Tuesday, around 3 in the morning, San Diego Padres pitcher Tim Stauffer used his iPhone to self-diagnose (correctly!) his appendicitis. While Stauffer was upstate in San Francisco for an away game, the MobiHealthNews team was down in San Diego for the Wireless Life-Sciences Alliance event.

On the first day, the WLSA Investors' Summit, TripleTree and the alliance awarded three companies I Awards: Zeo, Calgary Scientific and CellTrak. TripleTree's Managing Director Peter Erikson wondered whether 50 or 60 years ago someone gave out a "best new consumer health product" to the inventors of the consumer weight scale. Erikson insinuated that Zeo, the personal sleep coach, may find a similar success. That's quite the prediction to live up to for the Newton-based sleep startup!

The WLSA Investors' Summit lived up to its name as the event was crawling with venture capitalist investors from big name corporate venture groups, angel investors and those in between.

Sweden-based GreatConnection, which we wrote about during our trip out to CES 2010 earlier this year, also presented at WLSA and announced its new headquarters in San Diego as well as its hope to attract investors for its service, which zaps ultrasound, x-ray and other DICOM images to the consumer's mobile phone.

Zeo CEO Dave Dickinson hinted at the (not-too-distant?) future for Zeo, where the company's wireless headband sensor would transmit EEG data and sleep metrics right to end users' cell phones instead of a bedside display device, which is the current setup. That arrangement sounds ideal for those of us that spend a lot of time on the road, but Dickinson used the word "eventually" and gave no specific time frame. We're still eagerly awaiting the company's version 1.0 iPhone app, to be released this June. More

Dr. Mohit Kaushal, director of healthcare for the FCC also presented at the WLSA event and made mention of a Senate proposal for a $10 billion allocation (through 2019) for a CMS Innovation Center that would pilot "eCare" solutions and test payment models. More

The West Wireless Health Institute's CEO Don Casey, who spoke on the second day of the WLSA event, encouraged the wireless health industry to pursue low cost solutions that do not depend on CMS reimbursement. Casey sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss his presentation, (which MobiHealthNews could not attend since WLSA's second day was closed to the media.) More

The West Wireless Health Institute made two big announcements this week: GE Healthcare has partnered with the Institute as its second technology partners -- Qualcomm was the first. The Gary and Mary West Foundation also granted the Institute an additional $20 million, which brings the foundation's total contribution to the WWHI up to $65 million. West reminded MobiHealthNews that the institute does not accept funding from for-profit entities for a reason:

"As we go through this whole process," Gary West told MobiHealthNews in an interview, "We want to be beholden to no one. We want our work and our opinions to be based on our own research, our own feelings. I don't care what anyone says: If you take money from someone, you do things differently whether that's consciously or unconsciously. We will never be in that position." More

Finally, in news unrelated to the WLSA event, Juniper Research predicted this week that by the year 2014 public and private healthcare providers may save between $1.96 billion and $5.83 billion in healthcare costs thanks to remote patient monitoring over cellular networks. More