Last week Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the US Department of Health and Human Services, penned a column on his top five health IT predictions for the year ahead. Not surprisingly, Mostashari expects consumers to use eHealth to get more involved in managing their own health.
"I believe this year we will see consumers and patients use...
"We need to make healthcare more positive," US Surgeon General Regina M. Benjamin told the audience at the mHealth Summit this week. Benjamin's keynote focused on her enthusiasm for mHealth as a key tool in preventive care. She also announced a new developer challenge sponsored by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS): The Surgeon General's Health Apps Challenge.
Benjamin told the...
“We are talking about taking the biggest technology breakthrough of our time and using it to address our greatest national challenge,” Kathleen Sebelius U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said during her keynote presentation at the mHealth Summit in Washington DC this morning. Sebelius envisioned a “remarkable future” where control over a patient’s own health was always within their...
An upcoming efficacy study by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on the Text4Baby SMS service will make use of electronic health records (EHR) data, according to an announcement in the US Federal Register.
Text4Baby is a free, SMS-based health information service for new and expectant mothers. Text4Baby launched in February of 2010 and currently has more than 190,000 subscribers...
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced this week two new SMS smoking cessation programs, QuitNowTXT and SmokeFreeTXT, as part of their Text4Health initiative. The programs, a collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, are aimed separately at adults, and teens/young adults, respectively.
HHS formed the Text4Health Task Force in November 2010 to provide ...
This week Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the establishment of the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA), a new partnership that will leverage mobile technology to help prevent death during childbirth. With an expected $10 million in funding over the next three years, MAMA plans to launch in Bangladesh, India and South Africa.
Given the federal government and Johnson...
By Judy Meehan, CEO, National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition
Tragically, in the U.S. approximately 28,000 babies die before their first birthday, despite a volume of science around behaviors that improve a baby’s chances for a healthy birth and opportunity to thrive. Text4baby was developed to deliver evidence-based health information to the women who need it most: the 1.5 million...
Imaging apps reviewed for iPad: Dr. Sam Friedman reviewed almost a half dozen imaging apps for iPhone on his son's iPad for an article in Advance. The apps included Merge Healthcare (eFilm Mobile), OsiriX and iCRco Inc. (iClarity), Mobile MIM (MIMvista) and ResolutionMD from Calgary Scientific. "Today's radiology viewing apps are bare-bones programs, with half their code devoted to moving image...
By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
The Health 2.0 Conference convened its first meeting in Washington, DC, today, with public sector health leaders and private sector innovators coming together in a Great Big Kumbayah. This conference featured two prominent and key players absent from previous Health 2.0 Conferences: patients on every panel, and the Federal government punctuating the start, the middle, and...
"Maybe with all that ARRA money floating about in the HITECH Act, ONC should just go ahead and build such an 'open' platform that supports modular apps to meet specific needs wihin this highly fragmented market. Seriously, this needs some consideration," Chilmark Research Principal John Moore wrote last year after reading about a proposal by Boston researchers to create an "iPhone-like" platform...
