When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced seven new codes for reimbursing telehealth services, the change was welcomed more or less universally in the healthcare realm.
Indeed, there’s little argument that it’s forward progress. The more services CMS covers, the thinking goes, the better equipped hospitals and doctors are to make patients healthier, not to mention happier, and...
Fletcher Allen was facing a problem. The 500-plus bed hospital in the heart of Vermont’s ski country needed to turn over as many as 20 to 30 medication trays within a limited time while maintaining patient safety, and the manual system had become unwieldy.
It was almost impossible to keep up, in fact, and the pharmacy tech support staff realized that automating the system was the only alternative...
While Apple, Google and even Microsoft have grabbed mHealth headlines in the last several months, two tech giants with just as much street cred haven’t gotten as much attention of late.
Samsung and Qualcomm are already squarely targeting healthcare providers while the aforementioned IT stalwarts are, bluntly stated, just starting down that road.
Take Apple HealthKit, for instance. The most...
Arch-rivals Apple, Google and Samsung (as well as other familiar Silicon Valley names) are offering glitzy front-end mobile platforms and applications that promise to seamlessly bring together data from multiple sources into a single interface.
The real unsung heros in mobile healthcare, however, are the middleware vendors who allow those front-ends to pull data out of gnarly back-end enterprise...
When Ottawa Hospital wanted to implement a new computerized physician order entry system it was faced with a choice: Tune the software for desktops and workstations and then adapt it for smartphones and tablets, or go exclusively mobile from the onset.
Canada's largest hospital, in fact, claims it's the first in the world to implement a mobile electronic order entry system for physicians,...
Pharma, the industry that prides itself on being at the cutting edge of medical research, is simultaneously at the back end when it comes to adopting mobile technology solutions for what is a ready and waiting market of healthcare professionals.
Only 33 percent of all healthcare pharma applications are mobilized. What’s more, 45 percent of healthcare pharma websites on the market for less than...
“We’ve had 20 years to learn and perfect desktop security,” Jeff Forristal says. And not nearly as much time for securing mHealth apps and devices.
As CTO of mobile data security company BlueBox, Forristal sees today’s security weaknesses as a result of the mHealth industry’s immaturity, rather than mobile apps and devices being inherently less secure than their desk-bound brethren.
The attack on...
Hackers used malware to penetrate Community Health Systems' firewall, and once inside, they made off with some 4.5 million medical records — a staggering but not surprising number to cyber security professionals.
While the uninformed may ask how such a thing could happen, the probable cause is user error. And with so many malicious apps on the market, it’s no wonder.
“The most likely path for the...
The illusion of mind over matter is poised to become even more rooted in the public’s eye.
Indeed, the healthcare community knows that the brain is just another organ, and as such, mapping the latent power of a patient’s brainwaves could produce new treatment breakthroughs.
As EEG science advances, those who deal with the mind - notably psychiatrists and psychologists - are turning to the...
Accenture and Philips Healthcare have announced a partnership under which the companies will create technology that essentially taps into a patient’s brainwaves.
The basic concept uses Emotiv’s five-channel EEG reader in conjunction with software on an iPad or Android tablet to interpret a user’s intentions.
Accenture's and Philips' proof-of-concept is targeted at people with Amyotrophic Lateral...
