a position where they can look at collaboration in a different way. We are pushing very hard on these collaborative agreements. Continue >>
Wednesday - March 17th, 2010 - 11:06am EST by Brian Dolan | CDC | CTIA | maternal health | SMS | text messaging | Text4Baby | Voxiva | White House |
Newly launched mHealth service Text4Baby just announced that they now have more than 22,000 registered users for the service, which White House CTO Aneesh Chopra officially launched last month: “We are excited to report that we now have 22,327 text4baby registrants, and a total of 537,087 messages have been sent to text4baby users!”
Text4Baby is a free public health service that aims to provide timely and expert health information through SMS text messages to pregnant women and new moms through their babies’ first year.
Text4Baby, which was launched by a consortium of the White House, CDC, Voxiva, Johnson & Johnson, MTV, CTIA, Healthy Mothers Health Babies Coalition and many more, has also added new partners at a fast clip since its launch. Just this past week the service added the West Virginia Perinatal Partnership, Health Department of Northwest Michigan, San Diego Coalition (co-chaired by San Diego Medical Society Foundation and Alliance Healthcare Foundation), Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota and Vanguard Health Systems to its growing roster of partner organizations.
Text4Baby also provided a state-by-state breakdown of its registered users, which we have posted below: Continue >>
Wednesday - March 17th, 2010 - 08:51am EST by Brian Dolan | Africa | medications | Nigeria | pharmaceutical companies | SMS | Sproxil | text messages | venture capital |
Last year the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that the global trade in fake pharmaceuticals would top $75 billion by the end of 2010, marking a 90 percent increase since 2005. Nigeria-based Sproxil, which was founded in 2005, uses scratch off codes and text messages to help consumers authenticate medications using the same process many use to add airtime minutes to their prepaid accounts.
Ashifi Gogo, Sproxil’s CEO, said that the rate of growth for counterfeit drugs is surpassing pharmaceutical companies’ own production rates. According to a 2005 Interpol report, about 80 percent of drugs sold in Nigeria’s capital Lagos were counterfeit. Continue >>
