Mark Bertolini, CEO, Aetna | Photo Credit: HIMSS 2014 Event Staff
By Jonah Comstock
There may not have been a lot of news from payers (or health insurance companies) at HIMSS 2014 in Orlando, Florida, but their presence was definitely felt. Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini's keynote address laid out the stakes well: healthcare costs are rising markedly, and it's everyone's job to try to keep them down...
A startup called Perminova is developing a necklace for clinical use that can track a number of vital signs including thoracic fluid levels, an early predictor of congestive heart failure that isn't currently monitored by most connected sensors. Patients at risk for CHF could use the device in place of or along with a weight scale.
"You have weight gain four days before a heart failure event," VP...
Patient engagement is about giving patients communication channels they want as well as the ones they need, according to Chanin Wendling, Director of eHealth at Geisinger Health System. And from her experience, patients are still more interested in useful web-based patient portals than they are in apps.
"We did a study this past summer on women's health where we were trying to figure out if we...
Three new Kaiser Permanente hospitals will be opening soon in California and will roll out the Journey Home Board, a tablet application that serves as an outpatient education and engagement app. The Journey Home Board is the latest technology to come out of Kaiser's Imagine Care Anywhere program, an innovation center based out of Kaiser's Garfield Innovation Center in San Leandro, California.
"...
Web-based patient portals, in one form or another, have started to become commonplace in American doctor's offices and hospitals. Partly this is due to requirements in Meaningful Use Stage II that patients have access to their own data. But the typical patient portal gives patients a small spattering of information like charts or lab results, without interpreting that data or making it actionable...
