Microsoft recently announced that it is officially shutting down HealthVault at the end of this year. HealthVault was Microsoft’s attempt at a web-based personal health record system. You probably never used it -- it suffered low adoption. But while HealthVault will shut down, mobile apps that collect and store your personal health information and share it with your healthcare team are poised to revolutionize medicine and wellness practice.
The downfalls of HealthVault included its focus on
Read More
Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
How Can Health System Command Centers Reduce Cost Growth?
Scott Newton, DNP, RN, MHA, EMT-P, VP of Care Model Solutions at Teletracking In our decentralized care landscape, health system command centers (HSCC) are coordinating high-quality care through complex and integrated delivery networks (IDN). Recently, command centers were recognized by KLAS and Gartner as a new model of care delivery with the potential to impact clinical, financial, and operational outcomes. That means in addition to improving routine health system operations—and increasing
Read More
We Need Less Focus on Perfecting Physicians Using Carrots and Sticks
I’m not sure what the relevant analogy might be, but I’ll take a shot, nonetheless.
Let’s say we poured billions of dollars into improving highways and city streets, but the local commute for residents continued to get longer, more frustrating, less effective.
Or, maybe we also dumped billions into school systems, but student test scores only got worse.
I ask if these comparisons are relevant after reading about a recent study published in the Lancet, which suggests that poor
Read More
The Four Cs: A Call to Action for Digital Health Tools
The United States spends more of their GDP on healthcare than any other developed nation, and yet it produces some of the poorest outcomes — notably in the field of maternal and infant health.
The advent of digital health has presented the opportunity for a paradigm shift in the delivery of care, and support from investors and policy-makers shows that as far as they’re concerned, digital health is not a new frontier for healthcare, but the current playing field.
A staggering $14.6B in funding
Read More
Where’s the Evidence? Barriers to Analyzing Digital Health’s Impact
The digital health industry continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. In 2018, venture funding for digital health companies approached a record $8.1B in funding, according to Rock Health. These companies are striving to address important healthcare issues by developing products and service offerings in various categories like genome sequencing, analytics, telemedicine, mobile apps, and population health management tools—all with the promise of increased insights and patient engagement, and
Read More
Amazon Alexa Is Now HIPAA-Eligible, What’s Next for Healthcare?
Big News, But Just The Beginning
These days, big news stories in healthcare are just as likely to come from large technology companies as from major healthcare institutions. Case in point: In early 2018, Amazon created a huge stir in the industry early by announcing a venture with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway that promised to go after the “hungry tapeworm” that is the cost of healthcare in the
Read More
Telemedicine: A Potential Remedy to Rural Healthcare Ills?
Mary Tolan, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Chicago Pacific Founders
The symptoms are innocuous enough at first. They begin with simple fatigue; readily explainable by a day spent working under the hot sun. The thirst sets in next, then the persistent hunger. The farmer brushes his symptoms off as simple work-caused exhaustion, and rationalizes that anyone would be tired, hungry, and thirsty after a long day in the field - he's getting older, after all. He thinks little of it until his
Read More
Analysis: How Digital Health Solutions Are Disrupting Care Delivery in Hospitals
Rainer Herzog, Vice President at Research2GuidanceNew stakeholders are entering the hospital arena, contesting the hospitals’ traditional role and freedom to provide care to the community. The newcomers’ focus is on digital care delivery processes and on a digitally enabled patient experience. Hospitals will have to start now to prepare their organizations for the coming change. Creating digital partner ecosystems is one prominent way to approach this task. Hospital stays can be frightening,
Read More
Consumerization of Healthcare: Why Differentiation is Critical for Clinics
The consumerization of healthcare is upon us. As retail pharmacies expand their reach and giant tech companies such as Apple and Amazon enter the market, we are transitioning from patients to healthcare consumers with more options and more purchasing decisions to make.
Whether this shift will prove beneficial to overall health remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: patients are being faced with an increasing number of decisions to make that have immediate effects on health and wellbeing.
Read More
Healthcare M&A: How Carestream Will Change Philips Strategy in Imaging Informatics
Earlier this month, Philips Healthcare announced it had signed an agreement to purchase the IT business (HCIS) of Carestream Healthcare for an undisclosed amount. The deal, expected to close in the second half of the year, is one of the largest M&A moves in the imaging informatics market for some time. While it was one of the worst kept secrets in the industry that the owners of Carestream were looking for a buyer, the decision to split off the HCIS business of Carestream was more of a
Read More
