[With summer over in the northern hemisphere and the conference season getting under way, relevant news items are coming in thick and fast. So here’s a little experiment: rather than posting these ‘short takes’ on products/services/organizations separately, we are grouping them… Read moreNews roundup 7 Oct
Aneesh Chopra, the US administration’s CTO, offered some roses to healthcare entrepreneurs Tuesday at the Health 2.0 Conference. Aside from stimulus funds for funding healthcare IT, he was fairly specific about how this administration will “create market conditions” by modifying specific healthcare policies. Examples given: discouraging patient return visits post-surgery, which would incentivize post-discharge trackers; cybersecurity and “patient privacy and control”, which sound like EMRs; funding medical students to work in startups. These must be the “levers” he referred to at the FCC meeting (see 23 September posting, “Telehealth being ‘levered’ by healthcare reform?”) Obama Administration’s Message to Health Care Start-Ups (New York Times)
Scotland again demonstrates the way forward with a vision of support for telehealth developments which integrates it into a wider health information delivery structure, to be pushed forward with a further increased level of (Scottish) government investment next year. You… Read moreScottish Centre for Telehealth (SCT) to integrate into NHS 24
Tower Hamlets (London Borough with high proportion of low income residents) has increased the take-up of its telecare service for people with low to moderate care needs by making it free. Tower Hamlets’s website.
Two press releases that raise the question of what is innovation in telehealth? If it is doing something no one else does, guess which one of these I consider innovative: NHS Dudley Wins Award for Innovative Telehealth Deployment (Tunstall) Here…. Read moreInnovation. What is it?
… and it has nothing to do with the recent neck cord story… Philips in the US has just introduced a new cordless phone that works with the Philips Lifeline Medical Alert Service. It is “designed to support the independence… Read moreNew product: Philips goes cordless
New Zealand dips its toe into telehealth remote patient monitoring with a trial of 10 patients with, and 10 without equipment, at a cost of NZD 100,000 (GBP 46,000; USD 73,000). Now what are they going to learn from that?… Read moreNew Zealand’s first telehealth pilot begins
Electronic medical records (EMRs) have been advocated as a “holy grail” since the Bush administration. Yet mention EMRs to many US physicians in private practice, and you’ll have to duck. A short article by Dr. Joseph Kvedar (Center for Connected Health) in the Healthspottr blog clearly states the unaffordable six-figure cost for small practices (2 or less) where 33% of US physicians work, and despite the PR, the lack of evidence that EMRs in this context improve health or cost-efficiency without payment reform. He advocates instead simpler, easier to implement now and cheaper ways of saving on healthcare, mainly through ‘connected health’ tools. The Reason Why
The Washington (DC) Times devoted four pages of coverage this past Sunday on telemedicine (and telehealth), going back to a TV hookup in the 1960s between Logan Airport and Mass General. It’s notable for mentioning (slog through to page 4) the… Read moreUnited Health Group and Cisco initiative for national telehealth system (Washington Times)
Certainly not a surprise to our readers: Continua Health Alliance and ZigBee formally announced expanding their relationship via a liaison agreement for further collaboration on defining interoperability standards. This follows on Continua’s June recommendation of ZigBee as their preferred low power LAN standard for use… Read moreContinua and ZigBee announce collaboration on standards
