Amazon launch Amazon Care service offering Mobile Video Consults with Primary Care Physicians & Nurses

Posted on September 27, 2019 by

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It’s of course a great validation of the value of the 3G Doctor service that we launched in 2006 that Amazon have put a similar service at the heart of their new Amazon Care service for employees in the Seattle area.

Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 Amazon is the world’s largest internet company by revenue (they generated $232Billion in 2018) and the second largest private employer in the USA (with some +470,000 employees it has more staff than Malta has citizens!). This isn’t the first experience they have of trying to run a healthcare service for employees as in 2013 at Zappos.com (a subsidiary since it was acquired in 2009) they launched TurnTable Health as a ‘next generation primary care clinic’ for staff next door to their huge office in downtown Las Vegas. Although Turntable Health was closed after 3 years I have no doubt from my own tour of the clinic that they built that it will have been in an invaluable contributor to helping Amazon get Amazon Care right and it’s positive that this new approach has very much evolved from being clinic centred to taking a Mobile First approach.

Turntable Helath Founder Dr Zubin Damania (@ZDoggMD) gave an interesting round up of the experience earlier this year for the AMA that you can watch here:

mHealth Insights

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It’s great to see the shift to a mobile first strategy. I was given a personal tour of the TurnTable Health clinic and while it was incredible to see what the team were trying to create it struck me that they were obviously missing this transformational component because the clinic was being built next door to the Zappos office and was part of an urban regeneration project. In 2019 a Mobile First approach puts Amazon in prime position to disrupt the entire healthcare industry.

Amazon Care is being billed as “Your first stop for healthcare” but I think the listing of  “urgent issues like colds, allergies, infections and minor injuries” is making a common misunderstanding about the mobile consulting opportunity and making the common  presumption that complex issues aren’t suited to remote consulting. This presents lots of challenges because giving people easy and free access to undocumented video chats with random Doctors creates lots of repetitive work but doesn’t save anyone much in the way of time or money. 

I think this is a predictable issue when a service isn’t well designed because if you’re just having undocumented video chats with random Doctors who know nothing about you and your needs before the chat starts you are pretty much limited to ‘general health questions’ (that you could probably just find the answer to by looking online if you’re someone who works in the tech industry). I’m confident that Amazon Care will soon evolve from the 2000 year old office consult model as they clearly extensively use data to enhance the relationships they have with all their customers.

At Doctors2.0 in 2014 I explained the value of enabling Patients to share the product of clinically validated interactive Medical History Taking Questionnaires with Doctors BEFORE they meet (so the Doctor can get a chance to do her research before connecting with their Patient):

I feel that without tools (like Instant Medical History from Primetime Medical Inc) to prepare Doctors and Patients for the Video Consults that this will also buy a lot of beachside properties for lawyers to retire to while the Doctors involved are forced into bankruptcy as Amazon’s lawyers won’t miss a trick in ensuring they are liable for malpractice if they miss something and there is a bad outcome or didn’t practice defensive medicine and refer their patient onto a specialist. Hopefully Amazon is already onto this as the potential for Alexa to be used to gather a clinically validated medical history (via Instant Medical History) would be a step change in medicine that would deserve a Novel Prize for Medicine…

Over-prescribing and excessive referring issues will no doubt abound with the model Amazon Care are showing here and it’s even obvious to the team creating the website eg. they’ve shown on their website how they prescribed antibiotics for acute sinusitis which is a viral illness!

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Privacy and your employer: If this service is enthusiastically adopted by employees it will be a break through that we’ll need to study extensively. We’ve never seen it work before at scale and there are loads of examples of how challenging it can be as employers have a long history of tripping workers up with small print eg. the US telco Sprint (who had 25,000 employees) couldn’t find any employees who would accept a monthly $100 bonus to share their blood glucose monitor readings as part of a study.

Amazon staff are acutely aware of how data is used to derive value for third parties so it’ll be very interesting to see what take up of their “Sexual health services like contraception and sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing” will be like.

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The biggest beneficiary of corporate wellness and preventative health programs is the worker and their family so I’m surprised by the restricted eligibility criteria that Amazon have used here. Surely they have the resources to build and validate a completely new care model so why not offer a basic service for all employees that doesn’t require insurer partners snd their third party healthcare provider companies that are invested in old models. Where we’ve seen  wellness incentive programs developed by insurers it’s all too often that the employees feel forced to partake in what feels like intrusive bureaucracy or face financial additions to their premiums if they refuse to participate which is not a great way to help people feel generous with sharing information especially as most Americans have heard about job applicants being routinely rejected when they apply for a job based on the data from a personality test, credit score, etc. 

I wonder how many Amazon employees are enrolled in an Amazon-sponsored Health Plan that isn’t with Kaiser Permanente and if this additional service is going to be used to entice them across to a different insurer. In the UK major companies have been offering mobile video chat services for years and staff have more often than not been unhappy with how it was implemented so devil is always in the detail eg. at corporations like VISA staff were very annoyed to find that they lost their weekly free cinema ticket perk and had it swapped with a 24×7 mobile video Doctor call service that they didn’t want to use.

It’s interesting that Amazon employees who are enrolled in Kaiser Permanente insurance plans are not eligible. I presume this is because Kaiser Permante were the first major healthcare brand to go Mobile First (back in 2012) and have been offering their own mobile video consulting services to their customers for 6+ years now.

Surely this friction is going to be a huge nightmare for health insurers. Amazon is quickly coming for your business and it has huge troves of data (they even have recording devices in their rivals boardrooms!) that are going to make it a rival that you probably don’t stand a chance competing with unless you’re prepared to disrupt your own business model.

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The lack of 24hr coverage is a great surprise. Maybe its just until the service gets up and running but sinking the cost to have a Doctor on call overnight has got to be more cost effective than having staff hit the insurance for a visit to an urgent care clinic and the time off work that could be completely avoided by the advice of an experienced medic on a video call.

Surely they shouldn’t be cheap skating things at the beginning and should’ve sunk some funds into even an under-utilised night shift working staff until demand materialised as 8-6pm opening hours aren’t going to make healthier, happier and more loyal employees especially when they work for a corporation that is a master of the consumer experience at scale.

Presumably it’s going to make it challenging to genuinely present the service as “Your first stop for healthcare” as all the Patients are all Amazon staff who are more than familiar with Chat Right Now messaging assistants etc that they provide to customers.

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Will this offer cost savings for Amazon or does it actually need to? I get a feeling that Amazon are going to launch this on the public after trialing it on staff as when the Patients aren’t their employees although it’s not great medicine they’ll have a gold mine on their hands. Most people don’t care a jot about small print so if they bundle this with Amazon Prime subscriptions all the extra data they’ll get will make it incredibly profitable.

I still strikes me as a weird decision to start this service in the USA where the massive sickcare business isn’t aligned with the interests of primary and preventative care, drug companies advertise on TV, and the market is dominated by employer sponsored insurance (that bring a whole host of issues arising from the most profitable use of data being it’s use to detect pre-existing conditions and deny coverage). Surely they could’ve had much more success developing this in a market like the UK or Ireland (where employers aren’t made responsible for employee health insurance and employees don’t have to change insurance every time they change employer etc) and instead of trying to fix an upside down healthcare model they could’ve better focused on leveraging their existing businesses and ignored the complexity of the health insurance market completely (eg. selling products through Prime, WholeFoods, rapid deliveries, etc).

Future

With Amazon Care launching Healthcare providers had better put their best people to work trying to disrupt themselves or preparing to get be disrupted. Medical Schools and professional membership bodies for family doctors (like the RCGP) should be gearing up to develop training courses for these emerging new roles that society expects of Doctors. They are welcome to copy ideas from the mHealth for Healthcare Professionals course that I produced for the Healthcare Informatics Society but they need a ground up revision as the type of medicine that Doctors can now practice cannot be done with the Doctor not using a properly provisioned smartphone (in the UK Doctors aren’t even tested on their use of the internet and still fail their membership exam of the RCGP if they have a mobile on their person).

What do you think? Click here to join me for a discussion of this development over in the +8000 member Linkedin mHealth group.

UPDATE: Sat 28th September 2019 

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After sharing this post on Linkedin Dr George Margelis informed me that Amazon are cutting the insurance for many of part time employees at the same time as launching Amazon Care which I presume isn’t going to boost feelings amongst staff that this is something that’s going to be great for them. 

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UPDATE: Monday 7th October 2019 

AWS (Amazon Web Services) will be hosting a “Healthcare & Life Sciences Web Day” on Wednesday 13th November 2019. This completely free virtual event will explore how the transformation of healthcare and life science companies is being fueled by cloud technology and will bring together industry leaders to explore how they expedite therapy development, incorporate digital therapeutics at scale, support population health, and improve patient outcomes.

Register here to receive your login link.

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Presenters include:

Dr Shez Partovi, Director Healthcare, Life Sciences & Genomics, Amazon Web Services
Ryan Hamilton, Sr. Vice President Population Health, Cerner
Marcello Damiani, Chief Digital and Operational Excellence Officer, Moderna Inc.
Venkat Jegadeesan, CTO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Arun Ravi- Sr. Program Manager, AWS
John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer, Boston Children’s Hospital
John Axerio-Cilies PhD, Cofounder and COO, Arterys
John Schneider, CTO, Apixio
Chris McCurdy, Lead Solutions Architect, AWS
Bill Nordmark, CEO, Aver.io
Morris Panner, CEO, Ambra Health
Drew Schiller, CEO, Validic
Patrick Combes, Healthcare Technical Lead, AWS Jim Harper, Cofounder and COO, Sonde Health
Nick Hatt, Director of Developer Relations, Redox
Ali Zaman, VP Marketing, Health Gorilla
Patrick Leonard, Founder and CEO, Sopris
Kevin Weinstein, Chief Growth Officer, Apervita
Russell Granzow, Head of Pharma Solutions, Philips
Mikki Nasch, Co-founder, Evidation Health
Aaron Friedman, Solutions Architect, AWS
Kyle Johnson, Data Science Practice Manager, ML Labs
Sivan Bercovici PhD, CTO, Karius
Nigel Beard PhD, SVP of R&D, Mission Bio
Ainslie Hatch, Digital Therapeutics Director, Otsuka America Pharmaceutical
Joris Van Dam, Head of Digital Therapeutics, Novartis
Corey McCann, CEO, PEAR Therapeutics
Yvonne Chen, Director for Digital Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Nigel Beard PhD, SVP of R&D, Mission Bio

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Review of Mobile Devices and Health by Ida Sim in the NEJM

Posted on September 6, 2019 by

Mobile Devices and Health

Mobile Devices and Health was published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Authored by Ida Sim, M.D., Ph.D who is a Primary Care Physician, Professor at UCSF & coFounder at Open mHealth (follow her on Twitter @IdaSim).

It’s exactly the type of papers we need to see more of so please read it at the NEJM website and share that link with your colleagues and social networks:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1806949

mHealth Insights

“Mobile health — the application of sensors, mobile apps, social media, and location-tracking technology to obtain data pertinent to wellness and disease diagnosis, prevention, and management — makes it theoretically possible to monitor and intervene whenever and wherever acute and chronic medical conditions occur. With 81% of North American adults owning a smartphone,1 this frontier could be reached in the foreseeable future in the United States and is particularly relevant to the management of chronic diseases. More than 40% of U.S. adults have two or more chronic conditions2 and chronic conditions now account for 71% of all U.S. health care spending,3 so the promise of mobile health is especially attractive.”

While I clearly have a conflict of interest (I coined the term mHealth more than a decade ago and define it as ‘the leverage of mobile – the newest mass media – for health’) I think it’s rather obvious that this is not what Mobile Health means and by thinking it does you limit your capacity to understand the scale of opportunity that comes from taking a Mobile First approach to healthcare.

An obvious example of how such limited thinking comprises your ability to see the opportunity is demonstrated by how Dr Sim has presented the concept that mHealth is somehow limited by adoption of smartphones. We all should know by now that the most kind thing a carer can say to a Patient in 2019 with a chronic condition is “Here’s my mobile number” and that obviously doesn’t require anyone to have a smartphone as you can benefit from this if you just both have even the most basic mobile phones.

I realise that not everyone is like me and had a smartphone BEFORE they had a camera phone but it’s well worth medics appreciating that in 2019 even the most basic feature phones are more powerful and smarter than the latest smartphones from just a few years ago.

“Mobile health is at the swirling confluence of remote sensing, consumer-facing personal technologies, and artificial intelligence (AI). Data from smartphone applications (colloquially known as “apps”) and an ever-growing range of wearable and environmental sensors can be processed with the use of machine learning and other AI techniques to support medical decision making. Here, I review the current state of sensing, digital biomarkers, and digital therapeutics (the use of online technologies in the treatment of behavioral and medical conditions); discuss the challenges of integrating mobile health into clinical care; and describe regulatory, business, and ethical issues confronting mobile health. I do not discuss sensors and apps intended solely for use by health care professionals in health care settings. Because mobile health is a nascent technology and rigorous evidence of clinical validity is generally lacking, rather than presenting a review of existing systems, I present an overview for practitioners and policy makers to understand key aspects of this rapidly evolving field (see video)”

We live in a strange time when even popular tech journalists still think “we have no idea if Mobile Healthcare apps work’ but it surprises me that a lot of frontline medics still seem to think that ‘Mobile health is a nascent technology and rigorous evidence of clinical validity is generally lacking” because it’s not like these same medics would want to live their own lives without mobile technology.

I think this is largely because they think mobile health is synonymous with ‘healthcare apps on smartphones’ but also because even the most technical young medics have very little concept that there is anything inherently wrong in the outdated administrivia heavy IT systems they use everyday. Remember: even if no one is paying to publish papers in expensive journals stating this it is a fact that if Patients see you’re uncomfortable using mobile technology they may lose confidence in how current you are with your medical knowledge.

“Of passive sensors, the smartphone is the most ubiquitous. It has a nine-axis inertial motion sensor that tracks motion and position in three-dimensional space. A three-axis accelerometer measures acceleration in the x, y, and z axes; a three-axis gyroscope senses rotation around each axis; and a three-axis magnetometer compensates for magnetic drift to maintain position accuracy. These sensors enable physics-based capabilities, such as detecting the number of steps that a person takes during a day. Most smartphones can also sense geographic position, atmospheric pressure, ambient light, voice, and touchscreen pressure. Creative uses of these sensors and a built-in camera can turn the smartphone into a fall detector,4 spirometer5 (by sensing air pressure on the microphone), or heart-rate sensor.6″

I love made for mobile medical sensors and the smartphone medical is still an ever fascinating opportunity that’s still surprising me every week but it’s important to realise that the mobile has a personal secure browser and that is probably THE best way to collect a medical history from a Patient.

“Active Sensing. Passive sensors collect observable data. Subjectively perceived states of health (e.g., pain and other symptoms) are equally important for informing patient-centered care and, at this time, can be captured only by asking the patient. Until recently, information about such outcomes has been obtained from questionnaires administered at intervals of weeks to months that ask patients to integrate their experiences during some past interval of time (e.g., “in the past 7 days, how often … ?”). The ubiquity of personal devices makes possible an alternative approach called ecologic momentary assessment (EMA) that is well suited to capturing some types of patient-reported outcomes. EMA involves “repeated sampling of subjects’ current behaviors and experiences in real time, in subjects’ natural environments.”18 EMAs are less subject to recall bias than infrequently administered questionnaires and can be administered multiple times a day to capture short-term variations in responses. EMAs range from simple text-message prompts to short one- or two-item app-based questions and have been used to collect information on chronic pain,19 anxiety,20substance-use disorders,21 and many other conditions. Widely used in the social and behavioral sciences, EMA is an emerging method for outcomes assessment in both clinical care and clinical research. Newer image-based EMAs, if designed with cultural sensitivity, offer intriguing opportunities for bridging language, literacy, and numeracy barriers”

To say that mHealth is something that is only just emerging is nonsensical. Back in 2008 at 3GDoctor we started offering the ability for Patients to use their mobiles to provide their own history to Doctors prior to a documented video consult:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4JoJnRbsbI

Eleven years on to describe this as emerging is plain denial of what’s happening in the USA (where Kaiser were the first big healthcare brand to go Mobile First in 2012 and Walgreens were generating $375Million a month in revenue from their smartphone app back in 2014) other parts of the world that don’t have healthcare systems designed around the needs of insurers eg. in the NHS where honest practical GPs are just doing innovative things and sharing news of what they’re doing (instead of paying to have a paper published in a journal).

“Digital Therapeutics and Diagnostics. Simply monitoring patient outcomes remotely generally does not by itself improve clinical outcomes”

I think this isn’t true. Of course it’s possible to anything the wrong way but Mobile devices can now be embedded inside medical devices that Patients are already reliant on and we’ve seen that with popular FDA cleared medical devices like glucometers for years now and having accurate information on the use is invaluable for Clinicians who can work more effectively when they have more informed, timely, useful and honest consultations with their Patients.

“A major challenge of mobile health is the high drop-off rate in sensor and app usage.40 In one survey, more than half of users of activity trackers stopped using their device, and a third did so in the first 6 months.41Strategies to improve engagement include discussion between patient and provider of goals for tracking and clear plans for attaining them. Joint goal-setting followed by joint review of the data appears to motivate continued tracking and therapeutic engagement.42 However, it is not clear, at present, whether enhanced patient–provider communication and shared decision making improves clinical outcomes”

I’m suprised people are still talking about the reluctance of Patients to use sensors and apps given to them by their carers because for the most part Patients still don’t get to even see their medical record and notes.

Also worth noting: this usability issue with trackers was a simple challenge that they managed to deal with in Japan 10+ years ago when the Raku-Raku (simple to use) mobiles used by seniors began featuring activity monitors (doing away with the need to wear separate motion tracking devices) and displaying the user activity as an icon on the idle screen. For more on this please read “Mobile Health Devices: Will Patients actually use them”.

Integration with Clinical Care. At the front lines of care, two challenges dominate the implementation of mobile health. The first is the vast quantity of data. Ancillary staff can help review and triage data, and visualization tools can mitigate the cognitive burden of interpreting the data. However, the most effective response is to develop and show to clinicians only those digital biomarkers that inform clinical action or clinical understanding (e.g., temporal and severity profiles of patient symptoms). Simultaneously, these biomarkers must be of sufficient direct value to patients to justify their participation in the data-collection effort. None of this is easy. Greater investment in the science of digital biomarkers is needed to evaluate the value of mobile health data for clinical use.

Let’s just start by letting Patients use the tools of our time to share their information with their Doctors, and let Doctors use these tools to move beyond the 2000 year old office visit only model of care.

“Integration of Sensor, Smartphone, and Electronic Health Record (EHR) Data for Patients and Clinicians. The second (and related) challenge is how the inclusion and presentation of data will fit into an already complicated and overstretched workflow. Clinicians cannot be expected to log in to separate websites for every sensor or app their patients are using. That said, integration with the electronic health record (EHR) is currently extremely challenging and costly. A recent development may offer hope: the federal government’s “meaningful use” requirements for EHR certification are calling for greater interoperability through an emerging data-exchange standard called Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). FHIR allows external third-party apps to integrate into the EHR workflow. For example, Apple enables data to flow from FHIR-enabled EHRs to the Apple Health app on iPhones and from there to other apps in the Apple ecosystem (). With this new ability to combine EHR and mobile health data, iOS mobile health apps may become more useful and effective. Absent an Android equivalent for EHR access, Android apps may over time become systematically less effective than iOS apps, which raises deep ethical concerns, as discussed below. A recently started open-source project called CommonHealth (https://commonhealth.org) aims to mitigate this concern by bringing EHR data integration to Android smartphones”

I notice Apple gets a lot of criticism for this but the reality needs to be appreciated by medics that Android smartphones really aren’t technically equivalent to Apple iPhones.

Apple is structured in a way that it owns the whole ecosystem and so can reassure the regulators, hospitals, insurers, Medics (who are putting their careers on the line entrusting these devices) and Patients (who are entrusting Apple with keeping their information private/secure) that the customer is using a specific device with the latest up to date software. In sharp contrast even brand new Android devices vary considerably in terms of their performance, specs, operating system, etc. On top of that they can install apps from a variety of app stores, have native software on them placed there by the mobile operators and manufacturers and Google. This makes it much more challenging environment in which to innovate and assure partners to have trust because there are many ways that data can be compromised if you don’t have a means of trusting the devices in Patients/Clinicians hands.

“FHIR also supports integrating the output of third-party digital health tools directly into the EHR workflow without requiring that the output be written into the database of the EHR, since such a requirement would trigger often prohibitive legal and security concerns. With this SMART-on-FHIR integration approach (SMART stands for Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies), a clinician who is signed into the patient’s record can view that patient’s third-party app or sensor data in an embedded window without the need for a separate log-in. This approach opens up the workflow and “screen real estate” of the EHR to essentially unlimited innovation. However, SMART-on-FHIR integration is currently very limited”

Sometimes while these innovations seem great and easy to work, the reality is they often fail because they’re an attempt to run before you can walk.

We must be mindful that Doctors have a responsibility to stay current with technology. The Royal College of General Practitioners is a world leader in championing tech and yet in 2019 a Doctor is still failed for bringing a mobile into an exam room for the entrance exams despite the fact that many of the consultations they provide wouldn’t need to happen if they just used the tools of our time and they’ll probably not ever consult with a Patient who hasn’t already used their mobile to research their symptoms, diagnosis and medications.

“Health care organizations that wish to implement mobile health cannot overlook the logistics and legal implications of providing patients with sensors and apps. Additional staffing must be considered for assisting patients with technology setup, providing technical support, and responding to patients’ questions and concerns. For example, the Ochsner Health System has assigned dedicated staff to act as “geniuses” in their O Bar, a retail-like space modeled after Apple’s Genius Bar that carries Ochsner-approved apps and devices that patients can “test drive.” As patients independently bring mobile health data to clinicians (e.g., Apple Watch and Fitbit data) and as digital health vendors try to sell to health care organizations, health care leaders will need to grapple with how best to support mobile health and the use of patient-generated health data.“

I think that you’re taking the wrong approach in wanting to be implementing mHealth innovations that require ‘Additional staffing’ needs. Instead of always trying to expand the healthcare workforce we should be trying to use technology to better utilise the teams we already have. Around the world healthcare professionals waste their lives doing arduous administrivia and we have the opportunity with mHealth to consign this to the history bin. Let’s seize that opportunity not try and build genius bars so that we can do even more complex things that we’ve no experience of ever having actually done before.

“Other Challenges: Validation and Regulation. Higher-risk mobile health technologies are considered medical devices under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The FDA regulates medical devices under processes that were designed for medical-grade hardware devices, such as hip implants, with known physical properties that change little after market release. Mobile health technologies, in contrast, often combine hardware (e.g., a glucometer) with software (e.g., algorithms for the management of type 1 diabetes) and can be extremely dynamic, with frequent hardware and software updates. A different regulatory approach is needed. The FDA proposes to regulate these technologies (now termed “software as a medical device”) through a new Digital Health Software Precertification Program.”

I think this paragraph makes a statement that is factually inaccurate. Everyone and their dog knows that the FDA does a terrible job of regulating medical devices and we’ve seen that with countless examples eg. the collossal failure of their regulation of the hip implants from JnJ DePuy.

It is more than ambitious to think they will be able to effectively manage the enormous complexity of the mHealth app market without killing innovation through their bureaucracy and overreach (but I’ve written more than enough about that back in 2012!).

“This “Pre-Cert” program, currently under pilot, proposes to precertify companies that demonstrate a “culture of quality and organizational excellence” for streamlined review of their applications. Products of precertified companies do not have to be associated with improved clinical outcomes before market release but will instead be subject to postmarketing performance monitoring to support the claims of safety and effectiveness by the company.

Many details of the program remain to be determined, including how companies can gain or lose precertification status, how different levels of risk of harm will be determined and handled, and how real-world performance will be assessed through postmarketing monitoring and with what consequences. Trust in mobile health technologies and the extent of their adoption will depend on how these and other details are resolved. Thus, the stakes for success of the Pre-Cert program are very high. The desire to support innovation must be balanced against grave concerns about insufficient or delayed oversight”

How is the pre-cert program any different from a situation in which the FDA gets paid by mHealth innovators to learn how to do its job and introduce more regulation and administration?

Surely Dr Sim is aware of the mess the FDA have made with it’s efforts to regulate the ‘e-cigerette/vaping’ market?

“In addition to these technologies, the accuracy of digital biomarkers also requires validation. For example, commercial sensors are relatively consistent with each other on step count but not on sleep duration or sleep cycles or duration of physical activity. Because most commercial devices restrict access to their raw data and algorithms, independent verification and validation of the majority of current digital biomarkers is not possible. Greater transparency and accountability, the setting of metadata standards (standards on how to describe data, such as their provenance), and external validation will facilitate evaluation of digital biomarkers proposed for use in clinical care. This can be achieved by making available reference data sets and through publication of tests of validation. An illustrative example is Sage BioNetwork’s Parkinson’s Disease Digital Biomarker DREAM Challenge that made available data from studies of digital biomarkers of tremor and dyskinesia.“

These are all desirable things but isn’t it obvious that this is where innovative startups are being motivated to innovate and build their value? For example innovators like SleepTracker help coach you to better sleep without the need for medications for a price that is insignificant compared to sleeping medications – all without side effects. But they wouldn’t be interested in this market if it wasn’t financially viable because regulations made them have to help everyone understand and potentially make a copy of the tech that they use to enable you to do that for yourself. 

“Clinicians, patients, and payers would benefit from digital health formularies that list sensors and apps that are vetted for clinical use, much like medication formularies for drugs. The latest of several attempts to launch such a digital health formulary is by Express Scripts. Other efforts include the establishment of principles and guidelines for app development and rigorous evaluation, but best practices for screening, integrating, and appraising apps remain to be established.”

Amazing that after calling for a need for more “independent verification and validation… Greater transparency and accountability” it’s seen to be a good thing for the USA’s largest pharmacy benefit management organisation (with 26000 employees and revenues of +$100B that is itself a subsidy of the health insurer Cigna) to provide the resource for Doctors to work with Patients that could be all about better control of and more appropriate clinical use of the medications that drive profits in the parent companies. 

While I think it’s obvious that everyone would like the lucrative gate keeper role when it comes to mHealth app quality the reality is it’s a very challenging area and vested interests often detract from a corporations ability to do a good job eg. remember how the American Medical Association CEO called out mHealth as Snake Oil and told us they were going to be the arbitrator of what’s good and what’s not?

“Market Growth and Clinical Value: Despite the regulatory flux, the digital health sector saw a record $8.1 billion in investments in 2018. A recent change in the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule that allows physician billing for time spent managing and interpreting data from remote monitoring (e.g., electrocardiographic, blood-pressure, and glucose monitoring) for management of chronic conditions provides an incentive for the use of mobile health data in the clinic. However, no standard models exist for who should pay for mobile health technology that is recommended or prescribed to patients. In clinical research, decentralized clinical trials (see Glossary) are using digital biomarkers as end points and replacing in-person study procedures with virtual and mobile procedures. ResearchKit by Apple and ResearchStack by Android — mobile research platforms that facilitate large-scale virtual recruitment and outcomes assessment — are expanding the reach of clinical studies, analogous to the effect of mobile health on clinical care”

I think it’s important to put VC investments into perspective. In the USA alone $350 Billion was spent on prescription drugs in 2018 and the federal government spent nearly $1.1 trillion. Surely it’s obvious that when the financial incentives are this stark in comparison you shouldn’t be optimistic that the US sick care system wants to drive the adoption of mHealth.

“Mechanisms of Mobile Health and Potential Benefits and Harms. Underlying these market developments is a persistent question: to what end is mobile health? Tracking and reporting data are means to an end, not the end itself. Achieving clinical value, the ultimate goal, may occur through the use of mobile health data as cognitive aids to patients and clinicians (helping people understand or think through an issue), decision aids to patients and clinicians (helping people decide on an action), or motivational aids for patient engagement and activation (). More collaboration is needed among clinicians, patients, and technologists to drive the development of clinically useful mobile health technology and to imagine clinically useful applications of novel sensors, while remaining cognizant of potential harms”
I don’t agree that the ‘ultimate goal’ of mHealth should be to achieve “clinical value”. Yes that’s desirable for the healthcare industry but societally we should be looking for much more. Mobiles are already having a huge impact on the psychology of young people. Most are learning about sex and developing their personal lives through watching ‘porn’ (AKA videos of sexual abuse) and becoming addicted to mobile content and struggling to concentrate, mature or develop with their lives. Instead of looking for clinical value maybe the much bigger opportunity is for mHealth to help these young people and their families to avoid the need for clinical intervention altogether. With Dr Sim’s focus I fear we’re just going to be  trying to fight fires with (eg. manage the obesity, anxieties, narcissism, sexual abuse, depression, stress, disease, etc, etc) rather than prevent them happening.
“Clinical researchers need to develop new evaluation approaches because years-long studies are poorly suited to the pace of change of mobile health technology. Finally, clearer demonstrations of the clinical and business value of mobile health will come when factors far beyond technology itself, such as integration into clinical workflow, payment model, and validation methods, are addressed in tandem with sensor and software development”

Somewhat unusual for me I know but I agree with these great points!

“Ethics. The tremendous promise of mobile health for transforming clinical care and research is tempered by deep concerns about the effect of these technologies on equity, privacy, and patient autonomy. Although there is essentially no digital divide according to race in the United States, Internet and smartphone adoption is lower in lower-income, disabled, elderly, and rural populations. Moreover, Android users, who account for more than half of U.S. smartphone users, have lower average income than iOS users. If iOS mobile health apps are systematically more effective than Android apps at improving health outcomes (e.g., owing to differential access to EHR data, as discussed above), health disparities will worsen. As health institutions increasingly develop a mobile presence with branded apps and other initiatives regarding digital patient experience (see Glossary), they must be careful not to increase health disparities — for example, by offering unequal services to iOS users and Android users”.

I think this is very controversial and it ignores the fact that Android devices are CHEAPER for a reason and that reason is that the software on these devices and the Google Play app store is made for device makers (like Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc, etc) so that Google/Alphabet (Android’s parent company) can essentially collect more data on customers and subsequently sell more effective means for advertisers to reach them. To think that you’re going to reduce health disparities by sharing more information with a company that makes its money from  advertising is overly optimistic and somewhat naive.

Android is a product of Googles. For all the positives and negatives it is the same company that makes billions from serving unhealthy junk food ads to customers. It’s the same company that is selling ads from the highest bidder next to the results when Patients search for healthcare information or get a gmail message from their Doctor etc.

Google has been very effective at ensuring you don’t read bad news about it’s brand as they have a great legal team so if you’re a normal medic and have no idea about this read here about how they are collecting NHS Hospital Records without consent or go further back to their founding story and you’ll realise they were [practically seed funded by illegal drug ads.

In my opinion health institutions should not preoccupy themselves with how unequal the iOS and Android platforms are. Google should be taking on the responsibility of investing in this space just like Apple have been with Apple Health, HealthKit, ResearchKit, etc, etc and hospitals should opt for the best platform for them and their Patients (as clearly the cost differential between an iPhone and Android Smartphone is an insignificantly inexpensive cost compared to the cost of healthcare services

“There is an even more profound digital divide. Use of mobile health and Internet of Things technologies requires digital literacy skills. Patients are essentially being asked to install and maintain their own medical devices and to be adept at managing their own data deluge, a tall order when the majority of U.S. adults are in the lowest three of six proficiency levels for literacy and numeracy and more than 60% are in the lowest two of four proficiency levels for problem solving in technology-rich environments (defined as “using digital technology, communication tools, and networks to acquire and evaluate information, communicate with others, and perform practical tasks”). This gap is further compounded by the paucity of mobile health technologies in languages other than English.”

I see a lot of insurance companies taking advantage of this and craftily pushing apps in their marketing messages to help them resonate with younger smartphone users who would have more profitable insurance needs but I think it’s important to realise what mobile SMS has done for literacy rates and that mobile services in public systems (like the NHS etc) are helping save resources when they aren’t needed because Patients can look up their own healthcare information, results, watch videos, organise and collect their own prescriptions, etc.

If you need a really obvious example think about the benefits of SMS appointment reminders (from 2011).

“Actions for Stakeholders in Mobile Health. With respect to privacy and autonomy, the potential threats are particularly worrisome. Mobile health technologies will increasingly connect to the Internet of Things, in which, like a “one-way mirror,” our virtual bodies and behavior will be visible on a grand scale for purposes to which we have not directly consented. When personal health and nonhealth data comingle in the cloud, companies and governments may access physiological biomarkers to monitor employee stress in the workplace, or marketers may offer us only certain products at differential prices based on our health history. Coupled with algorithms that are not in the public domain, these approaches could deliberately or inadvertently reinforce and entrench existing biases against disadvantaged groups, and incautious deployment of mobile health technology could potentially result in loss of privacy and autonomy amounting to net harm to patients. lists actions that patients, practitioners, researchers, and policymakers can take to guide the evolution of mobile health”

To be fair I think these potential risks are already materialised. Google already has your full search/viewing history and if you gave that information to a good psychiatrist they could probably tell more about you than you know about yourself and that’s before you go into the myriad of incredibly sensitive personal data that’s being collected just through normal use of a smartphone (think eye scans, fingerprints being used to unlock/lock a phone, etc, etc.)

“Conclusions. Mobile health technologies are evolving from descriptive monitoring tools to digital diagnostics and therapeutics that synergize tracking with behavioral and other interventions to directly affect health outcomes. Major challenges include the discovery and validation of meaningful digital biomarkers, regulation of and payment for mobile health technologies, and their integration into frontline care. Clearer articulations are needed of how mobile health technology can concretely affect clinical outcomes, along with more rigorous evaluations of clinical effectiveness”

Interesting ideas but I prefer the idea of mHealth being used to create a new frontline of care rather than just trying to integrate it into today’s frontline of care.

“Networked mobile health technologies have the potential to harm. Concerns about digital surveillance are not unique to mobile health, but health-related risks can be reduced through improved digital literacy among patients, ethical codes of conduct for developers and regulators of mobile health, and transparency and accountability in how health care organizations adopt mobile health technology. The transformative potential of mobile health compels clinicians to take an active role in ensuring that this new frontier will be safe, fair, and just for all patients”

Another very important message in this excellent paper.

 

*** Update 8 September 2019 ***

Please click here to join a discussion of this NEJM paper over in the Linkedin mHealth group:

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European Parliament approves #Article11 & #Article13

Posted on March 26, 2019 by

Kim Jong Un

The European Parliament has approved copyright legislation including Article 11 (a “link tax,” that requires web platform to obtain a license to link to or use snippets of news articles) and Article 13 (that will require a web platform to make their “best efforts” to obtain licenses to copyrighted material before uploading it to their platforms which is a change to the current standard practice whereby platforms would simply comply with copyright takedown requests).
This is the end of the open internet in the EU and it will do great harm to innovative thinkers and all the startups and internet companies based in the European Union. Medics and Patients will suffer because it will make it harder for them to make and share content. 
Please write to your parliamentary representative and ask them to fight this. 
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The predictable outcome when you try and add video consulting to the broken hospital centric healthcare model…

Posted on March 10, 2019 by

Screen Shot 2019-03-10 at 09.58.08

Man told he’s going to die by doctor on video-link robot

mHealth Insights

This is a terrible news story for those keen to see the modernisation of how healthcare is  delivered particularly as Kaiser was the world’s first major Healthcare brand to go Mobile First (back in 2012).

It is obvious that the big opportunity for Patients and Carers is in enabling them to connect with their family Doctors for the complex day to day  management of their health needs but this is ignores the fact that most money (and profits) lie in the Hospital side of the US healthcare industry so naturally this is where the sick care industry will invest in video tech because it will return the most revenue for the investment by enabling organisations like Kaiser to introduce services that are more profitable (or ‘cost saving’ in light of them being a not for profit organisation).

I suppose it’s a bit like the saying “when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail” but when applied to healthcare organisations “when you make all your money when Patients are in hospital beds any crackpot idea is a good one as long as they stay in the bed”.  The are loads of examples of these daft tech concepts in broken healthcare systems eg. Boston Children’s hospital was sending Patients home with 2 wheeled robots, the EU was wasting money on R&D into homecare future scenarios that ignored the fact that everyone already has a mobile, the NHS paid to have an app built so that bereaved children could compose music, etc.

 

Check out this post for some good tips on online consulting.

You might also find the talk I gave.at Doctors 2.0 in 2014 on video consulting best practice interesting:

 

 

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mHealth guide to Mobile World Congress 2019

Posted on February 21, 2019 by

Last year mHealth fell off the radar for the GSMA and there was no mHealth content at the world’s biggest mobile industry conference and exhibition (held annually in Barcelona – https://mhealthinsight.com/2017/01/31/mhealth-guide-to-the-2017-mobile-world-congress/

https://www.mwcbarcelona.com/conference-programmes/agenda/#day=7808&keyword=health

 

 

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GLOMO Awards: Fourth Industrial Revolution Live Presentation

Glomos

Date & Time

Monday, 25 Feb

10:00 – 10:30

Description

Fourth Industrial Revolution a. Best Mobile Innovation for Enterprise b. Best Mobile Innovation for Health and BioTech c. Best Mobile Innovation for Education

Wellness Life with Taiwan Smart Tech SolutionsTaiwan Excellence

Partner Programmes
The Future
Taiwan Excellence

Apply

Date & Time

Monday, 25 Feb

11:00 – 12:30

Location

Hall 8.0 – NEXTech Theatre E

Description

Doors Open: 10:30

Taiwan Excellence is presenting Taiwan’s best tech brands in addressing the growing demand for rising medical issues. You will find the newest tech solutions, including 5G, AIoT technique, VR, AI healthcare solutions and intelligent indoor positioning system. All products have been awarded with Taiwan Excellence Award, the highest recognition for Taiwan’s best innovative products.

Open to all attendees. Pre-approved attendees will have priority. All others will be seated on a first come first served basis. Click here to indicate your interest in attending or click the “APPLY” button above.

Speaker

Mark Basham

Mark Basham

Edgecore Networks

Vice President Business Development and Marketing, EMEA

Lewis Chang

Lewis Chang

HTC DeepQ

Manager

Rosa Liu

Rosa Liu

IEI Integration Corp.

Senior Account Mananger

Ian Chen

Ian Chen

STARWING Technology Co.

CEO

Striking a Balance in the Age of Digital Distraction

Conference
Digital Wellness

Date & Time

Monday, 25 Feb

16:00 – 16:45

Location

Hall 4 – Auditorium 3

Description

Digital Wellness is a relatively new concept that examines our relationship with the online world and its effect on our physical and mental wellbeing. A world where devices and connectivity are almost ubiquitous allows us access to a host of services and information at a level that was previously imaginable. But it also has significant implications for our mental and physical health. Apps are designed to grab and keep our attention, causing us to check our phones up to 200 times per day (TechMark) and a recent survey found that 46% of us “could not live without our smartphones.” (Pew Research Center) Children and teenagers are even more susceptible to device addiction, as well as the potentially harmful impacts of social media. This begs the question, where does the responsibility for our increased usage lie? Some device manufacturers and social media platforms have recently taken steps to curb our usage, introducing features like screen-time monitoring and the introduction of “holiday mode.” But does this go far enough and are they really addressing the issue? Have we lost sight of connecting with people in a meaningful way? How can we strike a balance in our ever-on, digital world?

Speaker

Timur Bekmambetov

Timur Bekmambetov

Bazelevs Group

Film Director, Producer, Founder

Dr Anastasia Dedyukhina

Dr Anastasia Dedyukhina

Consciously Digital

Author & Founder

Maggie Stanphill

Maggie Stanphill

Google

UX Director

Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones

Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones

NHS

Founder & Director, National Problem Gambling Clinic

Dr Autumn Krauss

Dr Autumn Krauss

SAP

Principal Scientist

 

 

Digital Health and Wellness Summit

4YFN

Date & Time

Tuesday, 26 Feb

10:00 – 18:00

Location

Fira Montjuïc Hall 8 – Summit Stage

 

Cashing in on Industrial Data: Data Exchanges, Brokering and Analytics

Conference
Industry 4.0

Date & Time

Tuesday, 26 Feb

15:30 – 16:30

Location

Hall 4 – Auditorium 3

Description

Having information for your own use is good, but being able to derive value from sharing data beyond the company, as well as the as-yet unexplored opportunities for data monetization, is even better. The outcomes of data sharing in the healthcare sector offer an impressive early example of how revolutionary this can be and there are exciting initiatives under way to help industries generally to follow suit. There are huge hurdles to overcome in governance, security, and commercial models but these are being addressed quickly. In this discussion we hear from the global pioneers who are changing the conversation about the value of industrial data.

Moderator

Matt Hatton

Matt Hatton

Independent

Investor & Entrepreneur

ACCIO-IWC Innovation World Cup Pitch & Award Ceremony 2019 BARCELONA

4YFN

Date & Time

Tuesday, 26 Feb

18:00 – 19:00

Location

Fira Montjuïc Hall 8 – Agora Stage

Description

The top IoT Catalan game changers and the top IoT finalists of the 10th IOT/WT Innovation World Cup®, the world-leading competition in the areas of IoT and wearable technologies, are ready to rock the stage at 4YFN. They are coming from New Zealand, United States, Germany, Spain and beyond to demonstrate how their solutions are revolutionizing the Healthcare, Industrial, City, Agriculture and Transport Industries. Who will win the jury prize? Join us and meet the IoT innovators the world will talk about.

Speaker

Christian Stammel

Christian Stammel

Innovation World Cup® Series

Founder & CEO

Privacy in the Era of Intelligent Machines: Designing AI solutions that protect people’s privacy and dataPrivacy

GSMA Seminars

Date & Time

Wednesday, 27 Feb

09:00 – 10:30

Location

South Entrance CC 1.5

Description

Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to revolutionise our daily lives: from AI-powered virtual assistants that help us to navigate the internet, to AI-powered machines that serve our consumer, health or other needs. AI will also drive more efficient industrial processes, delivering smarter networks and better products and services at reduced costs. Organisations seeking to harness the power of AI must first consider the ethical implications of this new capability. In particular, the ability of algorithms to learn at a speed which far surpasses human capacity could have detrimental consequences for our privacy, for example by re-identifying individuals from previously anonymous datasets or by developing ever more accurate profiles of our preferences and behaviours. Conversely, AI could be leveraged to enhance our privacy by providing organisations with the means to understand potential risks of harm to individuals or by helping individuals to assert their own preferences and permissions on their digital interactions with people and businesses. So how can organisations get the best out of AI without introducing new privacy risks? This session will bring together mobile industry leaders, innovators, researchers and policymakers to share experiences and discuss best practice for designing privacy into AI-powered solutions. Places are limited and allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Register here before 9:00 on Tuesday 26 February to gain priority access to this session. Priority lane access closes 10 minutes before the scheduled start time.

Speaker

Nathalie Laneret

Nathalie Laneret

Centre for Information Policy Leadership

Director of Privacy Policy

Boris Wojtan

Boris Wojtan

GSMA

Director of Privacy

Beth Smith

Beth Smith

IBM

GM Watson AI Data

Simon McDougall

Simon McDougall

Information Commissioner’s Office (UK)

Executive Director – Technology Policy and Innovation

Aimee van Wynsberghe

Aimee van Wynsberghe

Responsible Robotics & TU Delft

Co-Founder & Assistant Professor of Ethics and Robots

Elena Gil Lizasoain

Elena Gil Lizasoain

Telefónica

CEO, LUCA, Data Unit

Nicholai Pfeiffer

Nicholai Pfeiffer

Telenor

Group Privacy Officer

 

Technology shaping our future

Ministerial Programme (invite only)

Date & Time

Wednesday, 27 Feb

10:00 – 11:00

Location

Hall 4 – Auditorium A

Description

In the last five years alone, $1.2 trillion has been invested into tech start-ups and emerging companies in sectors undergoing significant digital disruption, such as banking, energy, utilities and healthcare. The digital transformation has seen new partnerships evolve between mobile operators and start-ups, but what role should government play in supporting this? This highly engaging session will demonstrate the very latest innovation in technology that is delivering the greatest societal impact, and show why there is much to be excited for the future.

Speaker

Gibran Huzaifah

Gibran Huzaifah

eFishery

Founder & CEO

Max Cuvellier

Max Cuvellier

GSMA

Head of M4D Utilities & Ecosystem Accelerator

Lilian Makoi

Lilian Makoi

Jamii Africa

Founder

Zac Cheah

Zac Cheah

Pundi X

CEO & Co-Founder

 

 

 

 

Transformation of public services

Ministerial Programme (invite only)

Date & Time

Wednesday, 27 Feb

11:30 – 13:00

Location

Hall 4 – Auditorium A

Description

In today’s society, there is a growing demand for public services to be accessible irrespective of time and place. Citizens around the world now consume a range of mobile-enabled financial, educational, health and utilities services, and pressure is growing for governments to further embrace technologies that innovate services and generate benefits for society at a lower cost. This session will explore the opportunities for public organisations to use technology, big data and blockchain to fundamentally reimagine and transform the engagement models of government services.

Keynote

Aurélie Adam Soule Zoumarou

Aurélie Adam Soule Zoumarou

Benin

Minister of Digital Economy and Communication

Dr Aisha Bint Butti Bin Bishr

Dr Aisha Bint Butti Bin Bishr

Smart Dubai Office

Director General

Speaker

Grégoire Landel

Grégoire Landel

CityTaps

CEO

Sharoda Rapeti

Sharoda Rapeti

Delta Partners

Non-Executive Partner

Eunice Gnay Namirembe

Eunice Gnay Namirembe

Kampala Capital City Authority

Manager, Sanitation Innovations

Héctor María Huici

Héctor María Huici

Republic of Argentina

Secretary of Information and Communication Technologies, Government Secretary of Modernization

Mikhail Mamonov

Mikhail Mamonov

Russian Federation

Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media

Dr Sara Saeed Khurram

Dr Sara Saeed Khurram

Sehat Kahani

Founder

Samba Sow

Samba Sow

SudPay

Co-Founder & CEO

 

Unlocking the Value of Data in Healthcare

Conference
Digital Wellness

Date & Time

Wednesday, 27 Feb

13:30 – 14:30

Location

Hall 4 – Auditorium 4

Description

Wearables manufacturers, tech companies and healthcare providers all have the ability to collect and analyse more personal data than ever before – this can be an incredibly powerful tool, bringing with it new opportunities through the use of advanced analytics and insights, but also creating a need for digital governance. Medical data sharing, or the lack of it, has been described as “one of the most broken things about health care” but tech companies could hold the power to fix this, through the development of open standards. As more technology is used personal data security becomes one of the biggest challenges – who owns our data and is it safe?

Moderator

Ronan Wisdom

Ronan Wisdom

Accenture

MD, Global Lead, Connected Health, Digital

Speaker

Dr Roberto Tapia-Conyer

Dr Roberto Tapia-Conyer

Carlos Slim Foundation

CEO

Harrison Lung

Harrison Lung

McKinsey & Company

Partner

Elena Gil Lizasoain

Elena Gil Lizasoain

Telefónica

CEO, LUCA, Data Unit

Sajid Rahman

Sajid Rahman

Telenor

CEO, Health

Nicolas Jaccard

Nicolas Jaccard

Visulytix

CTO

 

Partnering for Impact: Health-Tech Innovation Showcase

Conference
Digital Wellness

Date & Time

Wednesday, 27 Feb

14:45 – 15:45

Location

Hall 4 – Auditorium 4

Description

Intelligent connectivity and mobile technology are key enablers for accessing a range of life-enhancing services such as mobile health – 1 billion subscribers used mobile to access health services in 2017 alone. Mobile phones are being used to provide a range of essential healthcare services ranging from humanitarian assistance during epidemics and natural disasters to providing effective and affordable solutions to addressing healthcare needs in developing markets. There are a number of start-ups and partnerships with operators, that point to scalable, sustainable and commercially viable use cases for digital health and wellbeing. This session will showcase some of the projects that are bettering people’s lives and working towards achieving the UN’s sustainable development goals, including universal access to good health.

Moderator

Pamela Spence

Pamela Spence

EY

Health Sciences & Wellness Industry Markets Leader

Speaker

Grégoire Landel

Grégoire Landel

CityTaps

CEO

Alain Nteff

Alain Nteff

Gifted Mom

Co-Founder & CEO

Matthew Turner

Matthew Turner

Goshawk Communications Ltd

CEO & Founder

Ilana Cohen

Ilana Cohen

GSMA

Senior Market Engagement Director

Lilian Makoi

Lilian Makoi

Jamii Africa

Founder

Dr Vèna Arielle Ahouansou

Dr Vèna Arielle Ahouansou

Kea Medicals

Founder & CEO

Raja Rajamannar

Raja Rajamannar

Mastercard

Chief Marketing & Communications Officer & President, Healthcare

Victoria Hernandez

Victoria Hernandez

Rising Tide

Head of Investment Committee

Dr Iffat Zafar

Dr Iffat Zafar

Sehat Kahani

Co-Founder & CDO

The Human Healthcare Predictions Panel

4YFN

Date & Time

Wednesday, 27 Feb

16:00 – 16:30

Location

Fira Montjuic Hall 8 – Banco Sabadell Stage

Moderator

Ronan Wisdom

Ronan Wisdom

Accenture

MD, Global Lead, Connected Health, Digital

Speaker

Kim-Fredrik Schneider

Kim-Fredrik Schneider

Abi

CEO

Zak Sherlock

Zak Sherlock

GoSHAWK

CTO

Anna Sort

Anna Sort

PlayBenefit

CEO & Founder

 

Fundraising and M&A for Tech Startups. Key Trends in Europe and Top Tips & Errors to Avoid for a Successful Outcome

4YFN

Date & Time

Wednesday, 27 Feb

16:00 – 16:45

Location

Fira Montjuïc Hall 8 – Mint Studio

Description

This workshop will deal with key trends in fund raising and M&A for tech startups in Europe and with top tips for a successful outcome + errors to avoid. Specifically will talk about: -Key valuation trends -Most active sectors within technology -How to prepare for a fund raising or M&A process -How to execute a successful transaction without losing your health -What are the key errors to avoid

Moderator

Oriol Juncosa

Oriol Juncosa

Encomenda Smart Capital

Managing Partner and co-founder

Speaker

Unai Franco

Unai Franco

White Peak Partners

Managing Partner and Co-Founder

 

Immersive Healthcare: A Virtual Revolution?

Conference
Digital Wellness

Date & Time

Wednesday, 27 Feb

16:00 – 17:00

Location

Hall 4 – Auditorium 4

Description

The rising cost of care, a lack doctors and other skilled workers and increases in aging populations are making traditional healthcare models increasingly unsustainable. Immersive and virtual services have the potential to deliver specialised care to those most in need and also offer access to those in rural areas. Accenture estimates an economic value of approximately $10 billion annually to the U.S. health system alone through the use of virtual healthcare tools. There are a host of companies utilising the latest technologies and tools such as avatar therapy for mental health conditions, and utilising VR to support those with anxiety and PTSD. The widespread introduction of 5G will surely serve to increase the spread of immersive and virtual healthcare services.

Moderator

Pamela Spence

Pamela Spence

EY

Health Sciences & Wellness Industry Markets Leader

 

Fake Devices: Countering a Hidden and Growing ThreatAfilias

Power Hour 60
Digital Trust
Afilias

Apply

Date & Time

Thursday, 28 Feb

11:30 – 12:30

Location

Hall 8.0 – NEXTech Theatre E

Description

With an estimated annual cost of €45.3 billion in revenues, counterfeit and non-standard devices pose a real threat to business, consumers, and regulators. Risks to brand reputation, network quality of service, data security, and health and safety have yet to be quantified. Find out how this growing threat can be measured and managed.Open to all attendees. Pre-approved attendees will have priority. All others will be seated on a first come first served basis. Click here to indicate your interest in attending or click the “APPLY” button above.

Speaker

John Leonard

John Leonard

Afilias

Director of Product Strategy

Ronan Cremin

Ronan Cremin

Afilias

Chief Technology Officer

 

Battle of the Health Apps

Conference
Digital Wellness

Date & Time

Thursday, 28 Feb

12:30 – 13:30

Location

Hall 4 – Auditorium 5

Description

There has been an explosion in health and wellness apps, as well as investment into the digital health space. Global digital health VC funding reached a record $8 Billion in the first nine months of 2018 (Mercom Capital) and in the first quarter of 2018, the top 10 grossing self-care apps in the U.S. earned $27 million in combined iOS and Android revenue worldwide (Sensor Tower). A large chunk of this market has been cornered by mindfulness and meditation apps – but there is certainly potential for other newcomers to get in on the action. With such a plethora of health apps available, this demo session will provide a stage for some of the most exciting and potentially disruptive apps to battle it out and pitch their concept to our panel of judges and get live feedback. This is one not to be missed!

Moderator

Michael Stothard

Sifted.eu

Editor

Speaker

Kim-Fredrik Schneider

Abi

CEO

Michael Townsend Williams

BreatheSync

Founder

Pernilla Jonsson

Ericsson

Head of Consumer Labs

Laureen R. Cook

Extelcon

Executive TMT Advisor

Heshan Fernando

Odoc

CEO & Co-Founder

Anna Sort

PlayBenefit

CEO & Founder

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

mHealth Guide to HIMSS19

Posted on February 7, 2019 by

Screen Shot 2019-02-07 at 06.29.47

Next week (11-15 February 2019) in Orlando (USA) 45,000 delegates will attend the world’s biggest Healthcare IT Conference and Exhibition and we’ll be there for meetings and to learn about and share mHealth innovations with readers of the mHealth Insight blog.

With more than 300 education sessions spanning 24 topics at the various summits, forums, symposia and workshops. More than 500 exhibit floor sessions and the world’s best entrepreneurial talent staffing more than 1,300 exhibitor stands and representatives from over 100 countries attending it’ll be hard to keep up so if you know of anything we should try to check out please tip us off and if you would like to meet up with either myself (David Doherty, cofounder of 3GDoctor) or San Diego based colleague Dr Chris Bickford MD for a video interview please complete the following form with info about your mHealth Innovation and contact details we’ll add it to this guide and try and meet up with you to video an interview:

mHealth focused talks and panels in the Conference:

Monday 11 February 2019

Time: 11:55am – 12:30pm. Location: Rosen Centre Grand Ballroom D.
Re-engineering Check-in to Improve the Patient Experience
Market forces are converging from multiple directions, demanding greater operational efficiencies and better patient experiences in today’s physician practices.
In 2018, executives at Jewett Orthopaedic Clinic, an internationally-recognized orthopaedic leader in Central Florida, determined a forward-looking patient experience strategy starts with an optimal front-end encounter that ensures smooth, efficient patient throughput and office workflow processes.
To accomplish that, the organization re-engineered its registration process by deploying a self-service kiosk and mobile pre-check solution, to promote greater accuracy, minimize bottlenecks and empower patients.
In this session, Jewett’s CEO Jon Albert will share the organization’s three-pronged implementation journey and highlight the successful outcomes.
• Identify current drivers behind process improvement trends in today’s physician practices.
• Discuss how self-service and mobile technologies can streamline the patient registration process and improve revenue cycle efficiency.
• Analyze Jewett Orthopaedic’s three-pronged journey to implement a self-service check-in solution, including change management, optimization and sustainability strategies.
Jon Albert, Chief Executive Officer, Jewett Orthopaedic Clinic.

Time: 13:15pm – 14:15pm. Location: Orlando W208C.
Promoting Quality of Aging: Care Coordination and Disease Management
As generations age, technologies must evolve. Many older adults have multiple conditions with some for example having 10 or more medications to manage. This session will present some of the solutions toward improving care outside the hospital. Medication management, remote monitoring and care coordination tools will be discussed as well as current gaps in care which the future use of technology needs to address. We will examine how to move beyond single point solutions to coordinated care plans wrapped in usable tech solutions.
David Lindeman, PhD, Director, CITRIS Health Initiative, CITRIS, Director, Banatao Institute, UC Berkeley
Laurie Orlov, Founder, Aging in Place Technology Watch
Sam Ahn, Senior Care Practice Lead, Samsung Electronics America

Time: 15:45pm – 16:30pm.  Location: Orlando W208C.
Closing Keynote: The Future of Technology in the Longevity Economy
This session provides a high level summary of today’s discussion and pivots towards future opportunities in aging. Discover what’s in store for the future of technology in aging. A key focus would be the need to disrupt how we think about aging and allowing technology to support an enhanced aging experience.
This session is part of a special program called Healthy Aging and Technology Symposium: Building a Digital Bridge to Transform the Aging Experience. Extra fees and separate registration is required.
Compare emerging technologies that show promise in enhancing aging
Identify areas/gaps that would benefit from new innovative technologies for the aging population
Discuss opportunities that will advance new innovations in aging
Dr David Drew, Chief Medical Officer & VP and GM of Enterprise (B2B) Healthcare, Samsung.

Tuesday 12 February 2019

Time: 10:15-10:35 am.  Location: Hall F Booth 9000 Innovation Live Pavilion.
Digital Health: Defining the Future of Healthcare
Sentara’s mission is to Improve Health Every Day. Our vision creates a dynamic model via the development of digital and consumer-facing solutions, updated wellness and ambulatory platforms, and with the integration of acute and chronic care programs with managed-care strategy. Digital, cloud, mobile, and blockchain technologies are key ingredients to our IT strategy. We aim to provide high quality and cost-effective care via cutting edge technology.
Michael Reagin, SVP & CIO, Sentara Healthcare.

Time: 10:30am.  Location: W314B.
Dr David Drew, Chief Medical Officer, Samsung

Time: 16:15 – 16:35pm.  Location: Hall A Booth 888.
Healthcare Wayfinding: Mobile App, Kiosk, or both?
An in depth look into how healthcare facilities can improve the patient experience through digital wayfinding. The topic will look into different applications of wayfinding (mobile app, kiosks in the facility, or a combination of the two.)
Jeffery Sarenpa, President/CTO, Express Image Digital

Time: 15:10 – 15:50pm.  Location: Rosen Ballroom C.
Technology to Drive Patient Engagement in a Digital World.
This panel will explore the power of digital therapeutics in helping patients be more engaged in their healthcare, and the technology that is being used to drive these innovations. Learn how the IoT exhaust data from digital therapies can be used to not just manage and intervene in care, but also to feedback into real-world evidence and value-based care justification.
Dan Housman, Principal, Deloitte
Hope Wohl, Chief Executive Officer, Breastcancer.Org
Lita Sands, Head of Life Sciences Business Development, Amazon Web Services
Shez Partovi, Director, Global HCLS BD, Amazon Web Services
William Zeruld, Digital Strategies, Otsuka

Time: 16:15 – 15:15pm.  Location: W311E.
Smartphones Are Driving Clinical Transformation
Hospitals and health systems surveyed are making large-scale, enterprise-wide investments in smartphones and unified communications solutions to drive clinical transformation and address mission as well as patient-critical communications requirements of clinical and non-clinical mobile workers within the hospital and across care continuum. These solutions support the achievement of the Quadruple Aim by reducing costs, improving quality and outcomes and increasing patient and provider satisfaction. The speakers, representing research, clinician and administrator standpoints, will offer compelling details of what a successful deployment looks like; how to address and overcome the associated pitfalls in operationalizing a large-scale health system-wide deployment; and explore future growth opportunities involved with integrating these solutions with evidence-based clinical pathways and care management programs including support of bedside documentation and clinical surveillance.
Howard Landa MD, Vice President, Clinical Informatics, Sutter Health, and Gregg Malkary MS, Managing Director, Spyglass Consulting.

Time: 16:20 – 16:50pm.  Location: Rosen Centre Grand Ballroom C.
Pfizer Spotlight: How Digital Technology is Changing Pharma
Value-based healthcare is reshaping the entire industry and its major players, including providers, payers and pharma. For pharma, technology and data are driving more effective and patient-centric clinical trials. With further advancements in technologies like mobile devices and wearables, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the pharma and biotech industries are poised to innovate existing clinical trial processes and systems – and better demonstrate therapeutic value.
In this session, two of Pfizer’s real-world data experts sit down with Shelley Price, HIMSS Director of Payer and Life Sciences, to discuss how the pharmaceutical giant is using digital tools to collect and analyze real world data, engage and reduce the burden on patients, collaborate with healthcare providers, and produce better results.

Christopher Boone, FACHE,FHIMSS,MHA,PMP, Vice President, Real World Data & Analytics, Pfizer, Hameed Farhan, Senior Director, Global Real World Center of Excellence, Pfizer, and Shelley Price, Director, Payer and Life Sciences, HIMSS,

Wednesday 13 February 2019

Time: 10:00 – 11:00am.  Location: W207C
Modifying the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS) to Evaluate Specific Health Applications
With the explosion of today’s mobile application marketplace, there exists a need to better differentiate between the quality of available applications. Specifically, mobile health applications (applications that help either the disabled or are used in a healthcare setting) lack a common rating scale that is neither subjective nor biased. By utilizing the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS) and its ability to be customized in a modular fashion for a special population, a quantitative-based scoring system was implemented to better evaluate mobile applications designed for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Furthermore, a content expert was recruited to refine our custom criteria as well as provide insight into the hard-of-hearing population’s desires for specific features in mobile applications.
Ryan L. Romero MPH, Student, University of Florida and Rick Kates, PhD, MBA
Clinical Assistant Professor, UF.

Time: 10:45 – 11:05am.  Location: Hall A Booth 888.
BreatheSmart: Consumer Connected Respiratory Care
BreatheSmart from Cohero Health is a connected mobile app and device respiratory platform that motivates and educates patients and caregivers to adopt behaviors to improve patient outcomes. To achieve market adoption and scale, under value-based care, we will discuss two prerequisites for patient engagement: Testing on product efficacy and ROI with randomized controlled trials and real-world implementations and developing a patient engagement platform to empower and optimize user experience.
Joe Condurso, CEO, Cohero Health Inc.

Time: 11:15 – 11:35am. Location: Hall F Booth 9000 Innovation Live Pavilion.
Predictive medicine: the new aim of connectivity
With the explosion of data, the e-health evolution is transforming how patients and healthcare professionals interact with one another. How can we access patient information quickly? How can we react efficiently? Enovacom will present how the value of rich and comprehensive healthcare data can be made available to all stakeholders using a new technological approach. Enovacom provides integration technology and a data repository which can be used in many different areas: IOT, BIG DATA and IA.
Jean-Baptiste Michon, Marketing Product Manager, Enovacom

Time: 12:15 – 12:35pm. Location: Orlando Hall A Booth 888.
Vodafone IoT Enables iGlucose Diabetes Solutions
Diabetes is a global epidemic affecting over 475 million people worldwide, a figure expected to rise to 642 million by 2040. Smart Meter is an innovator in diabetes management systems, making technology an enabler, not a barrier, to better patient outcomes. iGlucose® is its response. iGlucose is connected via the Vodafone Managed IoT Connectivity Platform, anywhere in the world. This session shows why Vodafone IoT was the best choice to confidently deliver a simple out-of-the-box experience.
Erik Kling, Vice President, Vodafone Business
Cliff McIntosh, CEO, iGlucose

Time: 12:30 – 12:55pm. Location: Orlando Hall E Booth 8559 Microsoft Leadership Theater.
Intelligent Evolution of Connected Hospitals
Himanshu will present on the topic of IOT for Healthcare, and the challenges and strategies needed to effect change balanced against the challenges for safe and well managed deployment in the real world. Examples from projects being delivered across the globe and particularly Americas will be shared.
Himanshu Khurana, VP, Honeywell

Time: 14:30 – 15:30pm. Location: Orlando W230A.
Embracing the IoT: Ideas Are Easy, Execution Is Hard
Healthcare delivery is in need of a technological transformation. Many of the challenges facing our healthcare system today can be remedied by applying the principles of an IIoT system and combining it with AI and ML, creating a highly reliable automated system for real time decision support. This session will take you on a journey starting with the current state of the IIoT in healthcare and highlighting the gaps that exist. The speakers will paint a futuristic picture of healthcare, utilizing a standards-based, edge-computing IIoT architecture and discuss the benefits and challenges of implementation. Finally, you will be provided with the tools (reference architectures from the IIC and MD PnP) necessary to help the healthcare industry begin developing products and creating an ecosystem for a next generation of connected healthcare products.
Julian Goldman, MD, Medical Director, Biomedical Engineering , Massachusetts General Hospital and David Niewolny, MBA, Director, Healthcare Segment, Real Time Innovations.

Time: 15:00-16:00pm.  Location: W224H.
Data Meets Diagnosis: How Technology is Changing Brain Health Assessments
Abstract: As medical professionals continue to integrate technology into the patient care experience, the biggest drawback of legacy systems is a lack of mobility. To truly benefit from the ongoing digital transformation, healthcare-grade solutions must be mobile and untethered to clunky devices or individual networks. Patient information today is generated through wearables on the individual and through other connected devices, like medical sensors and even home appliances. Leveraging all these data sources for clinicians and patients has lowered the cost of care in cases of chronic pain and diabetes, but other practices have been slow to adapt. This session will focus on brain health, an area where many clinicians still rely on subjective, personal evaluations to make diagnoses about traumatic brain injuries and cognitive diseases. Standardizing the evaluation process through easy to use technology is a critical way to improve accuracy for clinicians, streamline operations across organizations and most importantly, identify and treat serious brain conditions earlier when treatment is most effective. This discussion will explore this unique area of medicine and will look at how learnings from other fields where digital health tools have been deployed can be applied.
Dr David Drew, Chief Medical Officer, Samsung.

Thursday 14 February 2019

Time: 10:15am-11:15am.  Location: Orlando – Orange County Convention Centre: W415D Valencia
Digital Traction in Consumerization of Healthcare
In the competition to attract young, motivated and healthy consumers, payers, providers, technology vendors and newcomers are drawing on strategies and tactics taken directly from retail marketing and advertising. How are they faring? Can we declare a winner? This session will magnify a battleground of digital health: virtual visits.
Speaker(s): Greg Orr, VP Digital Health, Walgreens, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, Health Economist Advisor Trend Weaver, Think-Health,  Nick Desai, CEO Chairman President Exec Director Admin Group Practice Mgr, Heal, Peter Rasmussen, Medical Director Digital Health, Cleveland Clinic.

Time: 11:00am-11:25am.  Location: Orlando – Orange County Convention Centre
mHealth solutions have proven effective in engaging patients in active personal health management. Join us for a real world application of how voice and AI technologies can be used as a non-pharmaceutical alternative in the treatment of chronic diseases.
Behdad Navabi, Paediatric Endocrinology Fellow , CHEO, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and Timon Ledain, Director IoT, Macadamian Technologies.

Time: 11:15-11:35am. Location: Orlando Hall A Booth 400 Cybersecurity Theatre A
Solving Emerging Big Data Challenges in Healthcare
The adoption of e-health platforms has created a torrent of digital information that creates tremendous opportunities to drive personalized medicine and improve healthcare outcomes.A digital strategy for healthcare no longer focus purely on clinical systems, but must also take into account diverse datasets such as user interaction click-streams, mobile app data, cyber security data-stream, IOT,and real-time data. Learn how industries solve big data problems and apply to challenges in healthcare.
Sam Kalbag, Consultant, Micro Focus Government Solutions

Time: 11:15am-11:35am.  Location: Orlando – Orange County Convention Centre. Hall D Booth 1745 Lightning sessions theatre.
Rewiring Healthcare for Clinical Interoperability
Advances in clinical interoperability, like TEFCA, have established a foundation for healthcare organizations to exchange electronic health information. Health Gorilla connects providers, patients, and key healthcare stakeholders to seamlessly exchange clinical data. This session describes our journey scaling a clinical network with partners like Apple, drchrono, and others.
Sergio Wagner, Chief Strategy Officer, Health Gorilla.

Friday 15 February 2019

Time: 12:00pm-13:00pm.  Location: Orlando – Orange County Convention Centre W304A
FHIR Interoperability: Point-of-Care Healthcare Apps in the Real World
Health information interoperability has historically been a daunting issue for healthcare systems with differing electronic medical records (EHRs) or those looking to export or import technical solutions developed on other EHRs. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) are an open-source solution that’s been increasingly adopted across EHRs and healthcare systems with the recent example of Apple including a personal health record in iOS, allowing patients to access their own data. While data sharing is becoming more feasible, there is practically little in the way of EHR-integrated, point of care healthcare applications (apps) utilizing FHIR that could be broadly scaled across both healthcare systems and EHRs. This session will describe Geisinger’s evolving approach to using FHIR resources to extend homegrown apps beyond our current EHR system, allowing us to share our innovation more broadly than ever before.

Speaker(s): Jon Billet, Director of Software Engineering and Enterprise Software Architect, Geisinger Health System and Ryan Van Loan, Manager Research and Development, Geisinger Health.

mHealth to discover on the exhibition floor:

Halo Communications (USA/Booth 458)

The Halo Patient Coordinator allows patient care teams to be created, managed and adjusted automatically through Halo’s native scheduling product and integration with a health system’s existing clinical applications. Care teams can also be updated manually, giving clinicians flexibility to adjust teams in real-time settings. Key features of the product include: • Patient-focused messaging – With one tap, clinicians can pull up patient-specific critical information right on a mobile device. Using the secure messaging capabilities on Halo’s platform, each message can thread down to a single patient, eliminating ambiguity and miscommunications. • Simple handoffs – With Halo Patient Coordinator, handoffs can be initiated automatically, and the patient’s care team members are adjusted instantly as shifts rotate. • One-way updates – Patient’s family members can receive one-way messages from members of the care team, providing instant updates throughout their loved one’s care. • Case-by-case syncing with EMR– Notably, messages through Halo Patient Coordinator can be optionally synced back to the patient’s EMR for documentation purposes.

Robust Medical CoRobust Medical Co (China/Booth 867)

Robusdical is developing cutting edge technology for mHealth, telemedicine and in home care. 

Cardinal Analytx (USA/Booth 888-33)

Cardinal Analytx promotes the ‘Right Care Sooner! Our machine learning methods have shown 2-3x greater accuracy over existing risk prediction methods and these combined with clinical insights and engagement analytics allow risk bearers to proactively address rising risk, improve precision of steerage solutions, and inform underwriting and value based contracting. The majority of the highest cost members are newly high cost members, not persistent high cost members. Yet, existing analytics tools and programs focus on persistent high cost members who are already very ill. Care Management teams grapple with long target lists and low engagement rates.

AsReader Inc (USA/Booth 1075)

AsReader, Inc. manufactures Healthcare-grade Batteries/Chargers and Barcode Scanners for the Medical Industry. Our sleds turn mobile/smartphones into professional medical Barcode Scanners for Patient, Medication, and Specimen Management. We also specialize in RFID (both UHF RAIN and HF/NFC) for mobile devices. Sleds are available for nearly all models of Apple iOS® iPhone®, iPad®, and the iPod touch® as well as selected Android phones and tablets. We specialize in rugged barcode sleds/cases and pocket-sized mobile batteries/chargers for nursing care, hospitals, and more. Use your smartphone As a Reader!

Healthasyst (USA/Booth 1075)

Mobile pre-registration of CheckinAsyst offers unmatched flexibility for patients to complete their forms and pay outstanding prior to their visit-anytime, anywhere.

Datalogic (/Booth 1641)

MEMOR™ 10 – THE POWER OF A SMARTPHONE, DESIGNED FOR ENTERPRISE. FEATURES • 5 inch capacitive multi-touch HD display with Dragontrail™ hardened glass • Android 8.1 (Oreo) with Google Mobile Services • Wireless charging eliminates all contacts on the device and cradle • Ruggedized with drop resistance to 1.5m / 5ft to concrete and IP65 sealing • Dual band Wi-Fi including the latest 802.11ac standard and 802.11r/k for fast roaming • Assisted GPS for location based apps • Voice-Enterprise Certified • Bluetooth v4.2 short range wireless technology • NFC for proximity communications • Advanced 2D ultra-slim imager with Datalogic’s patented ‘Green Spot’ technology for visual good-read feedback • Datalogic’s SoftSpot™ technology for innovative triggering through the touch display • Chemical resistant plastics / enclosures designed to withstand daily cleaning with harsh disinfectant solutions

Mobile Heartbeat (USA/Booth 4179).

Mobile Heartbeat is a leading provider of enterprise mobility clinical communications and collaboration solutions that improve clinical workflow and provide secure team communications, enabling better patient care at a lower cost. The company’s Unified Clinical Communication platform, MH-CURE, gives clinicians what they want and need: simple, secure access to their patients and other care team members with clinically relevant patient information—no matter where they are. Based upon its Clinical Unified Results Enterprise (CURE) technology, MH-CURE dramatically improves clinical workflows across the enterprise, freeing clinicians to focus on what they do best: care for their patients.

Samsung Electronics America (USA/Booth 5247)

Samsung Business provides a diverse portfolio of enterprise technologies from smartphones to wearables, tablets, and digital displays. We are committed to putting the business customer at the core of everything we do by delivering comprehensive products, solutions and services across diverse industries. For more information, please visit samsung.com/business, call 1-866-SAM-4BIZ or follow Samsung Business via Twitter: @SamsungBizUSA.

ITI Technology (S Korea/Booth 5448)

SMB MOBILE SMART MEDIATABLE BUILT-IN 17.3″ TOUCH SCREEN.  Good for Bed Table and Smart 17.3” Touch Screen O Tempered Glass protected and Infection control O Removable MediaTable O Rotation, Clockwise and Counter clockwise • functional, stabile and comfortable MEDIATABLE • smooth-running mobility • height adjustment • ergonomic tilting by 0°, 20°, 40°, 90° for both sides • high security when burdened with up to 30 kg • removable MediaTable with recessed grips, safely fixed • hygiene surfaces that are easy to clean • pneumatic springs allow height lift of the table of 79 to 104 cm

Varian Medical Systems (USA/Booth 6143)

Varian Mobile empowers clinicians to access and edit their ARIA® clinical data anywhere in real time. View, interact with and edit your appointments, tasks, patient summaries, patient face & setup photos, dictate notes and much more. Simplify your workflow for smoother clinic operations and improve the quality of your life. http://www.varian.com/VarianMobile

Humetrix (USA/Booth 6578)

Humetrix has pioneered the development of innovative patient-facing mobile health platforms over the past 20 years, starting with smart card health applications in Europe and Asia, and later with smartphone health applications for care-coordination iBlueButton, emergency care SOS QR, and chronic care management TENSIO. A strong advocate of the Blue Button initiative from its launch, Humetrix has been an industry partner of the ONC and CMS for the development of Blue Button Standards and the formulation of the new CMS Blue Button 2.0 API. Humetrix mHealth applications have won multiple government and industry awards in the U.S. and in Europe.

Jamf (USA/Booth 7261)

Through industry-leading mobile healthcare solutions, Jamf enables organizations to transform patient experience with iPad. Using Jamf Pro to manage iPads, iPhones and Apple TVs allows providers to deliver faster, more personalized care to their patients while simultaneously improving communications within their care teams. Patients have more control throughout their stay, which enhances their overall experience. Better healthcare is here, and its’s possible with Jamf.

Transility (USA/Booth 8541)

We are a Software Development company bringing greatest technology usage onboard to help healthcare industry. Being an Interoperability expert, we provide an open-source healthcare data integration platform to our clients for integration of their products with various Health system quickly. We are a seasoned team of HIPPA certified engineers building custom software solutions for leading healthcare companies. Our solution ranges from Practice Management, Patient Engagement, Healthcare Insurance, Appointment & Scheduling, Remote Patient Monitoring, Tele-Health, Home-Healthcare, mHealth and IoT-health devices. We are development partner for EPIC, Athenahealth, Allscripts, Cerner, AdvancedMD and GE-Healthcare.

Blue Spark Technologies (USA/Booth 8559-13)

Blue Spark Technologies’ latest innovation, TempTraq®, is the only Bluetooth®, wearable, disposable, temperature monitor in the form of a soft, comfortable patch that continuously, safely and comfortably, monitors body temperature for up to 72 hours and sends alerts to Apple® or Android™ compatible mobile devices. The company’s TempTraq Connect HIPAA-compliant cloud service supported by the Google Healthcare Cloud Platform allows hospitals and caregivers to monitor body temperature from anywhere. It also allows direct integration with health care provider electronic health records (EHR) systems and central nursing stations, providing a secure method of storing patient health care data.

Alfred SmartHub/11 Health and Technologies Inc (USA/Booth 8559-25)

The Alfred SmartHub is the smart assistant that connects the bag and baseplate wirelessly. It is designed to monitor the stoma and assist in reducing the chances of infections, which will aid in improving quality of life. The category-defining product benefits include real-time output data access from the Alfred mobile app, smart alerts on your mobile app, and wirelessly syncs data to the Cloud via Bluetooth® and cellular/mobile data.

Combining Smart Technology with the world’s first one to one Patient Coach Program that provides both technical and emotional support to patients, we have a complete care management platform that is the new gold standard in healthcare for both patients and clinicians.

Mobile Eye – Crowdsource wireless network monitoring/7SIGNAL Solutions Inc (USA/Booth 8559-25)

Finally, a solution that diagnoses Wi-Fi issues at the end point. Mobile Eye empowers organizations to continuously monitor the wireless network from any Windows, Android, Mac OS or IOS device. Know if the issue is wired, wireless or device related in seconds.

Highmark Interactive: EQ Active Brain Tracking (USA/Booth 9000-41)

EQ is a mobile neurological assessment tool focused on concussion management. It utilizes engaging games that are clinically evaluated tests for cognitive, vestibular and visual-motor functions. EQ is perfect for clinics that are interested in baseline testing, sports leagues & organizations, schools & academies, and many more use cases.

AMCHART (USA/Booth 9000-47)

See how we are using an EMR, Personal Health Record, and our mobile Health Companion to monitor patients in India and to improve outcomes when it comes to diabetes and cardiovascular management.

Mobisoft Infotech (?/Booth 9000-97)

1. NEMT: Provide reliable and cost-effective non-emergency medical transportation services with a technology first approach to patient transportation. 2. Medicine Ordering: Provide convenient and affordable access to prescription drugs and healthcare products online. 3. Telehealth: Enables clinics, hospitals, and healthcare startups to offer robust telehealth to every patient. 4. Appointment Scheduling: Ease down the appointment booking process for patients with a seamless mobile app booking interface.

Veradigm Health (USA/Booth MP183-5)

Veradigm is an integrated data systems and services business that combines data-driven clinical insights with actionable tools for clinical workflow, research, analytics and media. Our solutions are designed to help key healthcare stakeholders to improve the quality, efficiency, and value of healthcare delivery – from biopharma to health plans, healthcare providers, health technology partners, and most importantly, the patients they serve. We are dedicated to simplifying the complicated healthcare system with next-generation healthcare solutions. That is how we are transforming health, insightfully. Veradigm™ is an Allscripts Company

Update: Some photos (posted until I get time to post a review)

IMG_3846IMG_3849IMG_3851IMG_3868IMG_3871IMG_3872IMG_3886IMG_3888IMG_3890IMG_3892IMG_3899WhatsApp Image 2019-02-11 at 12.54.16WhatsApp Image 2019-02-11 at 13.00.45WhatsApp Image 2019-02-11 at 13.01.31WhatsApp Image 2019-02-11 at 13.02.10WhatsApp Image 2019-02-11 at 18.18.05WhatsApp Image 2019-02-11 at 19.38.36WhatsApp Image 2019-02-11 at 21.53.48WhatsApp Image 2019-02-12 at 18.37.51WhatsApp Image 2019-02-14 at 04.22.46

 

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Hal Wolf, President and CEO, HIMSS congratulates Prof Linda Macomber, National University San Diego on making it to #HIMSS19. Linda attended her first HIMSS Conference 30 years ago!

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Apple’s Tim Cook to CNBC’s Jim Cramer: “Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind will be about health”

Posted on January 13, 2019 by

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Tim Cook teases new Apple services to come in 2019.

Related Post: Apple senior management have made it clear: they’re going all in on Healthcare (October 2017).

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