When the Palm Pre App Catalog first launched in early June it had no medical apps to offer, but among the few applications the App Catalog launched with was an emulator app by MotionApps that promised to bring applications from old Palm platforms to the new Pre. In other words, if you are a health practitioner who has relied on a Palm Pilot for the past ten years, now you can upgrade to a new Palm Pre and use the same applications with more or less the same user experience.
This is set to change soon — hopefully. Palm recently announced that 1.8 million applications have been downloaded from its App Catalog, which is a surprising figure given the relatively few apps (in the dozens) available. The number of Palm Pre devices sold is also only in the hundreds of thousands. Last week Palm announced that its Mojo software development kit (SDK) was now available to any developer. Up until now the SDK was only available to a limited number of developers, so now it’s time to see if developers are still interested in developing applications for the Pre platform. On the medical app front, competition is sparse for the Pre. We hope to hear about some new Palm Pre medical apps soon.
Meanwhile, The Palm Doc Chronicles blog has done a nice job of keeping up with all things Palm-related for healthcare workers, including which of the old Palm applications work on the Palm Pre through the emulator application. While their list of proven apps is still rather short, it serves as a snapshot of the only medical applications available for the Palm Pre.
Read on for a slideshow of the applications from legacy Palm OS devices that now work on the Palm Pre through the emulator app. It’s never been more true: What’s old is new again for Palm in the medical world. Keep reading>>
The California Healthcare Foundation’s iHealthBeat recently conducted a podcast interview with Shankar Sastry, dean of engineering at the University of California-Berkeley and Monica Levy, senior director of research at Manhattan Research. Both Sastry and Levy discuss the state and promise of wireless-enabled healthcare tools. Sastry notes that continuous wireless monitoring will be challenging type of service for our healthcare reimbursement system. Here are some more notable quotes from the interview:
The Continua Health Alliance has added three companies to its board of directors: Qualcomm, Ascension Health and CA. The industry alliance of now more than 200 healthcare and technology companies works to ensure global interoperability between personal telehealth solutions.
We reported their plans 
Last month, Dr. Dan Fletcher, who is an adviser in the White House Office of Science and Technology shared the Obama administration’s views on the emerging wireless health opportunity. Fletcher’s remarks included challenges for the industry as well as ways it can best engage the federal government. Fletcher’s presentation was part of a summit in Washington D.C. organized by CTIA, the wireless industry association.
CareGroup Health System CIO John Halamka recently wrote about the strategy his facility, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is pursuing to comply with new Massachusetts Data Protection regulations. The new regs require organizations to take extra precautions to secure information, including data on mobile devices at the work place. (If you are not familiar with Halamka, he holds a number of positions, including Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and a practicing Emergency Physician.)