Fitbit Surge
Fitbit's Corporate Wellness arm officially became a HIPAA compliant platform, announced Target as a new client, which will offer Fitbits to its 335,000 US employees, and showed off a new software offering that will facilitate fitness competitions among employees in large, distributed companies.
Fitbit Wellness has been around almost since the beginning, but is lately one of the ...
As more and more mobile devices embed biometric sensors, mostly for health and fitness tracking, the market for using biometrics for identifying and authenticating people is trending up, according to a recent report from analyst firm Tractica. The group also points to the healthcare industry as one of the most promising sectors for adoption of biometric authentication. Tractica believes that...
The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), a division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has penned a five-part draft guidance on cybersecurity for mobile devices that connect to electronic health records. The guidance includes a step-by-step how-to guide for improving data security that uses commercially available and open source tools and technologies, as...
A brain training game fined by the FTC earlier this year.
Developers of mobile health apps need to be mindful of regulation from a number of different quarters. Among others, developers need to be aware of the FDA, OCR (HIPAA), and the FTC, which is increasingly regulating areas that would seem to be the purview of one of the other two groups.
At a HIMSS session on mobile and digital health...
The Center for Innovative Technology GAP Fund has invested an undisclosed amount in Ostendio, a DC-based company that developed a software-as-a-service offering aimed at helping health IT companies better achieve and prove HIPAA compliance.
CIT GAP Fund, a group of seed and early-stage investment funds, invests in Virginia-based technology, life science, and cleantech startups.
Ostendio was...
HHS' Office of Civil Rights, which oversees the administration of HIPAA, will begin working closely with mobile health companies to make sure HIPAA rules are clear and unambiguous, according to a letter HHS sent to Representatives Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Tom Marino (R-PA) in November.
The letter, signed by HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell, was sent in response to a request Marino and DeFazio sent in...
Dr. William Tierney
HIPAA is designed to give patients control of their own medical data -- who can see it, who can access it, and who can use it, especially with regards to third parties. But when it comes to physicians themselves, the status quo is patients being expected to fully disclose, so doctors have all the information they might need to treat them. A new study is challenging that...
Mobile-focused EHR company drchrono has updated its iPad-based EHR and smartphone-based PHR so that both can be accessed with Apple's Touch ID, a security feature that was added to the latest generation of iPads and iPhones.
Touch ID allows the user of an iOS device to save his or her fingerprint to the device and sync it up with a passcode. Then, in situations where the user would normally type...
Employers are turning more and more to preventative wellness programs to keep down their employee's eventual healthcare costs, including biometric screenings to determine early risk factors. But when those screenings are mandatory, and incentivized through sanctions for opting out rather than rewards for opting in, does that cross the line into violating employee's privacy? Has the employer...
Source: Reddit
About a year ago when Google launched its video chats service and directory Helpouts, which connects people to experts in a wide variety of fields, reports emerged that the search giant was now offering video visits with doctors.
Soon after Helpouts' launch, tech-savvy primary care provider One Medical Group's CEO Dr. Tom Lee told VentureBeat that his company was working with...
