Text message-based health surveys distributed to 6,694 Liberians during an Ebola outbreak were generally on par with baseline demographic data collected in a prior household survey, according to a study recently published in Nature Digital Medicine. Further, the text surveys suggested that women sought fewer hospital-based deliveries during the outbreak, a trend consistent with other...
New York City-based digital healthcare service Sherpaa has raised an additional $2.25 million, according to an SEC filing. The funding is an amendment to last year's $4 million round. This brings the company's total funding to at least $8 million.
Past investors include O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, First Round Capital, Collaborative Fund, and angels including Tumblr founder David Karp, ex-...
Physician adoption of smartphones and tablets is higher than it's ever been, but poor communication between IT departments and doctors keeps those devices from being effectively used, according to a new report from Spyglass Consulting. The report estimates that 96 percent of doctors have smartphones, but only 10 percent are actually willing to use their mobile devices to access electronic health...
While a tiny percentage of Ebola cases are popping up in the United States and Europe, the epicenter of the disease is and remains in West Africa, an area where mobile health initiatives are often deployed, especially those that take advantage of text messaging and other short message services. Texting is a good way to educate a large swath of the population so they can identify symptoms of the...
The opportunity for healthcare organizations to leverage text messaging as a channel for health education, behavior change, and patient engagement has been widely discussed over the past decade. But unlike other health technology solutions, the body of data supporting text messaging-based mobile health programs is substantial and growing.
During our next MobiHealthNews webinar -- October 16th at...
Infield Health's Healthy Steps app.
People in a Weight Watchers program who received motivational and reminder text messages lost an average of 4.5 pounds more in a 12-week period than those who were left to their own volition, a newly published study found. Text messaging also showed promise for increasing exercise and promoting other healthy behaviors, according to researchers from Virginia...
Medicaid health plans in more than 20 states are rolling out mobile health services thanks to a new partnership between mobile health company Voxiva and mobile operator TracFone Wireless. The partnership will see the launch of SafeLink Health Solutions. The program is something of an offshoot of the federal Lifeline mobile phone program, which can trace its roots to a Reagan-era landline phone...
At times, text messages seem to be the uncelebrated workhorse of mobile health, especially when you compare SMS to health apps in terms of the amount of attention each gets.
While the potential for smartphone apps is still great, adoption across all mobile phone users in the US for apps has remained flat at about 10 percent for the past three years. Once these apps find tighter integration with...
At the beginning of the month DocBookMD announced a $2.2 million seed round of funding from a handful of private investors from the healthcare industry. DocBookMD offers a HIPAA-compliant platform for doctors to exchange texts, photos, charts, x-rays and similar information.
About 6,500 physicians now use the app, according to a report over at MedCityNews.
While the company did not specifically...
Arogya World, a US-based non-profit, announced a collaboration with Nokia at the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting this week on an SMS-based diabetes prevention program in India. The program aims to raise awareness about diabetes and its prevention through text messages and hopes to reach one million consumers in rural and urban India over the next two years.
A consortium of...
