A year ago at the HIMSS healthcare IT event in Chicago, MobiHealthNews lamented the lack of wireless health presentations, panel sessions and exhibiting companies on the event's showfloor. We did, however, meet with the founder of a new smartphone app centered start-up, Voalte. The company's founder Trey Lauderdale had worked previously at Philips' subsidiary Emergin, where he sensed his customers growing frustration with the tiny pool of wireless VoIP phones in the market. By the end of 2008, Lauderdale believed that nurses and physicians’ demand for a wireless VoIP solution on the iPhone had reached a fever pitch. So he left to launch Voalte.

As we have noted throughout the past year, the demand for smartphones and wireless services in healthcare have ramped up increasingly since HIMSS 2009.

Next week in Atlanta, the HIMSS 2010 event kicks off with a wireless health focused keynote by Sprint CEO Dan Hesse. Sprint's headliner presentation is immediately followed by a breakout session focused on mobile phone applications for physicians. What's more, some two dozen companies -- including health startups, care providers, wireless operators and established health IT vendors -- are set to meet with MobiHealthNews next week. Clearly, the healthcare industry has come a long way toward embracing mobile technologies this past year.

As for Voalte, the newly launched startup that we met at HIMSS last year has since inked a number of deals with care facilities across the US. Its latest deal, however, brings Voalte's founder full circle. Ahead of the event next week, Voalte announced a partnership agreement with Lauderdale's former employer, Emergin. The Philips healthcare company has partnered with Voalte to create an interface between the Emergin alert management platform and the Voalte communication server to deliver alert message notifications from Emergin to the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

Large health IT incumbents like Philips are just beginning to work with mobile-focused startups like Voalte -- we expect to hear about many more such deals in the coming week. If you'd like to tip me off to any such deals before they're announced, send me a note here or look for me rushing around the trade showfloor next week. See you in Atlanta!