Fifty-nine percent of American adults used a website like WebMD to look up symptoms instead of visiting a primary care physician, according to a new survey, while only 12 percent used telemedicine in place of primary care.
The data comes from the University of Phoenix College of Health Professionals, which completed an online survey of 2,201 individuals across a range of demographic backgrounds....
Mental health-focused telemedicine company Talkspace has raised $15 million in a funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Existing investors Spark Capital, Soft Bank, Metamorphic Ventures, and TheTime, also contributed.
“We’ve eliminated a lot of the barriers that prevent people from getting help in the first place by delivering therapy via messaging -- and, the biggest has been reducing...
Ten years ago Smile Reminder saw an opportunity to offer text message appointment reminders to physician practices that were losing upwards of $200,000 a year because of missed appointments. Some of those practices had no-show rates of up to 20 percent, according to the company. During the past decade, Smile Reminder has served 20 million patients, including some as far away as Dubai and...
Stalking around the usual suspects at the HIMSS conference this week was a band of pink pants wearing entrepreneurs: The team from Sarasota-based start-up Voalte brought more than silly pants to Chicago though, they brought iPhones loaded with wireless VoIP, nurses' alarms and text messages, too. Vo- (voice) + al- (alarms) + te (texts), pronounced "volt" was founded by Trey Lauderdale, a former...
John Halamka, MD, MS, the CIO of CareGroup Health System and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, has cut the cord and no longer has a landline phone. Halamka wrote a post about going all mobile over at his blog Life as a Healthcare CIO. Halamka is also Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and a practicing Emergency Physician.
This is a puff piece,...
A recent reader comment about SMS security and reliability issues, dovetails nicely with the presentation that Barbara Rapchak, CEO of Leap of Faith Technologies gave last week at the TEPR conference in Palm Springs. Her company conducted a medicine compliance pilot study that sent text messages reminding users to take their medication on-time--but the texts were not sent over a wireless carrier'...
During the final presentations at an mHealth Workshop at TEPR this week, Barry Greene, President & CEO, Libertas.md & Med Practice Informatics outlined the return on investment for deploying a simple text message-based communications tool in a hypothetical one doctor practice. Greene showed significant costs saving and revenue boosting opportunities can be leveraged by using text messages...
During the second morning session of the mHealth track at TEPR today, Kaiser Permanente's Manager of Solution Consulting Nardo Manaloto outlined best practices for using text messages to send appointment reminders to patients. Manaloto recently completed a successful trial of such reminders at one of Kaiser's clinics. KP teamed up with text messaging application service provider Mobilestorm to...
