A Kit Check scanning station.
Washington, DC-based Rock Health startup Kit Check has raised $10.4 million in a round of funding led by New Leaf Venture Partners. Sands Capital Ventures, Easton Capital Investment Group and LionBird also participated in the round.
Although Kit Check has been in hospitals since April 2012, this is the company's first funding round of any kind.
"We took the Rock...
Some groups have criticized the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology for not building usability requirements into the national standards for "meaningful use" of electronic health records, suggesting that usability issues have hindered adoption.
Though it hasn't been designed to help providers achieve meaningful use – or necessarily for the U.S. market – a new...
A small FDA survey of nine hospitals found that the most popular use cases for RFID (radio frequency identification) technology are infusion pumps, portable monitors, wheelchairs, beds, and ventilators. Eight of the nine hospitals surveyed use RFID or RTLS (real time location services) technologies. These hospitals are part of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) MedSun...
Japananese company Asahi Kasei has developed a portable device that gives users access to their health records from a computer or smartphone by connecting to these devices through short range, contactless RFID, according to a report in TechCrunch.
The device is a smart card, sized at just 3x3cm, and built on FeliCa technology, which is prominently used by Japan’s mobile operators.
The card would...
Meridian Health, a not-for-profit group of hospitals in New Jersey, has teamed up with wireless technology firm Cypak to form a joint venture, called iMPak, which is focused on creating wireless health monitoring devices and services. iMPak aims to launch a number of reliable, low cost, easy to use solutions based on Near Field Communications (NFC), embedded sensors, and storage capabilities from...
Wireless tools continue to roll out in hospitals: Aerohive and others have enabled a wireless infrastructure at Riverside Health Care's facility that enables providers to conduct bedside registration and order entry. Nurses conduct bedside documentation drug administration by using tablet devices. The facility also outfitted its nurses and health care professionals with handheld units that...
By Christine Chang, Healthcare Technology Analyst, Ovum
mHealth: The Buzzword of 2009
The 2009 healthcare technology buzzword was ‘mHealth,’ or mobile health. Ovum has seen a moderate, but steadily increasing interest in mobile health over the year as the phrase began appearing with increasing frequency in the media and at conferences. Unlike the last healthcare IT buzzword, real time radio...
By David Doherty
Forget about remote monitoring, wearable sensors, NFC/RFID, smartphones, software apps, GPS, mEHR's, video messaging, 3G video calling and SMS. These are part of a wave that is without a doubt advancing, but the evidence of successful mHealth applications can already be found throughout the healthcare system:
Urgent Care: For over a decade emergency medical services around the...
Kaiser Permanente's innovation centers: The Sacramento Bee has a feature on Kaiser Permanente's various innovation centers, which test a number of wireless health technologies. The San Leandro center, for example, is outfitted with patient rooms, mock-ups of workstations, operating rooms, and a "living room" that includes demonstrations of home health products.
"By 2015, the home will become the...
A recent Frost & Sullivan report that extols the value of mobile technology for healthcare settings missed the mark when it pointed to network level security as the key to wireless health tools' success.
"While mobile technology undoubtedly adds value to healthcare, the question is whether advances in technology pose a security threat, as information transmitted across a network should be...
