You can't avoid the term "patient engagement" in healthcare today, and for good reason.
Health Affairs explains that "'patient activation' refers to a patient's knowledge, skills, ability, and willingness to manage his or her own health and care," while "'patient engagement' is a broader concept that combines patient activation with interventions designed to increase activation and promote...
Seventy percent of health insurance companies have published only one or two apps and 67 percent of those companies have achieved less than 100,000 downloads on the apps they do have, according to a new report from Research2Guidance. The report analyzed app offerings from 79 health insurance companies from around the world.
The report follows on the heels of a similar look at the pharmaceutical...
In just a few short years smart mobile devices have become indispensable tools for clinicians. As device adoption peaks for providers, a growing number of digital health tools are now literally at clinicians' fingertips: clinical decision support software, patient education apps, smartphone-connected medical devices, secure messaging software, and many more.
While some providers have brought apps...
By Bradley Merrill Thompson
Over the last couple years, FDA has clarified the scope of its regulation over mobile health. In the agency’s September 2013 guidance, FDA spelled out its oversight for some of the most common mobile medical apps. Then, last month, in two separate draft guidances FDA explained the limits on its oversight of apps used for general wellness like fitness trackers, as well...
Miami Children's Hospital CIO Edward Martinez talked about two of the hospital's new mobile offerings for patients and clinicians in an interview with HealthcareIT News this week.
The hospital has developed a care coordination app that helps clinicians hand off patients between shifts in addition to a patient-facing version of the app that helps parents keep tabs on those transitions. The...
Bethesda, Maryland-based cellular-enabled blood glucose meter company Telcare has raised $32.5 million led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from Mosaic Health Solutions and existing backers The Qualcomm Life Fund and Sequoia Capital. The latest round of funding takes Telcare's total disclosed funding to north of $60 million.
Telcare offers a diabetes management package that includes...
Last week the FDA granted 510(k) clearance to a mobile-based cognitive test called DANA (Defense Automated Neurobehavioral Assessment), which helps healthcare providers better assess the medical or psychological state of their patients. DANA was developed by Silver Spring, Maryland-based AnthroTronix, a digital health R&D company, and it was developed partially thanks to funding from the US...
Along with the official launch of the new iOS 8 operating system yesterday, a large number of health and medical app developers intended to launch apps that integrated with Apple's HealthKit platform. However, because of a bug in HealthKit that Apple apparently discovered at the last minute, the iPhone-maker did not grant approval to any updated health app that integrated with HealthKit.
“We...
Late last week the Financial Times (sub. req.) reported that Apple had modified its iOS developer license agreement, its rules for developers that create apps for its devices, to ban developers from selling health data collected by HealthKit.
The company wrote that developers must “not sell an end-user’s health information collected through the HealthKit API to advertising platforms, data brokers...
New York City-based medical device maker Philosys received FDA 510(k) clearance this week for its smartphone-connected glucose meter, Gmate Smart.
To use the Gmate Smart glucometer, users launch the device's connected app, plug in their Gmate glucometer through the audio jack, insert a test strip into the glucometer, add a blood sample, and view results on the app. Gmate Smart's app is only...
