“November has been busy with a number of important conferences in England and Scotland. There has been the publication of the NHS Mandate in England with references to telecare and telehealth. The next phase of the 3millionlives initiative has been
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Monthly Archives November 2012
One newspaper – two treatments of telecare (UK)
1. Guardian journalist visits a response centre and becomes a spokesperson for Tunstall. It doesn’t quite justify the headline: How telecare is transforming social care. 2. Also in The Guardian – but this time by someone who has real, albeit
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Nurses 1, Video Consultations 0… for now (Australia)
Nurses in a town in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, have seen off proposals to reduce a doctor’s presence in favour of ‘tele-health’ (as in video-based consultations). The system is being widely used in NSW and the ‘setback’ has been
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The Friday telehealth roundup
Is it telehealth? Telemedicine? Whatever… Healthcare IT News went to the National eHealth Collaborative’s Technology Crossroads Conference in Washington, DC this past Tuesday and reports that telehealth–in their definition also including telemedicine–will be doubling its use in the next few
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More EHR misery: EHR payment cutoff, data breach
US EHR Stage 2 payments a waste? In September and October, Congressional Republicans scored Health and Human Services (HHS) on “weak” EHR interoperability standards under Stage 2 of the HITECH Act and called for temporary suspension of EHR incentive payments
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More cars that will monitor your BP…and brain waves
The Gimlet Eye is beginning to feel not quite up to speed in reading The Wall Street Journal’s dashing article on the wonderful things cars will shortly be doing to keep you awake, alive and healthy. Now awake is all
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The chip that may revolutionize telehealth and telecare?
Vital signs and activity monitoring sensors enabled on one large postage stamp-sized chip? That is the promise–and it costs less than 25 cents, can be made adhesive (for on-body or clothing use), is disposable and runs on energy drawn from
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Telecare on the 'slope of enlightenment'?
On the Gartner hype curve, the ‘slope of enlightenment’ follows the ‘trough of disillusionment’–and telecare, or at least the sensor-based behavioral part, has been in the trough since about 2009. The Gimlet Eye sees a possible curve change coming from
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Confusion, consolidation and collapse?
Updated 27 Nov pm
Editor Donna's post-Thanksgiving observations of the US healthcare technology scene, from financing to EHRs, incorporate all of these:
Confusion: seemingly reigns in--and reins in--financing for early stage health tech companies. While major companies attended, presented and chit-chatted at last week's Life Sciences Angel Network's conference in NYC, the chairman of major provider Continuum Health Partners, and a (former, current) investor, stated his reluctance to invest in healthcare delivery tech. Dell Computer and device giant Becton Dickinson are looking to invest, but..but...but....uncertain of tech's relationships to providers and whether they can truly address 'inefficiencies in the system.' No one is certain about healthcare in the next five years (with the Federal ACA under further challenge and perhaps designed to fail under its own jury-rigged weight), how to integrate technology into provider workflow, who's paying for it (back in FBQ-land again, now with insurers augering in to an iffy ACA-landing) and how to deal with all that regulation already there, much less that to come (see ACA). So what else is new? Investors Interested in Health IT—With Caveats (xConomy)
Consolidation and Collapse: Early entrant electronic health records (EHR) company ImagineMD folded its tent in late September with little notice, not only publicly but also to its (probably few) customers after burning through at least $25 million in financing. As Editor Donna mentions in comments below the article, EHRs normally fall outside our scope. But since 2009, investors in search of quick returns flocked to finance every Tom, Dick and Harry EHR that IT companies could cook up, rather than telehealth, telecare and telemedicine. Why?
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Post-Thanksgiving robot roundup
iRobot’s new robotic hand, developed for DARPA’s Autonomous Robotic Manipulation (ARM) program, takes a licking and keeps on ticking, like the old Timex commercial. See the hand’s fingers, holding a baseball, ‘teed off’ by a baseball bat in the article
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