Timed somewhat appropriately on Valentine's Day, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the winner of its Million Hearts Risk Assessment Challenge this week. More than 35 developers competed to create a mobile app that would leverage Archimedes analytics engine IndiGO (which stands for Individual Guidelines and Outcomes) for patient use, allowing anyone to easily calculate...
Health Tech Hatch CEO Patricia Salber
In late January, medical-focused crowdfunding site Health Tech Hatch will premier its testing platform in a three-way partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Health 2.0. Health Tech Hatch will offer its 20 physician, patient, and tech guru testers up for free to developers entering healthfinder.gov's Mobile App Challenge....
While hospital CIOs and privacy officers sweat over the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and the BYOD phenomenon, federal health IT officials are trying to put their minds at ease with a series of resources to help providers safeguard patients' protected health information.
Wednesday at its annual meeting in Washington, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology...
One of the shifts that occurred in telecommunications once most people began to carry mobile phones was that we no longer only called places, we called people. Location no longer mattered us much, we can now make calls -- for better or worse -- from virtually anywhere.
A popular phrase in healthcare -- "point of care" -- has historically been a phrase that is very much tied to a particular...
Though the Food and Drug Administration is developing regulations for mobile medical apps, at least one member of Congress believes the federal agency is not currently equipped to handle the rapid pace of innovation in mobile technology.
Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), whose district covers much of Silicon Valley, is preparing to introduce legislation that would address this perceived shortcoming by...
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held a public briefing this week with its mHealth Task Force, which formed just this past June to work with various other healthcare professionals and technologists to create a report full of "concrete" next steps that the FCC (and other agencies) can take to facilitate the adoption and acceleration of mHealth in the United States. The task force co-...
An ePHI-less text message.
Are vendors of secure text-messaging technology trying to sell people a bridge in Brooklyn, or is there a loophole in the somewhat outdated HIPAA privacy and security regulations that few have taken advantage of? The answer is unclear.
Dr. Michael Koriwchak, an otolaryngologist in Atlanta, raised the question last week on his Wired EMR Practice blog by calling secure...
Newly finalized rules for Stage 2 of the "meaningful use" electronic health records (EHR) incentive program take into consideration some of the ways mobile technology has changed how healthcare professionals and patients access health information.
Notably, the 672-page rule, which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released Thursday, requires providers to conduct a risk...
During a panel discussion organized by the Office of the National Coordinator and the HHS last week, Federal Trade Commission Attorney Cora Tung Han, who works in the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection and the FDA's Policy Advisor Bakul Patel, who works at the agency's Center for Devices and Radiological Health helped explain how the two organizations work together when it comes to...
Last week Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS, kicked off a half-day HHS event focused on privacy and security issues surrounding the use of mobile devices in healthcare. Mostashari's comments summed up the mobile health opportunity for providers while pointing out the potential problems, too.
Mostashari described mobile phones as ubiquitous,...
