AliveCor which makes an mobile electrocardiogram device, will integrate data from Omron Healthcare's Bluetooth blood pressure devices into its ECG Kardia Mobile application. The clinically validated, direct-to-consumer app ECG and blood pressure monitor will patients with a more complete view of their heart health, improve proactive monitoring and create a new standard of care for people at risk of stroke. AliveCor has been moving towards creating a new machine-learning driven system to engage patients in their care while making things easier for doctors. The integration with Omron’s blood pressure monitoring device will further propel Kardia Mobile’s impact. AliveCor puts the number of ECGs recorded on its app at 10 million so far.
iHealth Labs, the connected device subsidiary of Andon Health with offices in Paris and Mountain View, California, has acquired Bordeaux, France-based eDevice for $106 million (98.33 million euros). eDevice is a longtime European provider of back-end infrastructure that connects remote monitoring devices to hospitals and healthcare professionals. iHealth is one of the earliest players in the smartphone-connected health device space. It offers a variety of weight scales, activity trackers, blood pressure monitors, and glucometers in the US, Europe, and China. Recently the company has shifted from a primarily direct-to-consumer focus toward a business-to-business market through products like iHealth Connect, its enterprise health management system, which it announced at HIMSS this year. The system includes iHealth Gateway, a secure hub for collecting data from various iHealth devices in the home as well as software systems for diabetes management, outpatient care, and population health.Acquiring eDevice seems like another step along this path. eDevice's technology will help iHealth to transfer data from its various devices to healthcare providers. More
A subsidiary of Qualcomm, Qualcomm Life will work with Royal Philips to serve as the medical device connectivity solution for Philips HealthSuite, the company’s cloud-enabled health ecosystem of devices, apps and digital tools. With Qualcomm Life’s 2net Platform, users of the HealthSuite will have seamless access to a host of connected devices including medication dispensers, biosensors, blood pressure monitors and more. Philips will leverage the 2net Platform to connect both Philips and third party medical devices. More.
Another one for Qualcomm: Watch, fitness wearable and jewelry maker Fossil will be using Qualcomm Technologies’s Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor in its Q Marshal and Q Wanderer smartwatches, making Fossil the first brand to ship smart watches based on Qualcomm technologies. The technology is Qualcomm’s full featured processor purposely designed for watches running Google’s Android operating system. More
Health IT security company Imprivata announced its secure communications platform Imprivata Cortex now supports clinical speech recognition through communication company Nuance's Dragon Medical One cloud platform. The aim is for healthcare providers to speed up the input of accurate, high context patient care communications, including orders. The pairing of technology offers a seamless, secure, professional-grade experience through a speaker-adaptive engine, custom vocabularies, auto-text and templates, built-in visualization and feedback, voice navigation and correction, delivering a consistent experience as clinicians move between desktop, web and mobile devices across EHR and support apps. More
Two deals for IBM Watson: Korea’s Gachon University Gil Medical Center will adopt IBM Watson for Oncology, the cloud-based platform that analyzes large amounts of data to help doctors offer individualized cancer treatment plans. This will be the first deployment of IBM Watson in Korea, and the technology will be delivered as SaaS. To protect patient privacy, data will reside with Gil Medical Center, and information that can directly identify an individual will not be provided to Watson. More
Harrow Council, a local authority for 100,000 households in Northwest London, has partnered with IBM Watson Health for a 10-year agreement to use cognitive technologies to help people in adult social care choose the best services, personalized to each person’s need. This is the first commercial agreement of its kind with a local UK authority and the first implementation of Watson Care Manager outside of the USA. Using Harrow Council's expertise and innovations in adult social care, IBM will enhance Watson Care Manager to enable individuals and caregivers to quickly and easily select the most appropriate provider that can deliver the services they need, using their allocated personal budget. Many social and health programmes globally require personal budgets, and Watson Care Manager's new functionality could simplify that process for individuals beyond Harrow and the UK. More
Baltimore-based Emocha Mobile Health, which makes an app to improve medication adherence for patients with tuberculosis, is expanding with new contracts in California. Founded in 2013 with technology licensed from the Johns Hopkins University, Emocha recently landed contracts with Fresno, Merced and Contra Costa Counties, where some of the country’s highest concentration of latent tuberculosis exist. Emocha’s app, miDOT, lets patients take selfie videos while they take medication, then send it over to a doctor or nurse to review. If patients don’t take the full course of the medication (or do so improperly), they may develop a resistance to the drugs and make it more difficult to fight the disease. More
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System will now be using VisualDX, a web-based clinical decision support tool. VisualDX’s offering, which is accessed through the electronic health record and via mobile devices, helps physicians build differential diagnosis by providing an extensive medical image library that easily shows physicians variations of disease. Dartmouth-Hitchcock clinicians will also access VisualDx through the Dartmouth College BioMedical Libraries Resources site that offers a suite of evidence-based medical tools for clinicians and students at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. More
Mental and behavioral app maker Mozzaz Corporation is collaborating with Project Transition, a community-based solution for people with complex needs such as mental illness, to launch TennCare (Tennessee’s state Medicaid program) Systems of Support Model. Project Transition will leverage the Mozzaz secure digital health platform to keep individuals, their families and healthcare professionals connected whenever, wherever. With TennCare’s Systems of Support model, the intervention, stabilization and prevention services provided by the Mozzaz-Project Transition collaboration will help individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities receive continuous coordination of care. More
