You know how we keep hearing that there just isn't enough clinical evidence yet to justify reimbursement for mobile and wireless technologies such as home monitoring systems? That may be about to change, possibly in an unlikely venue: the venerable, oftentimes stuffy, Journal of the American Medical Association.

The American Medical Association, which publishes JAMA, has a reputation as being a staid defender of the status quo, which is why you'll rarely see any AMA news in a publication like MobiHealthNews that covers the cutting edge of health innovation. But the new editor of JAMA, Dr. Howard Bauchner, sounds like he's ready to embrace mobility.

I base this on an extensive interview Bauchner gave with longtime Chicago Tribune healthcare reporter Bruce Japsen (who, unfortunately, is losing his job soon). Bauchner, who was vice chairman of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine before taking over at JAMA last month, told Japsen he is interested in "intelligent innovation" for the 127-year-old journal and the nine "Archives" titles that the AMA publishes for various medical specialties.

"Most practitioners are inundated with information," Bauchner is quoted as saying. "How do you get information to them in a usable format?"

The answer? Small bites. Mobility. Alerts through social media.

"If you look at some of the other creative sites like TED or Big Think, they have been experimenting with video clips," Bauchner said in the interview. "I could imagine having some of our authors do video clips where they speak about the meaning of their research for eight or 10 minutes, and then that's easily linked into a smartphone."

(Seriously, did you ever think you’d see the day when the editor of JAMA would cite TED or Big Think?)

The Tribune noted that Bauchner has innovated in the eight years he has been editor-in-chief of the Archives of Disease in Childhood in the UK. "At the Archives of Disease in Childhood, Bauchner was never averse to change and embraced technology, working to tailor different editions of the journal to different groups of readers, according to researchers there. He launched a medical education version and a journal for specialists in fetal and neonatal medicine, which focuses on very young infants," the story says.

But back to JAMA and TED. In the spirit of TED ("ideas worth spreading"), expect to see more articles posted online before the print edition comes out because new knowledge shouldn't wait. Neither should new ways of reaching the next generation of doctors. That seems to be exactly what the next wave wants.

Japsen talked to 35-year-old Jim Wills, a second-year student at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine with a young family. (Japsen said Wills "was surrounded by white-haired, older doctors at the Hyatt Regency Chicago during the American Medical Association annual meeting in June." Yeah, that's generally who goes to AMA meetings: the old guard, students and gaggles of reporters.)

Between helping raise three children, studying, patient rounds and attending the occasional professional meeting, Wills is awfully busy and doesn't want to have to hunt for information.

"JAMA's content is quite valuable and can really help medical students and residents on the hospital floor, but we often don't have time to even review the table of contents and dig for content that meets our needs," Wills told Japsen.

"We need a JAMA experience that is more proactive in getting us usable information in a way that is delivered and packaged for our needs," Wills continued. "I'd love to have the option of signing up for alerts in certain content areas that are core to most medical school curriculums, such as cardiology, pharmacology, nephrology, etc. Then I'd want JAMA to push abstracts of these specific articles to me. I'm on my pediatrics rounds, and bam — I get an abstract right to my smartphone."

News on demand, coming soon to a medical journal that's been around since the 1880s. Better late than never.