Updated Tuesday 15 March
Borrowing from the investing classic ‘A Random Walk Down Wall Street’ (it must be the air in the Financial District that Ed. Donna’s breathing lately), news of note from the US side this late Monday:
WellAWARE Systems charts a big ‘win’ in a new partnership with Ohio Masonic Homes, for both its variety of senior communities and in-home care. Ohio Masonic Homes serves over 100,000 Masons in Ohio. WellAWARE has been emphasizing ‘sleep quality’ insights and the ability of their telecare system to track clinically significant sleep disturbance, which afflicts over 65% of those living in senior care facilities. Release.
Sproxil, the anti-counterfeiting SMS drug authenticator, succeeded in raising $1.8 million in Series A funding (VentureFizz) and added GlaxoSmithKline to its Mobile Product Authentication (MPA) portfolio. Sproxil will be verifying GSK’s Ampiclox antibiotic in Nigeria. SecuringPharma also confirms Sproxil’s expansion into other African countries and India, where many of Africa’s drugs originate. More…. New: Sproxil has added Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen-Cilag division in Nigeria, for their Nizoral tablet and cream products. Vanguard Online (Nigeria) covering a summit on fake and substandard drugs
More on Africa and emerging countries in Jane Sarasohn-Kahn’s observations of the SXSW conference this past week on what the US healthcare system could learn from their mHealth ventures, including micro-mobile payments, SMS med reminders and mashups, hacks etc.
Picking and packing of pills…by robots. University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center has joined the robotic pharmacy bandwagon for integrated medication management. Article and video. Not big news in NYC with NYU-Langone Medical Center implementing last year [TA 24 Nov], but the California robots look like they ate their California raisins.
In the iCorner…Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School received $15 million from ONC-HIT (Office of National Coordinator-Health Information Technology–part of HHS) one year ago the SMArt platform architecture (Substitutable Medical Applications, reusable technologies) to facilitate the equivalent of an iTunes App Store for health and support applications ranging from medication managers for patients at home to e-prescribing applications and decision support for physicians in the office. Now it has gone public and is inviting web developers to create new apps for public health with $5,000 prizes. Race is on for iPhone-like health IT apps.