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Sweden rolls out online access to medical records and is developing new e-health services to enable people to manage their care

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Sweden rolls out online access to medical records and is developing new e-health services to enable people to manage their care

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¹Health Informatics Centre, LIME, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Correspondence to: M Hägglund Maria.Hagglund{at}ki.se

National e-health services in Sweden provide citizens with health information, contact details of providers, and interactive services where they can ask questions anonymously that are answered by healthcare professionals within seven days. The national portal My Healthcare Contacts lets citizens request, cancel, or reschedule healthcare appointments, renew prescriptions, and request contact with a specific clinician or hospital. Each healthcare centre or other local provider decides which e-services people can use to interact with them. People log in to the portal using either an electronic ID or their Swedish personal identity number. Recent figures show that over 2 million people have set up accounts in My Healthcare Contacts (about a fifth of the Swedish population). During November 2014 over 135 000 contacts with healthcare were made through the portal nationally. 1

Sweden is currently planning to make full electronic medical records available to all citizens who want them. A pilot study in Uppsala County in 2002 ran into legal problems as citizens in Sweden did not have the right to have direct online access to their medical record. 2 However, ensuing discussions resulted in the introduction of the Patient Data Act in 2008, which solved this problem. Through the Sustains project ( www.sustainsproject.eu/), all citizens in Uppsala were given access to their records through the secure My Healthcare Contacts platform in 2012. 2

Other national e-health initiatives under way include the My Care Pathways project. 3 This will allow patients to follow, own, and manage their care processes online. Three groups of patients with specific conditions were involved in the initial design of the service. 4 The project also aims to adapt and further develop the Swedish National e-service and provide a platform for developing new e-services ( http://healthinnovationplatform.se/en/), such as allowing patients to track the status of referrals and other planned interactions with healthcare services.

Both the Sustains and My Care Pathways solutions are currently being implemented and evaluated in several counties and are accessible through My Healthcare Contacts.

Notes

Cite this as: BMJ 2015;350:h359

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Commentary: Sweden rolls out online access to medical records and is developing new e-health services to enable people to manage their care

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1Health Informatics Centre, LIME, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden Correspondence to: M Hägglund Maria.Hagglund{at}ki.se National e-health services in Sweden provide citizens with health information, contact details of providers, and interactive services where they can ask questions anonymously that are answered by healthcare professionals within seven days.

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Did Google just make health information on pharma websites obsolete?

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Did Google just make health information on pharma websites obsolete?

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POST SUMMARY: Google searches for certain medical conditions will now bring up typical symptoms and treatments, along with details about how common the condition is. All answers are compiled, curated, and reviewed by a team of medical doctors at Google and the Mayo Clinic, using a combination of clinical knowledge and high-quality medical sources across the Internet.

A big part of the content on pharma websites is comprised of health information, but Google may have made that obsolete. Since 1 in 20 Google searches relate to health in some way, today's upgrade certainly makes sense for Google and for users. It's also going to change the way online health information seekers search for health information.

DTC marketers are now going to have, in depth, on health information within product and disease sites. The key question is going to be "what value, beyond Google search results, can we offer to online health seekers". There is no doubt that Google and the Mayo clinic are trusted a lot more than pharma and this change in Google search could negatively affect site traffic to product websites. Marketers need to focus on how and where search results are displayed.

In a way this is good news because it's going to force DTC digital marketers to focus more on the quality of their content versus using repurposed brochures.

This entry was posted in Health information online, in the news and tagged Google Knowledge Graph by Richard Meyer. Bookmark the permalink.

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Did Google just make health information on pharma websites obsolete?

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POST SUMMARY: Google searches for certain medical conditions will now bring up typical symptoms and treatments, along with details about how common the condition is. All answers are compiled, curated, and reviewed by a team of medical doctors at Google and the Mayo Clinic, using a combination of clinical knowledge and high-quality medical sources across the Internet.

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Study: Smartphone apps count steps more accurately than wearables

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Study: Smartphone apps count steps more accurately than wearables

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Study: Smartphone apps count steps more accurately than wearables

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Activity tracking apps on smartphones are more accurate than fitness tracking wearables when it comes to step counts, according to a small study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Stanford launches patient app with Apple HealthKit integration

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Stanford launches patient app with Apple HealthKit integration

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Stanford launches patient app with Apple HealthKit integration

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Stanford Health Care, one of the few previously announced healthcare provider adopters of Apple HealthKit, has officially launched its patient-facing, HealthKit enabled iOS app this week.

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Out of 4.6M wearables shipped in 2014, only 720K were Android smartwatches

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Out of 4.6M wearables shipped in 2014, only 720K were Android smartwatches

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As hype over the Apple Watch reaches a boiling point ahead of its April on-sale date, it's easy to forget that we have yet to enter the age of the smartwatch. It certainly didn't start in 2014.

By far the most prevalent smartwatch OS is Android Wear, and a new report by Canalys Research said only 720,000 Android Wear devices shipped in 2014 out of a total of 4.6 million smart wearable bands sold.

Motorola's Moto 360 led the pack in sales of Android Wear smartwatches. The 360 sold very well until fourth quarter of last year, until it ran into some supply chain issues at the end of the year, Canalys said.

The 360 beat out a number of Samsung smartwatches to become the best selling device in the category in 2014. "Samsung ... has struggled to keep consumers engaged and must work hard to attract developers while it focuses on [operating system] Tizen for its wearables," said Canalys analyst Chris Jones in a statement.

LG's round G Watch R performed significantly better than its original squarish G Watch, while Asus and Sony entered the market with their own Android Wear devices, Canalys said.

Pebble shipped a total of 1 million units from its 2013 launch through to the end of 2014, according to Canalys. "Continual software updates, more apps in its app store and price cuts in the fall helped maintain strong sales in the second half of the year," the report stated.

Fitbit remained the global leader in the basic wearable band market. The company has recently gone to market with two new fitness trackers - one with a heart rate monitor - and a fitness watch called the Surge.

Xiaomi shipped more than a million of its $13 Mi Bands. This included one-day of sales of over 103,000 units.

"Though the Mi Band is a lower-margin product than competing devices, Xiaomi entered the wearables market with a unique strategy, and its shipment volumes show how quickly a company can become a major force in a segment based solely on the size of the Chinese market," said Canalys analyst Jason Low.

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Out of 4.6M wearables shipped in 2014, only 720K were Android smartwatches

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As hype over the Apple Watch reaches a boiling point ahead of its April on-sale date, it's easy to forget that we have yet to enter the age of the smartwatch. It certainly didn't start in 2014.

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What is the future of healthcare innovation? Today, massive technological shifts - driven by big data, mobility, security and cloud computing - are rapidly transforming business and society. Entire industries are being completely transformed, and healthcare is one of them. These trends are unlocking new possibilities for hospitals, researchers, doctors and patients.

Here are five recent examples of digital health innovations:

1. Artificial Heart

According to the American Heart Association, nearly 300,000 people die from heart failure each year. As the wait for heart transplants grows ever longer, SynCardia is saving lives with the only FDA-approved total replacement for the one of hardest working organs in the body. For more about tech innovations in the health care industry. According to data published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 79% of patients who received the Total Artificial Heart were bridged to transplant. This is the highest bridge to transplant rate for any approved heart device in the world.

2. A Knee Powered by Artificial Intelligence

Össur, an Icelandic company has created the world's first microprocessor joint system that helps its users replicate and improve natural knee function.

3. Open Notes - Provider Allows Patients To Contribute To Own EHRs

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has received a $450,000 grant from The Commonwealth Fund to develop develop OurNotes, a new initiative for allowing patients, caregivers, and providers jointly create clinical notes and care plans within the shared EHR. OurNotes is an extension of the provider's current OpenNotes program, a movement to offer patients ready, online access to their clinicians' visit notes after an appointment or discussion. These notes are available on the PatientSite, the secure portal where patients can manage their health care online, anytime.

4. Personalized Metabolomics Service

Just launched on Indiegogo, Kenkodo is a personalized metabolomics service that connects your individual lifestyle to your biochemical state. Your metabolism changes constantly: when you eat, do sports or just relax. And if two people follow the same diet, the effect may not be the same. Our bodies respond differently to external factors, like nutrition. This means there is no general "optimal lifestyle".

5. Wearable That Monitors Your Eating Habits

BitBite is a revolutionary wearable device meant to track, analyze and change the way you eat. When you slow down, chew more and eat at regular intervals you'll be improving your nutrition, feel better and shed those extra pounds. The device was launched on Indiegogo last month. BitBite is a discrete ear clip equipped with a microphone and sensors that records, analyzes and reports your eating habits.
Register for HP Matter for a chance to win an HP SlateBook x2, an Ultrabook™ and a tablet in one. Weekly drawings will be conducted throughout January and February.
: technology and healthcare

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5 Recent Digital Health Innovations - HIT Consultant

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What is the future of healthcare innovation? Today, massive technological shifts - driven by big data, mobility, security and cloud computing - are rapidly transforming business and society. Entire industries are being completely transformed, and healthcare is one of them. These trends are unlocking new possibilities for hospitals, researchers, doctors and patients.

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Dr. Google steps up its medical search game again

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Dr. Google steps up its medical search game again

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By better leveraging its Knowledge Graph smart search algorithm, Google is giving its health-related search functions a shot in the arm. Starting in the next few days, health searches on Google and via the Google app will display a wide range of medical facts about the disease or condition in question.

"We'll show you typical symptoms and treatments, as well as details on how common the condition is-whether it's critical, if it's contagious, what ages it affects, and more," product manager Prem Ramaswami wrote on the Google Blog this week. "For some conditions you'll also see high-quality illustrations from licensed medical illustrators. Once you get this basic info from Google, you should find it easier to do more research on other sites around the web, or know what questions to ask your doctor."

Knowledge Graph is a function of Google Search, introduced in 2012, that combines Google's search algorithm with publicly available and internal databases to create a "smarter" search. With Knowledge Graph, a small display of relevant information shows up at the top of a user's search results page. Google first started using Knowledge Graph with health-related search results in 2012.

The information Knowledge Graph will display is gathered from well-regarded medical websites has been vetted by a team of doctors, both internal at Google, led by Dr. Kapil Parakh, and at the Mayo Clinic.

"That doesn't mean these search results are intended as medical advice," Ramaswami added. "We know that cases can vary in severity from person to person, and that there are bound to be exceptions. What we present is intended for informational purposes only -- and you should always consult a healthcare professional if you have a medical concern."

Ramaswami writes that 1 in 20 Google searches is health related, and Google has been aware of this fact for years. At various times since 2009, Google has updated its search features to be more friendly to health-related searches. In November 2010, Google wrote a blog post officially introducing special search results for people using Google in an emergency situation.

"We know that in times of crisis, it's especially important for you to find the crucial information you're looking for -- and find it fast," Dr. Roni Zeiger, Google's then Chief Health Strategist wrote at the time. "Today, in 13 countries, we'll begin displaying some combination of special search results for searches around poison control, suicide and common emergency numbers that point to emergency information."

In fact, Google had rolled out special search results - a large, prominently displayed phone number - for poison- and suicide-related searches as early as the fall of 2009. The company added special results for emergency-related terms in various languages as well.

In February 2012, Google changed how search worked for people who seemed to be looking for information about medical symptoms, displaying a short list of related conditions.

"The list is generated by our algorithms that analyze data from pages across the web and surface the health conditions that appear to be related to your search," Zeiger wrote in a blog post at the time. This search protocol has been modified somewhat since then. It now displays the message "Consult a doctor if you have a medical concern" in response to symptom searches.

In November 2012, Google added medication concerns to its roster of special searches. This time Adam Brown, the former Google Health product manager wrote the blog post for the feature, which was the first to tie in health searches to Knowledge Graph.

"We get a lot of queries for medicine on Google. So to make it quick and easy for you to learn about medications, we'll start showing key facts - side effects, related medications, links to in-depth resources, and more - right on the search results page," he wrote. Medication searches also display the "consult a doctor" disclaimer.

The most recent health-related change to search was nutrition-related. Starting in May of 2013, Google search begain to answer questions about the nutritional content of food, even making connections between foods with unlike-sounding names like summer squash and zucchini.

Last year Google also experimented by inviting some health information searchers to video chat with a physician. The video chats were part of Google's Helpouts service. The October experiment, however, was just a temporary search feature.

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Dr. Google steps up its medical search game again

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By better leveraging its Knowledge Graph smart search algorithm, Google is giving its health-related search functions a shot in the arm. Starting in the next few days, health searches on Google and via the Google app will display a wide range of medical facts about the disease or condition in question.

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Is Cybersecurity The Elephant In The Digital Health Room?

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Is Cybersecurity The Elephant In The Digital Health Room?

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50% of Execs Think mHealth will be Key to Patient Engagement

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50% of Execs Think mHealth will be Key to Patient Engagement

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- Half of executive leaders believe that patient engagement will rely heavily on mobile health technologies within the next five years, according to a poll conducted by The Economist. mHealth technologies will be key to providing patients with their personal health information, supplementing population health management programs, and reducing strain on the overextended healthcare delivery system, the survey found.

The poll of 144 healthcare executives revealed optimism about the role of mobile technologies in patient engagement, with 63% of respondents believing that greater access to health information will allow patients to make better decisions and improve their outcomes. More than a third believe that smartphones, tablets, and home monitoring technology will help to cut costs and relieve the burden on providers, while 79% believe that these devices and apps are providing important educational information to the public.

Yet few organizations have worked out how to make money from mHealth, the report found. Nearly 20% of US participants believe that mobile technology has no potential to bring revenue to a healthcare provider. Under the current fee-for-service model, which still provides the majority of revenue for most healthcare organizations, keeping patients healthy and out of the hospital is simply bad business. While this may change as value-based reimbursement ramps up, there are other significant barriers to mHealth adoption within the industry.

More than 40% of executives believe that healthcare's resistance to change will be the top obstacle for mobile health technologies, while 37% believe that provider organizations simply don't have the technical infrastructure to deal with a new influx of patient information and new patient engagement techniques. Unreliable internet and cell phone service, transition costs, and the complexity of ongoing upgrades were among the top technical challenges highlighted by the poll. Privacy and security also figure highly on the risk list, while 19% blame regulatory hurdles for slow adoption of mobile health strategies.
Dig Deeper
Respondents also fretted over the possibility that patients would take too much responsibility into their own hands, misinterpreting their data and making poor decisions because of it. Ten percent worried that the increase in social media chatter would be harmful to professional reputations, while half worried about privacy and security risks inherent in all data exchange and sharing transactions.

At the moment, mHealth devices and wearable technologies are mostly centered around education, according to 79% of respondents. Just over a third believe they have the potential to improve communications between providers and patient, while around 17% believe that mHealth can help patients monitor their own health, receive social support from their peers, and share their new knowledge with others.

Five years from now, however, the landscape shifts towards patient engagement and cost reduction. Half of participants believe that mHealth infrastructure will mature past its revenue obstacles to cut costs and boost patient contact with the healthcare continuum in a meaningful way. Patients newly empowered by mobile technologies will spend less time in their physician offices or hospitals, become an active player in a streamlined and efficient healthcare delivery system, and be increasingly instrumental in the quest for better outcomes and chronic disease management.

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50% of Execs Think mHealth will be Key to Patient Engagement

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Half of executive leaders believe that patient engagement will rely heavily on mobile health technologies within the next five years, according to a poll conducted by The Economist. mHealth technologies will be key to providing patients with their personal health information, supplementing population health management programs, and reducing strain on the overextended healthcare delivery system, the survey found.

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Apple Watch app will track glucose levels for diabetics

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Apple Watch app will track glucose levels for diabetics

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James Martin/CNET

Apple Watch wearers with diabetes will be able to use an app to monitor their glucose levels.

Designed by medical products maker DexCom, the app will track and display your glucose levels on your watch in the form of a graph, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. The goal is to help diabetics easily and quickly read their glucose, or blood sugar, levels by simply glancing at the app.

To use with the Apple Watch, DexCom's glucose monitor will take the form of a body sensor that you wear around your abdomen. That body sensor measures your glucose levels every five minutes and sends the data to a remote handheld device within 20 feet. That device then communicates with the iPhone, which then sends the data to be displayed on the Apple Watch. The advantage is that you can see the data on your watch without having to check either your iPhone or DexCom's remote handheld device.

The app itself is expected to be available in April, the same time the Apple Watch itself will reach consumers. DexCom actually offers two different apps as part of the process -- one app that lets the user view the data and another app that can share the data with another person, such as a doctor who may need to monitor the person's glucose levels.

One of the major selling points behind the Apple Watch is that it will function both as a smartwatch and as a health and fitness tracker. But one of the challenges is that certain health devices and apps require regulatory approval. Previously, the Food and Drug Administration considered glucose-related software to be Class III, which meant they required the highest level of regulatory approval. But the FDA has since revised its guidelines. DexCom's monitors will remain Class III devices since they connect directly to a person's body. But apps that simply display data on mobile devices fall into Class II, which don't need prior approval, though they still need to be registered with the agency and follow certain controls.

Such a change in the regulations benefits both Apple and third-party developers as more health-related apps can be created for the Apple Watch without requiring strict regulatory approval. At this point, the app is designed only for the Apple Watch and will not support other smartwatches.

The FDA loosened the reins on its requirements over certain health-related apps after a group of software developers created NightScout, a system that can monitor glucose levels over the Internet, the Journal said. The engineers had been frustrated with the slow pace of approval over such apps. NightScout gives parents, doctors and caregivers the ability to remotely view the data collected on individual diabetes patients.

Diabetes is a condition in which the body lacks the ability to convert blood sugar into energy. The continuous tracking of glucose levels is vital for diabetics, especially those with Type 1 diabetes. If their levels rise too high or drop too low, Type 1 diabetics run the risk of stroke, heart disease, kidney disease and other serious medical problems.

Apple declined to respond to CNET's request for comment.

Updated 10:30 a.m. PT: Added more details about DexCom's glucose monitor.

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Apple Watch app will track glucose levels for diabetics

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Apple Watch wearers with diabetes will be able to use an app to monitor their glucose levels. Designed by medical products maker DexCom, the app will track and display your glucose levels on your watch in the form of a graph, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

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Wearable health-monitoring devices represent an exciting opportunity in healthcare. Armed with tools to track their own conditions, patients could be empowered to take responsibility for their own health. And rather than getting small glimpses during infrequent checkups, physicians could be provided with a steady stream of data about how their patients are doing.

That's the dream, anyway. The reality is that given the tools to track their health, many patients don't follow through, and physicians simply don't have the time or resources to deal with the deluge of data about their patients that wearable health-monitoring devices can provide.

Still, there is value for healthcare in body-worn tracking technology. Switzerland-based Soreon Research estimates that the market for wearable healthcare was worth $2 billion last year and expects it to grow 65% annually, to exceed $40 billion in 2020. Last year saw traditional medtech players wade into the space with Medtronic's acquisition of Corventis, maker of a wearable, noninvasive mobile cardiac telemetry system, and Covidien's purchase of Zephyr Technology, a maker of wearable patient monitoring devices.

But for wearable health trackers to achieve their promise and even become the standard of care for some conditions, the technology must first overcome some serious hurdles.

Quickly Abandoned

One of the main criticisms lobbed at wearable technologies today is the fact that many people who initially adopt them don't end up using them long term. A September 2013 study by Endeavor Partners found that although one in 10 Americans owned an activity tracker, nearly one in two users had abandoned their devices after only six months. When the consulting firm polled a new group of users in June 2014, long-term adoption rates had improved somewhat, but one-third of users had still stopped using their devices after just half a year.

Therein lies a major problem for wearables in healthcare: Abandoning a toy you got for Christmas is one thing, but not continuing to use a device prescribed by your doctor could have serious ramifications-especially if it's being used to capture vital data. For wearables to truly transform healthcare, they will need to improve their stickiness among users.

Steven LeBoeuf attributes the widespread abandonment of wearables to "death by discharge." LeBoeuf, cofounder and president of Valencell Inc., a Raleigh, NC-based company that licenses biometric sensor technology, says users may be initially enthusiastic about wearable devices, but their excitement tends to dim each time the needs recharged. Think of an activity tracker. You put it on the day you get it and wear it constantly until the battery dies, at which point you plug it in and forget about it for a few days. Each time the device needs to be recharged, the interval between uses gets longer and longer until, as LeBoeuf puts it, "it becomes best friends with your underwear in the sock drawer."

Make It Stick

Vancive Medical Technologies's Metria IH1 disposable device monitors calorie expenditure, activity levels, steps, and sleep for up to seven days.

Part of the problem, he says, is that wearables that track biometric data don't keep users engaged. Sure, it can be exciting to track your heart rate for a week or log your steps for a month, but eventually the data plateaus, and you're looking at the same stats day after day.

One way to avoid that, LeBoeuf says, is to make wearable devices that combine biometrics to provide actionable insights." That way, [the data] becomes continually interesting," he says. "Your phone would be boring as all hell if you just had one game on it. [Wearables] need to be more about experience; you have to want to turn back home and get the thing."

Another solution might be to ensure users don't forget the device in the first place by incorporating it into something they already use. While many on the market today are standalone, single-purpose devices, a new wave of health-tracking technology is being bundled with other items users find useful. "We want to make it so you don't even think about it," LeBoeuf says. "We want it to be part of what people already wear in a way they already want to wear it."

Wearable technology company Misfit, for example, recently paired its Shine activity and sleep tracker with Swarovski's crystal jewelry to make a version of the technology that senior vice president of marketing Joan Ng bragged she wore to a fashion show. (Hear Sridhar Iyengar, cofounder and chief technology officer at Misfit, talk about designing for simplicity at MD&M West February 10, 2015.) LeBoeuf says Valencell is also working on a concept for earbuds that can both play music and measure blood pressure. He envisions the device as something users can pop in their ears at the gym or during their commute to gather the information they need.

"You don't need to wear a wearable all the time to get important data," he says.

That's an idea Vancive Medical Technologies also subscribes to. The company launched its first foray into wearables with the Metria IH1 disposable adhesive monitoring patch, which tracks calories burned, activity level, steps taken, and sleep. The device is designed to be worn for seven days straight (even while showering and exercising), but Deepak Prakash, global director of marketing for digital health, says it's not intended for long-term use.

"What we want is to provide a good, accurate snapshot for a short period of time," he says.

Prakash compares monitoring health data to keeping tabs on your 401(k). "You don't need to assess every second," he says. "Most people's lifestyles don't change that rapidly. It takes time, and if you bombard them day after day [with data], they're going to get sick of it."

The Physician's Perspective

If patients don't want to be bothered with a constant stream of data about themselves, imagine how doctors feel. Survey results published in 2005 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine showed that physicians typically see around 2300 patients per year. Managing a steady stream of wearable device data for even a small fraction of those patients would be overwhelming.

"I don't think that anybody wants to just see raw data 24/7; that's a lot of data about you," Young Sohn, Samsung's president and chief strategy officer, told an audience during the Digital Health Summit at the 2015 International CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas last month. "What matters is the trend and the change and being able to have a smart algorithm that can pick up on the change."

H2 Care's H2 device can take a blood pressure reading in just 20 seconds as well as capture the data and share it with a physician.

Companies such as Qualcomm, with its 2net Platform, are working to create portals to help clinicians and users aggregate and make sense of data from disparate devices including wearables, but that's only half the battle. For wearables to really gain traction in healthcare, they will need to be incorporated into clinical workflows.

That's a substantial challenge because healthcare today is typically managed episodically, with many patients only visiting a physician when something is wrong. Wearables, however, have the potential to disrupt that paradigm.

Take the example of a patient with high blood pressure. Once the condition is discovered, the doctor will typically advise the patient to come back for check-ups and ask them to periodically take readings with a blood pressure cuff at home and record the results to share at their appointments. But South Korea-based H2 Care has developed the H2, a small, lightweight, wrist-worn blood pressure monitor that lets users get readings from anywhere in just 20 seconds. The device is paired with an online dashboard for managing the data it captures, and a companion app can be set to remind users to take readings at set intervals.

As chief medical officer at the New England Quality Care Alliance, a network of nearly 1800 physicians in practices across eastern Massachusetts, Michael Cantor looks at the wearable trend from a clinical perspective. "Most doctors are not thrilled, I would say, by this opportunity," he said during a panel about wearable technology at the Digital Health Summit. "The challenge we've got is, 'How does this fit into my mental model of how I treat patients?'"

Cantor said from the time they're in medical school, physicians are taught a clear, constructive process to help them diagnose or treat patients. When presented with new tools such as wearables, they naturally try to figure out how those tools fit into the workflow they're used to.

"It's much more of a barrier than you might think," he said.

Keys to Clinical Adoption

So how can developers of wearable health-tracking devices overcome that barrier?

"[Physicians] been left out of this conversation so far," Cantor said. "We have to be part of this conversation, too, and we want to be part of this conversation."

Makers of wearable devices also need to ensure physicians are confident in their technology. That's part of the mission at the UCSF-Samsung Digital Health Innovation Lab at the University of California, San Francisco's Mission Bay campus, where researchers are coming together to validate new mobile health technologies.

"When these things get in the clinical space, we need to have utmost confidence that the data is accurate and reliable," Michael Blum, a cardiologist who also serves as the chief medical information officer at UCSF Medical Center, vice chancellor for informatics at UCSF, and director of the Center for Digital Health Innovation at UCSF, said at the Digital Health Summit. "As clinicians, we can't just have everyone sending us or e-mailing us the data from whatever device they're wearing."

Reimbursement is another hurdle. Though there are a few exceptions, such as an August 2014 announcement by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs that it would begin reimbursing physicians for activity trackers that deliver data on prosthetic devices, there hasn't been consensus among payers as to how to handle wearable technology.

But healthcare reform driven by the Affordable Care Act could be nudging providers toward adoption of wearables. The law's pay-for-performance structure penalizes facilities for hospital-acquired conditions such as pressure ulcers, and some providers are turning to wearables to help them meet their goals. Chino Valley Medical Center, in California, for example, now requires patients at risk of developing pressure ulcers to be monitored using Pleasanton, CA-based Leaf Healthcare's Leaf Patient Monitoring System, which includes a wearable sensor that wirelessly monitors patients' movements and position to ensure adherence to protocols intended to prevent bed sores.

"The Leaf Patient Monitor will help us to maintain a pressure-ulcer-free performance goal while significantly improving staff productivity by allowing clinicians to focus on those patients requiring turn assistance," James Lally, the hospital's chief medical officer, said in a press release.

Won't Happen Overnight

While developments like that hint at the promising future of wearable monitoring technology in healthcare, there's still a ways to go before we get there. While Soreon Research predicts 1.3 million lives will be saved with help from wearable devices by 2020, others see a longer path to adoption for the technology.

"It's going to be slow," says Valencell's LeBoeuf. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's 10 years out, and I'd be shocked if it's sooner than that."

Prakash, of Vancive Medical Technologies, predicts it could take even double that amount of time for wearable health-tracking technology to gain widespread acceptance among providers. "People are expecting too much, too soon, too fast," he says. "To go into the clinical space and go into legacy systems is going to take years."

And during that time, the medtech industry will need to do some heavy lifting to help wearables live up to their potential. "Manufacturers need to invest in outcomes," Prakash says. Providing meaningful data-not just about patients, but about the effectiveness of wearable devices themselves-will play a key role in determining if wearables are indeed the or simply another fad.
is MD+DI's editor-in-chief. Reach her via e-mail at [email protected] .

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Wearable health-monitoring devices represent an exciting opportunity in healthcare. Armed with tools to track their own conditions, patients could be empowered to take responsibility for their own health. And rather than getting small glimpses during infrequent checkups, physicians could be provided with a steady stream of data about how their patients are doing.

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Apple vs. Google. The battle for digital health begins

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Apple vs. Google. The battle for digital health begins

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New Sleep-Tracking Wearables Help Solve Real Medical Problems

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New Sleep-Tracking Wearables Help Solve Real Medical Problems

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Every year, nearly a million exhausted people with sleep apnea-a breathing disorder caused when throat muscles relax and block the airway during sleep-get into car accidents, causing over a thousand deaths. Apnea is linked to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, an additional $3.4 billion in medical costs, and $16 billion in auto collision costs. Even though apnea has telltale signs (loud snoring, daytime fatigue), it goes undiagnosed 75 percent of the time.

Why? It's damned expensive and horrendously inconvenient to diagnose sleep apnea. Polysomnography, the standard medical sleep study, requires a medical technician to attach 22 wires to a person's body and monitor them all night long. The average cost is nearly $3,000. In the world of high-deductible health plans, that payment comes right out of the patient's pocket. Follow-up testing to measure the effectiveness of treatment is financially unthinkable. The idea of doing clinical sleep studies once a month to monitor progress is a diagnostic crack-pipe fantasy.

Enter wearables, specifically the "pro-sumer" variety with FDA clearance and clinical backing. Unlike first-generation activity trackers that measure movement and sometimes heartbeat, clinical consumer wearables like the recently released SleepImage can measure heart rhythm (ECG), breathing volume, and snoring (through tissue vibration). They can also keep tabs on body movement as well as position-whether a person is sleeping on their back, side, or belly. Algorithms calculate the second-to-second relationship between heart rate variability and breathing variability. This relationship between heart and breathing rhythms, known as cardio-pulmonary coupling, maps to the sleep stages and breathing disruptions that previously only a polysomnogram could measure.

The SleepImage is a small, oval-shaped disc that sticks to the chest near the heart. An electrode on a short wire is also attached a little lower, on the ribs. At the end of the night, a person peels off the wearable, uploads the data to a HIPPA-compliant web site, and sees a breakdown the night's sleep: stable versus unstable sleep stages, REM sleep, snore count, position and sleep interruptions. A prescription subscription gives a person more detailed clinical data visualizations and gives their doctor enough raw biometric data to distinguish between the cardio-pulmonary patterns of obstructive sleep apnea and other sleep-related breathing disorders.

Pro-sumer wearables-consumer devices that generate clinically relevant biometric data-are not (yet) cheap. The SleepImage is $249. Its consumer-level data service is $99 a year, and its prescription-level data service is $149 per year. But it's an order of magnitude cheaper than polysomnography, and it's two orders of magnitude cheaper if used four nights in a row, or once a month for half a year, to see whether measures to address the problem-losing weight, sleeping with a mouthpiece that helps keep the airway open, or a continuous positive air pressure (CPAP) mask-make a measurable difference. The real shift that pro-sumer devices enable is from one-time snapshots to a continuous, long-duration series of views that allow a patient and doctor to adjust tactics and measure the results.

Pro-sumer wearables also move measurement from the lab to the actual environment where a person lives. If the devices get cheap enough, the data makes it possible to tease apart individual sleeping issues and social sleeping problems: a partner's movements, snores and yes, cover stealing.

In a clinical case study using wearables, researchers stacked husband-and-wife time-series data to observe that the husband's snoring wasn't loud enough to wake up his wife. But it was loud enough to disrupt her stable sleep, leaving her wrecked the next day. After the husband was treated for apnea, his wife's sleep quality improved even more than his did. At long last, the Quantified Self can deliver what snorers' partners have always wanted: evidence.

Jokes aside, the hope for pro-sumer wearables is that they can transcend the "nice to have" activity data generated by movement trackers and provide the "need to have" data that indicates major medical issues. It's one thing for a healthy person to tinker with their caffeine intake, room temperature and the thread count of their sheets to see what happens to their sleep. It's a completely different thing for a doctor and patient to use wearables to addresses life-threatening conditions. That shift has a potentially monumental impact on patients, their sleeping partners, and everyone who shares the road with millions of drowsy drivers.

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New Sleep-Tracking Wearables Help Solve Real Medical Problems

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Every year, nearly a million exhausted people with sleep apnea-a breathing disorder caused when throat muscles relax and block the airway during sleep-get into car accidents, causing over a thousand deaths. Apnea is linked to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, an additional $3.4 billion in medical costs, and $16 billion in auto collision costs.

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Will 2015 really be the year of healthcare technology?

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Will 2015 really be the year of healthcare technology?

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"21st century businesses will rely on American science, technology, research and development. I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine - one that delivers the right treatment at the right time."- President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 20, 2015.

Well, it's official - 2015 has only just begun and already it's being declared by some as the year of healthcare technology. On the back of a record setting 2014 for money raised and invested in healthcare IT, many in the industry are predicting an even more robust 2015.

In the State of the Union address, President Obama supported these predictions by announcing the establishment of the Precision Medicine Initiative - an effort that aims to utilize healthcare technology to deliver more effective treatment regimens through emerging technologies like genome mapping, big data analytics and personalization. It is clear now that from the very top of the government, technology is expected to be the driver in changing the face of healthcare in the United States.

In a recent front page Wall Street Journal article, Dr. Eric Topol detailed and extoled the virtues of these emerging technologies and their potential impact on patient health and system costs. For those of us in the business, it's no surprise to read about Dr. Topol's enthusiasm for healthcare technology.

So, it's going to be an exciting year for healthcare technology!! Woo-hoo!

I guess that's the end of this post.

Except... there are a couple of major issues on the horizon that I see as potential stumbling blocks to the unfettered healthcare technology revolution everyone is envisioning over the next couple of years.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Topol properly touched on both in his WSJ article. In it he stated:

"Even as we're making great strides in capturing personal medical information....we're also pathetic at data analytics: We tend to hoard big data and have done relatively little to extract meaningful information from it. To make matters even more complicated, none of the new patient-generated data-from sensors, lab tests, self-exams, DNA sequencing or auto-imaging-is flowing into the traditional hospital- or doctor-owned electronic health records."

His first point - that all of these new applications will be great at generating data, but will do little to foster meaningful population-wide information and analysis - is solvable. There are many firms, like ours, focused on deriving meaningful insight from available data and I expect that we'll see many more new and existing data companies putting effort into aggregating and analyzing elements of this new tidal wave of data in the years ahead.

The bigger concern, and the one that is a lot harder to solve, is how we get analytics and information to flow to practitioners and other key decision makers. Dr. Topol mentions the need for these new data to better interact with electronic health records and, while he's right, he's also too myopically focused.

The bigger issue is the quantum technology gap that exists between what the healthcare technologists are building and what the traditional medical establishment can ingest and use.

What do I mean? Let me give you a real-world example.

Even though most of the open source and widely used programming languages used today are geared toward Chrome and Firefox , we at AdverseEvents, made a conscious decision to program our first web application using HTML 5 because that is the modern programming language that works for Windows and Internet Explorer - the systems that most payers and providers utilize. Yet, despite all of this forethought, we missed a major technology hurdle.

Many of the large hospital systems and insurers are still running Windows XP with Internet Explorer 8, which won't work with HTML 5. How outdated are these browsers? Microsoft itself has stopped supporting Internet Explorer 8 and Windows XP and told all customers to upgrade. That upgrade process is slow and for most healthcare institutions it hasn't even begun. Now, there are some quick fixes that can be performed, but those require a user to download a plug-in or different browser, or simply initiate a quick upgrade. Unfortunately, none of those solutions are allowed in a big multi-site medical center.

For technologists, this may all sound ridiculous, but the enterprise clients do what they do for good reason. If you want to read more on the topic, this article goes into in great detail.

This presents a basic infrastructure problem - and I'm concerned that most in our industry haven't figured it out yet. Just like you wouldn't build a 5-story apartment building on a foundation originally designed for a 1-story house, we can't easily build modern technology apps to run on outdated operating systems.

So, what does this have to do with 2015 and the year of healthcare technology?

Simply this - I expect a lot of positive developments in our industry this year, but for all of these new-fangled applications (mobile and web) to really reach their maximum potential, they need to work within the traditional centers of care.

And for that to happen, there needs to be a system-wide technology awakening at those sites. Unfortunately, making that happen is going to be a slow and expensive process. And it may even end up only happening with a requirement (or an incentive) from the government.

Until a key healthcare decision maker can perform the same basic technology tasks in her professional environment that we all take for granted in our personal lives, the utility of all of the new healthcare technologies coming to market will be largely mitigated. And that will stall out the momentum everyone is expecting in this industry over the next couple of years.

Will this technology gap be solved? Of course it will. The questions are how long will it take, how much will it cost, and who is going to foot that bill.

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Will 2015 really be the year of healthcare technology?

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"21st century businesses will rely on American science, technology, research and development. I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine - one that delivers the right treatment at the right time." - President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 20, 2015.

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WHEN Kenneth Treleani was told last summer that he was suffering from high blood pressure, his doctor prescribed medicine to tackle the condition. He also made another recommendation: that Mr Treleani invest in a wireless wrist monitor that takes his blood pressure at various times during the day and sends the data wirelessly to an app on his smartphone, which dispatches the readings to his physician. Mr Treleani says the device (pictured), made by a startup called iHealth, has already saved him several visits to the doctor's surgery.
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Portable blood-pressure monitors have been around for a while. But the idea of linking a tiny, wearable one to a smartphone and a software app is an example of how entrepreneurs are harnessing wireless technology to create innovative services. By letting doctors and carers monitor patients remotely, and by making it simpler to collect vast amounts of data on the effectiveness of treatments, the mobile-health industry, or m-health as it has become known, aims to drive down costs while improving results for patients.

Many experiments are already under way in emerging markets, where new mobile devices and apps are helping relieve pressure on poorly financed and ill-equipped clinics and hospitals. But the biggest prize is America, which splashes out a breathtaking $2.8 trillion each year on a health-care system riddled with inefficiencies. The prospect of revolutionising the way care is delivered there is inspiring entrepreneurs. Mercom Capital Group, a consulting firm, reckons that of the $2.2 billion venture capitalists put into health-care startups last year, mostly in America, $564m went to m-health businesses.

The m-health market can be broken down into two broad categories. First, there are the apps and appliances used to monitor the wearer's physical fitness. Firms such as Nike, Fitbit and Jawbone make wristbands and other wearable gadgets full of sensors that let people record their performance, and their calorie-burning, as they pound the pavement or sweat in the gym.

Second, other apps and devices link patients with a medical condition to the health-care system. Last month Google said it was working on a contact lens containing a tiny wireless chip and sensors that would measure and transmit the glucose levels in a diabetic patient's tears. In December Apple was granted an American patent on a means to incorporate a heartbeat sensor into its devices.

The fitness apps may help people to keep up their training regimes, and in time make the population healthier. But in the shorter term they will not have much effect on the health-care system. Nor may they make many investors rich. IMS Health, a research firm, says that of the 33,000-plus health-related apps on Google Play's app store (the figure for Apple's iTunes is over 43,000), just five of them-of which two are calorie-counters-account for 15% of all downloads.

A growing posse of entrepreneurs think the big money is to be made in the second category, of apps and devices that seek to transform the way health care is delivered. Large companies spy an opportunity here too. Qualcomm, which sells wireless technology and services, has set up an m-health division, Qualcomm Life, and built a technology platform to make it easy for m-health companies to combine data about things such as the medicines people take and the results of tests they run on themselves, so their doctors can get a more complete picture of their health.

Among those firms with products already for sale, AliveCor makes a $199 gadget that attaches to a smartphone and lets patients take an electrocardiogram by placing two fingers on metal plates. It also sells a veterinary version for taking pets' ECGs. The data are displayed in an app on the phone and can be reviewed (for a fee) by a cardiologist. CellScope, another startup, makes an otoscope-a device for looking inside the ear-that can be attached to an iPhone and an app that can send the images it takes to a physician.

Last year Medtronic, a huge medical-devices company, splashed out $200m to buy Cardiocom, which combines telehealth services with wireless home gadgets, including scales for heart patients for whom sudden weight gain may be a dangerous symptom. In October Verizon, a mobile-telecoms operator, launched a platform to transmit data from home devices, such as glucose monitors, to the firm's secure "cloud" of servers.

As Don Jones of Qualcomm Life puts is, just as a car's electronics tell a driver about its condition, so m-health devices and apps "give people dashboards, gauges and alarm signals" that make it easier for them and their doctors to track what is happening with their bodies. This may alert them to the need for action well before the patient's condition deteriorates to the extent that he needs hospital treatment. Given that in America the average cost of a night's stay in hospital is almost $4,300, there is scope for significant savings.

Another obvious way to use the technology to avert health crises is by checking that patients are taking their medicines. Propeller Health sells a device that fits on top of asthma inhalers, to monitor their use. Proteus Digital Health, which raised $63m last year, is testing an ingestible sensor that is taken at the same time as prescribed medication. The device, which relies on stomach fluids to complete a circuit to power it, transmits information to a smartphone so doctors and carers can track when a patient takes pills.

Again, the goal is to save money while improving health. The average annual cost of, say, treating sufferers from high blood pressure who fail to take their medicines is nearly $4,000 more than the cost of treating those who pop their pills reliably.

If such products live up to their promise, a side-effect may be that there is less need for medical technicians-an example of a wave of technology-related job losses that some economists expect. The development of machine intelligence, another hot area for investment (see article), may eventually mean there is less need for doctors or specialists to analyse test results.

One snag is that techies' enthusiasm for such innovation is colliding with the health-care industry's conservatism. Doctors in America have been paid for delivering more care, so products that might lead to fewer billable patient visits are viewed with suspicion. This is changing gradually as insurers switch towards rewarding hospitals for providing a better quality of care instead of simply paying them for the quantity delivered. But there is a long way to go in making the medical profession take an interest in cost-saving: a study last month in Health Affairs, a journal, found that few American surgeons had any idea of the cost of the devices, such as replacement hip joints, they implant in patients.

Encouraging iPochondria

Insurers may have cause to worry that, instead of reducing doctors' workloads, the spread of m-health devices and apps may only encourage hypochondria: surgeries may be flooded with the "worried well", fussing over every slightly anomalous reading. That may keep the medical profession nicely busy, but will not curb the ever-rising cost of health care.

So, to win over doctors, hospital managers and insurers, m-health firms will need to gather evidence to support their claims of cost-cutting and improved patient outcomes. Such evidence is still surprisingly scarce, says Robert Kaplan of the National Institutes of Health, a government agency. Stephen Kraus of Bessemer Venture Partners, which has examined hundreds of m-health startups, says many firms are blithely assuming that all you have to do is "appify" health care and the world will change.

Makers of more sophisticated m-health products, aimed at doctors, clinics and hospitals rather than patients, will have to build a sales force like that of a pharmaceuticals company, says Bob Kocher of Venrock, another venture-capital firm. That will take time and lots of money.

Some m-health products may have to win approval from America's Food and Drug Administration. Most firms were pleased by a plan the FDA published last year that said it would regulate only those m-health products that do the work of a traditional medical device-an ECG, say, but not a pedometer. But applying for approval is still burdensome. And the FDA has not finished drawing up its rules: m-health firms are waiting for a framework on the use of information technology in health care from the FDA and two other agencies. Despite such obstacles, optimists such as Peter Tippett of Verizon see health care undergoing the mobile transformation that banking and other industries have already been through.

Andrew Thompson, Proteus's boss, hopes that the sensors and software his firm is developing will form the dominant "platform" for m-health in the way that Facebook dominates social networking and lets other firms build apps that run on it. But it is likely to face stiff opposition. Mr Kocher thinks giants like Google and Apple may seek to build m-health platforms too.

Apple filed its patent for a "seamlessly embedded heart-rate monitor" after looking for ways to replace passwords with biometric methods-in this case, an ECG-to authenticate users. It may think carefully before entering a business as heavily regulated as medical devices. But it has made no secret of its interest in selling wearable gadgets packed with sensors; and if consumers prove as keen on m-health as investors currently are, it will surely want to satisfy them.

Firms that aspire to make serious money in m-health will need plenty of patience and deep pockets. But they may be able to rely on an army of technophile patients who lobby their doctors to incorporate the new devices and apps in their treatment programmes. Mr Treleani is one of them: "I'd be suspicious of medical practices that aren't moving forward with these new technologies," he says.

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WHEN Kenneth Treleani was told last summer that he was suffering from high blood pressure, his doctor prescribed medicine to tackle the condition. He also made another recommendation: that Mr Treleani invest in a wireless wrist monitor that takes his blood pressure at various times during the day and sends the data wirelessly to an app on his smartphone, which dispatches the readings to his physician.

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Apple's health tech takes early lead among top hospitals

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Apple's health tech takes early lead among top hospitals

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc's () healthcare technology is spreading quickly among major U.S. hospitals, showing early promise as a way for doctors to monitor patients remotely and lower costs.

Fourteen of 23 top hospitals contacted by Reuters said they have rolled out a pilot program of Apple's HealthKit service - which acts as a repository for patient-generated health information like blood pressure, weight or heart rate - or are in talks to do so.

The pilots aim to help physicians monitor patients with such chronic conditions as diabetes and hypertension. Apple rivals Google Inc () and Samsung Electronics (), which have released similar services, are only just starting to reach out to hospitals and other medical partners.

Such systems hold the promise of allowing doctors to watch for early signs of trouble and intervene before a medical problem becomes acute. That could help hospitals avoid repeat admissions, for which they are penalized under new U.S. government guidelines, all at a relatively low cost.

The U.S. healthcare market is $3 trillion, and researcher IDC Health Insights predicts that 70 percent of healthcare organizations worldwide will invest by 2018 in technology including apps, wearables, remote monitoring and virtual care.

Those trying out Apple's service included at least eight of the 17 hospitals on one list ranking the best hospitals, the U.S. News & World Report's Honor Roll. Google and Samsung had started discussions with just a few of these hospitals.

Apple's HealthKit works by gathering data from sources such as glucose measurement tools, food and exercise-tracking apps and Wi-fi connected scales. The company's Apple Watch, due for release in April, promises to add to the range of possible data, which with patients' consent can be sent to an electronic medical record for doctors to view.

"TIMING RIGHT"

Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans has been working with Apple and Epic Systems, Ochsner's medical records vendor, to roll out a pilot program for high-risk patients. The team is already tracking several hundred patients who are struggling to control their blood pressure. The devices measure blood pressure and other statistics and send it to Apple phones and tablets.

"If we had more data, like daily weights, we could give the patient a call before they need to be hospitalized," said Chief Clinical Transformation Officer Dr. Richard Milani.

Sumit Rana, chief technology officer at Epic Systems, said the timing was right for mobile health tech to take off.

"We didn't have smartphones ten years ago; or an explosion of new sensors and devices," Rana said.

Apple has said that over 600 developers are integrating HealthKit into their health and fitness apps.

Many of the hospitals told Reuters they were eager to try pilots of the Google Fit service, since Google's Android software powers most smartphones. Google said it has several developer partners on board for Fit, which connects to apps and devices, but did not comment on its outreach to hospitals.

Samsung said it is working with Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital to develop mobile health technology. The firm also has a relationship with the University of California's San Francisco Medical Center.

Apple's move into mobile health tech comes as the Affordable Care Act and other healthcare reform efforts aim to provide incentives for doctors to keep patients healthy. The aim is to move away from the "fee for service" model, which has tended to reward doctors for pricey procedures rather than for outcomes.

Still, hospitals must decide whether the difficulty of sorting through a deluge of patient-generated data of varying quality is worth the investment.

"This is a whole new data source that we don't understand the integrity of yet," said William Hanson, chief medical information officer at the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

FIRST STEPS

Apple has recruited informal industry advisors, including Rana and John Halamka, chief information officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, to discuss health data privacy and for introductions to the industry.

The company said it had an "incredible team" of experts in health and fitness and was talking to medical institutions, healthcare and industry experts on ways to deliver its services.

A few hospitals are also exploring how to manage the data that is flowing in from health and fitness-concerned patients, whom many in Silicon Valley refer to as the "worried well."

Beth Israel's Halamka said that many of the 250,000 patients in his system had data from sources such as Jawbone's Up activity tracker and wirelessly connected scales.

"Can I interface to every possible device that every patient uses? No. But Apple can," he said.

Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles is developing visual dashboards to present patient-generated data to doctors in an easy-to-digest manner.

Experts say that there will eventually be a need for common standards to ensure that data can be gathered from both Apple's system and its competitors.

"How do we get Apple to work with Samsung? I think it will be a problem eventually," said Brian Carter, a director focused on personal and population health at Cerner, an electronic medical record vendor that is integrated with HealthKit.

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Exclusive: Apple's health tech takes early lead among top hospitals

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc's () healthcare technology is spreading quickly among major U.S. hospitals, showing early promise as a way for doctors to monitor patients remotely and lower costs.

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Wearables Carve New Path To Health In 2015

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Wearables Carve New Path To Health In 2015

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Currently viewed as extensions of avid joggers, cyclists, and quantified-selfers, fitness bands and other wearable devices will begin a transition to serious health tools in 2015.

Many developers compete on price, offering models at around $50, or on fashion-oriented options like band colors, but others focus their development initiatives on health-oriented differentiators designed to improve users' condition or educate them on the effects their habits have on their bodies or minds.

Athletes, too, want more usable information; they want insight into how they can increase endurance and stamina and enhance their physical performance, executives said.

"The wearables market is starting to see technology that produces richer and more precise user data than ever before. The problem we're seeing is that most fitness trackers are offering a flat world of data, without much insight beyond what an accelerometer can capture," Kenzen CEO Sonia Sousa told InformationWeek. "This is why wearable fatigue is so high. After about six months, you stop caring because the number of steps doesn't really change."

Use of health-oriented wearables will almost triple between 2014 and 2018, according to Juniper Research. Yet Gartner says shipments of wearable electronic devices for fitness will decline to 68.1 million units in 2015 from 70 million in 2014. Sales will rebound in 2016 as people buy other devices to do similar jobs, spending money on smart watches, smart wristbands, and related fitness devices, the research firm predicted.

No matter what they're called, some of these devices are getting smarter about motivating healthy behavior, bringing new capabilities to wearers, or providing useful medical insight.

Hidden among the hundreds of product releases flooding the market in 2014, a late trickle of news from both well-known and lesser-known wearable device vendors touted new, medically focused capabilities for their products. These features will help propel adoption beyond casual or fitness-oriented users and into the hands of those with chronic conditions -- the people who can most benefit from regular monitoring of their heart rates, glucose levels, diets, and other vital signs.

Others are targeting the growing senior population. In 2015, wearable technology will continue its evolution from step counters to critical remote health monitoring tools. In fact, 45% of those surveyed said increased access to patient data and technological innovation will present the biggest opportunity for growth in 2015, according to a recent Kinnser Software survey of home health leaders.

"Big data will mean big business for home health agencies," Chris Hester, president and founder of Kinnser, said in a press release. "Home health agencies and physicians will use the data collected from wearable technologies to inform better care decisions, allowing them to deliver higher quality care in an ultimately more efficient way. This new approach will enable insights into the care continuum and help identify long-term patterns and risk factors before they become serious medical issues."

Before these more widespread medically oriented trends take hold, the industry as a whole must address privacy concerns, ensuring private companies protect patient data (for they are patients, not consumers, anytime you're discussing this type of information). This data can never be sold or shared, and it must be accessible to the patient, who has the right to provide it to a clinician or other medical professional. Likewise, the federal government must address regulatory issues that slow investment, development, and adoption.

Ideally, insurers will cover these devices if they are deemed medically necessary. Certainly, further study may show wearables reduce medical costs by eliminating unnecessary doctor visits, reducing hospital stays and readmissions, improving physical and mental health, and perhaps curtailing instances of diabetes, obesity, and other conditions. If these theories hold true, the volume discount purchase price on these (perhaps private-labeled) products by a health system or insurance company could soon pay for itself.

Indeed, Gartner predicts that, by 2018 through 2020, 25% of fitness monitors will be sold through nonretail channels -- including gyms, wellness providers, insurance companies, employers, and weight loss clinics -- at subsidized or no cost. Perhaps, if research proves particularly compelling, that movement could start even earlier.

Some of these new wearables are best suited for physical therapy or training; others are targeted directly at the chronically ill or those recuperating from an illness or surgery. Given the newness of this overall market, the developments we're seeing today bode well for the overall health of the wearable health market.

Here are some new health-oriented wearable products and apps expected to reach the market in 2015. Which ones could be hits? Which ones miss the mark?

(Image: Keoni Cabral/Flickr)

Alison Diana has written about technology and business for more than 20 years. She was editor, contributors, at Internet Evolution; editor-in-chief of 21st Century IT; and managing editor, sections, at CRN. She has also written for eWeek, Baseline Magazine, Redmond Channel ... View Full Bio

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Wearables Carve New Path To Health In 2015 - InformationWeek

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Currently viewed as extensions of avid joggers, cyclists, and quantified-selfers, fitness bands and other wearable devices will begin a transition to serious health tools in 2015. Many developers compete on price, offering models at around $50, or on fashion-oriented options like band colors, but others focus their development initiatives on health-oriented differentiators designed to improve users' condition or educate them on the effects their habits have on their bodies or minds.

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5 major digital health trends we will see in 2015

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5 major digital health trends we will see in 2015

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Survey: Data Privacy Biggest Barrier to mHealth Adoption

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Survey: Data Privacy Biggest Barrier to mHealth Adoption

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51 percent of healthcare executives find data privacy is the biggest barrier to mHealth adoption, according to a survey of 144 executives and managers in the healthcare industry in 23 countries published by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

Privacy Concerns

The report, Power to the patient: How mobile technology is transforming healthcare , sponsored by SAP, reveals the path to mHealth adoption will not be smooth. 49 percent of EIU survey respondents think consumer wariness about privacy violations could be a stumbling block for adoption, while 53 percent of executives fear that consumers may misinterpret their data and make poor decisions.

The worries are real and justified, but solutions can be found. In Ampath's project in Kenya, "it took us five years to get to the point where we feel comfortable and we are continuously improving the security features within our applications", says Dr. Were, chief medical information officer at Ampath in Kenya. Key steps include encrypting all data and being able to remotely wipe smartphones clean if lost or stolen.

In addition, companies worry that regulators will struggle to keep up with the fast pace of technological innovation, leading to long delays before new devices are approved. In the developing world, people tend to use pre-paid phones and switch numbers frequently, making it harder to reach them reliably by text or email.

Finding Viable Business Models

Another key barrier for mHealth adoption is finding viable business models for the new devices, services and connections. The report states the business case is strongest when the agency or organization that pays for mobile health is able to reap potential savings. This problem is most acute in U.S. fee-for-service healthcare model, where mobile health may take money out of the pockets of hospitals, doctors, lab-testing companies and pharmaceutical firms. In fact, 19% of EIU survey respondents in the U.S. saw no viable revenue stream at all. Healthcare executives identified the following possible business models:

- selling health services (cited by 41% of respondents)

- selling subscriptions to premium content and advice (38%)

- selling the data collected although potentially controversial

For example, the pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca is helping to fund Ampath's HIV control efforts in Kenya, for instance, in exchange for data that it can use in drug development.

Key Findings

Other key findings include:

- 64% of healthcare leaders and executives say mobile health could dramatically improve outcomes by giving people greater access to medical information

- 79% of healthcare executives say that mobile technologies are providing education and information.

- In five years, 50% predict that mobile health will enable patients to proactively participate in their own care, and lower costs.

- The main role of mobile health technologies, according to 79% of the respondents in the EIU survey, is to provide education and information.

- Many respondents fear that "consumers and/or patients are not used to the idea of tech-based health services" (54%), and that "the technologies are too complicated," especially for the ill or elderly (44%).

- Five years from now, only 11% of respondents in the EIU survey see education as the primary role for mobile technology. Rather, they see the top three benefits as "enabling patients to participate proactively in their care" (50%), "reducing the cost of healthcare delivery" (50%) and "improving personal awareness through self-monitoring" (29%).

- 50% of the EIU survey respondents, predict that mobile health can slash spending on healthcare in the US and other developed countries.

-44% of respondents find institutional conservatism a big problem

In the future of mobile health, success will go to pioneers with the most innovative ideas, devices, services and business models.

Survey Background/Methodology

The report is based on a survey of 144 executives and managers in the healthcare industry in 23 countries. The survey tapped the opinions of those in biotechnology companies (8%), healthcare provision (41%), healthcare technology companies (10%), medical device and diagnostics provision (8%), healthcare payment (5%) and pharmaceuticals (15%). Just over a third (36%) of respondents came from public sector institutions, such as Medicare or Medicaid in the US or the NHS in the UK, while two-thirds are from the private sector (64%). Respondents were based in North America (48%), Europe (30%), Latin America (34%), and Africa (32%).

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Survey: Data Privacy Biggest Barrier to mHealth Adoption

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51 percent of healthcare executives find data privacy is the biggest barrier to mHealth adoption, according to a survey of 144 executives and managers in the healthcare industry in 23 countries published by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

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As 2014 is coming to an end, I have put together a list of the most notable medical apps that were released in 2014. While 2014 was dominated by wearable technology, it still saw the addition of several innovative physician and healthcare provider centric apps.

In particular, it was great to see organizations such as the CDC, Red Cross, American Heart Association, and several others step up and finally create some innovative apps for health providers. The following list contains apps not only by these venerable organizations - but also several apps that most haven't even heard of.

Most of the apps listed are available for all platforms: iPhone, iPad, Android. All the apps listed are free, except for one.

12) JAMA Network Medical Image challenge

While the NEJM has had their image challenge app in the App Store for more than four years now, JAMA finally released their version - the JAMA Network Medical Image Challenge.

The app has an interesting quiz function and is great for learning on the go. You can compare your answers to peers and also see how you're progressing through a point scoring system. The cases presented are succinct and fun to go through. We did a video review of the app recently to highlight all the features.
Price: Free
iMedicalApps Review
iPhone/iPad Link
Android Link (not currently available)

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The best medical apps released in 2014 - iMedicalApps

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As 2014 is coming to an end, I have put together a list of the most notable medical apps that were released in 2014. While 2014 was dominated by wearable technology, it still saw the addition of several innovative physician and healthcare provider centric apps.

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8 Examples Of How Google Is Moving Into Digital Health

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8 Examples Of How Google Is Moving Into Digital Health

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Universities use Fitbit trackers to study spine surgery recovery time

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Universities use Fitbit trackers to study spine surgery recovery time

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Universities use Fitbit trackers to study spine surgery recovery time

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Researchers from Northwestern University have launched a study that will analyze how monitoring the physical activity of patients who underwent spine surgery, using Fitbit activity trackers, could help them predict the patient's recovery time.

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What is wearable tech? Everything you need to know explained

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What is wearable tech? Everything you need to know explained

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Wearable tech is one of the fastest-advancing sectors of the wider technology industry, now outpacing the development of smartphones.

From the basic fitness trackers and highly-advanced sports and smartwatches, to virtual and augmented reality headsets, wearables are everywhere.

The sector has even spawned an entire 'hearables' subcategory of tech placed in the ear to deliver music, but also offer access to smart assistants. Basically, there's a whole lot happening in the space. If you're a newcomer to this world and want to get up to speed with the world of wearables, we've broken it all down for you below.

What exactly is wearable tech?

The new age of wearables tap into the connected self - they're laden with smart sensors that track our movements and biometrics, often using Bluetooth to sync wirelessly to a smartphone. Others also rely on Wi-Fi connectivity and standalone mobile 4G LTE data connections.

Wearables use sensors to connect to you as a person, helping you to achieve goals such as staying fit and active, losing weight, being more organized or tracking your overall mental and physical health. In the case of VR and AR heads-up displays, they're providing a wealth of new entertainment and educational opportunities, as well as enhancing the world around us.

How do you wear them?

The early generations of wearables saw devices clipped to our bodies, as the prime focus was tracking movement through motion sensors. However, advancements brought a wide-range of powerful sensors, which require direct contact with the skin. Thus, the tech gravitated to other body parts: the wrists, fingers, chest, forearms, ears, eyes, forehead, temple and anywhere else you can think of (yes, even those parts).

What kinds of wearables are there?

There are multiple categories of wearables. Some products manage exist in more than one, while a few others define categories all of their own.

Smartwatches

Smartwatches are wrist-worn devices that connect to your mobile phone to act as mini-windows onto your digital life. The mighty Apple Watch now dominates the landscape. It brings notifications and calls from the iPhone screen and tracks your physical activity. There's independent GPS for location services and an LTE model.

Beyond the Apple Watch, Google's own Wear OS is the equivalent for Android phone users. Watches like the Skagen Falster 3 offer slim design and great for men's and women's wrists alike.

Fitbit is in on the act with the excellent Fitbit Versa 2, which is heavy on health features with blood oxygen tracking and top-notch sleep tracking.

Other Apple Watch rivals are going their own route. Samsung uses its own Tizen OS on wearables like the Galaxy Watch Active 2.

But things are getting cheaper. Xiaomi has dominated fitness trackers and is looking to repeat the trick with the Xiaomi Mi Watch, and Amazfit can't stop undercutting the competition with the likes of the Amazfit GTS and Amazfit T-Rex.

Fitness trackers remain very popular among people who want to track progress through heart rate, steps and estimated calorie burn, while receiving some smartphone notifications.

They're perfect if you don't/want super-advanced metrics provided by sports watches, or don't want a mini smartphone like the Apple Watch. They also offer longer battery life than smartphones.

The latest devices like the Fitbit Charge 3 - our current fitness tracker of the year - offer heart-rate tracking, sleep tracking, waterproofing and swim tracking, smartphone notifications and, importantly, a seven-day battery life.

The Fitbit Inspire HR is a great, lower cost and less techy alternative - as is the $40 Xioami Mi Band 4, delivers functional options for those entering the wearable arena. Overall quality and accuracy take a hit.

For those active types who love running, cycling, swimming or even golf, a dedicated sports watch should be at the top of your wearable wish list.

These devices should have GPS (don't be suckered into one that doesn't) with heart rate tracking and associated insights. This data can provide another level of information about your chosen sport, and take your training to the next level.

Garmin leads the way with its series of GPS sports watches.

The flagship Forerunner 945 is designed for elite triathletes who require Olympic-level biometric training programs, including metrics like "VO2 max and training status with adjustments for heat, altitude acclimation status, training load focus, recovery time, and aerobic and anaerobic training effects."

The Fenix 6 series is perhaps the ultimate sports watch, and features all of the top features from the company's running, trekking, outdoors, swimming and golf devices - and features tracking for every sport imaginable.

There's a full colour display and on board maps and Spotify offline syncing. Options like the Polar Vantage V and Suunto 9 Baro are great for those seeking a high-end training watch.

The best sports watches run upwards of £500, but there are options at friendlier price points. The Garmin Forerunner 45 still delivers accurate GPS and represents incredible fantastic value at £170.

Head-mounted displays

They're generally classified into virtual reality and augmented reality categories. Some straddle both.

VR

VR headsets, like the higher-end Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, block out the rest of the world. They're connected to a PC/games console and present a computer-generated virtual reality to fool your brain into thinking it's somewhere else entirely.

Sitting in between those and the cheaper VR headsets are the likes of the Oculus Quest and the upcoming Vive Cosmos. Both offer high end VR experiences in a standalone setup.

You can experiment with VR by inserting your smartphone into a Google Cardboard headset for around $15. Google Daydream and Samsung Gear VR headsets offer greater quality for under $100, while the Oculus Go offers affordable standalone virtual reality experience, free from a smartphone and a PC.
Essential round-up: The best VR headsets
AR/smartglasses

Augmented reality headsets and smart glasses enhance the real world by placing virtual elements in our line of sight. So a large projector screen could appear to be on your living room wall, or a game of Minecraft could be happening on your dinner table. If you're walking around a city, you could see restaurant recommendations or turn-by-turn directions.

Microsoft's Hololens headsets and the range of third-party Windows Mixed Reality devices lead the way, but there are a growing range of smartglasses that perform the function in more recognisable form factors. The Eyesight Raptor and Solos glasses for cyclists, for example, enable serious riders to keep their eyes on the road and keep track of all their stats, maps and weather.

This is still an emerging category, a long way from reaching the mainstream, but Apple's rumored interest in building AR hardware could change all that.
Essential round-up: Best AR headsets and smartglasses
Hearables

The fastest-emerging segment of the wearable market is hearables, which are worn in the ear. The most popular example is Apple's AirPods, those true wireless earphones that offer quick access to the Siri voice assistant. Similarly, any pair of head/earphones that interacts with a voice assistant like Alexa and the Google Assistant is considered a hearable device.

There are also live translation tools like Google's Pixel Buds and the Waverley Labs Pilot, smart hearing aids like the Nuheara IQbuds Boost, and the Lifebeam Vi headset for on-board virtual run coaching. The Bose Frames for example, combine bone conduction audio, augmented reality visuals and access to smart assistants all in a pair of sunglasses.

Unfortunately, not all is rosy in the hearable garden. Bragi, makers of the excellent Dash earphones has exited the wearable market. However, we're excited for the forthcoming developments from the players that still remain in this space.
Essential round-up: Best hearables and smart earbuds
Consumer health

A huge growth area for wearable technology is consumer health. We're not just talking about improving fitness here. The insights from medical class sensors in consumer wearable products are already saving lives. The FDA-approved electrocardiogram (ECG) in the Apple Watch can detect signs of A-Fib, while it'll also check for an irregular heartbeat at regular intervals. The fall detection tool can alert the emergency services/contacts if you take a tumble.

It's tools like these that are broadening the appeal of wearables to new audiences. The Dreem 2 headset - which is seeking out FDA approval - is taking on chronic insomnia with cognitive behavioural therapy. The company says 80% of its users experience relief after just six weeks.

There are wearable blood sugar monitors, blood pressure monitors and even sweat trackers that'll tell you when you need to hydrate. The Flow headset is certified to treat depression, while L'Oreal is selling the My Skin Track UV patch, which indicates your exposure to damaging UV rays.

What have wearables still got to get right?

Although wearables have improved exponentially in the last few years, the journey is far from complete. The Apple Watch, for example, still lacks sleep tracking nous, making its pitch as a holistic wellness tracking device highly questionable. Until battery life exceeds the need to charge nightly, that isn't changing. The key to that could be the rumored deployment of less power-hungry micro LED displays.

Google could double its efforts on Wear OS and still be accused of half-assing it. Hardly any Wear OS watches are using the newer Snapdragon 3100 SoC that could improve battery life and efficiency either.

Although Fitbit has introduced female health tracking, there's still a long way to go. We expect to see more wearable companies dedicate more of their efforts to exploring an area largely untapped market.

Hearables are showing promise, but we want hands-free support for personal assistants like Siri and true real-time language translation without needing a companion app or without lag.

Then there's smart clothing. A wearable sector that we've often championed to be the one that will truly bring wearables to the masses. Development challenges remain and while we seen a few standout examples like the Nadi X smart yoga pants and fitness garments from the likes of Athos and Hexoskin, it's still not really taken off.

Overall, we're only scratching the surface when it comes to biometrics. Sensors are giving us access to more data and it's increasingly accurate. However, the true value comes through the ability to interpret that data with actionable insights. This myriad of data points can be married more effectively to provide a greater overall picture of our health.

When it comes to virtual reality, it may already have peaked without a killer app and issues with motion sickness endure for lots of users. With augmented reality we're yet to see anything outstanding that can significantly enhance lives. But it's early days for AR and we anticipate that there's more to come in the quest to merge our real world with a virtual one.

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What is wearable tech? Everything you need to know explained

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Wearable tech is one of the fastest-advancing sectors of the wider technology industry, now outpacing the development of smartphones. From the basic fitness trackers and highly-advanced sports and smartwatches, to virtual and augmented reality headsets, wearables are everywhere. The sector has even spawned an entire 'hearables' subcategory of tech placed in the ear to deliver...

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5 ways digital health is going to evolve in 2015

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5 ways digital health is going to evolve in 2015

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While most providers know that smart phones can run neat healthcare apps, with new products on the market every day, few healthcare stakeholders are up to date on the ways in which digital healthcare has blossomed in the US. Those who ignore digital health's potential will be left behind quickly-the revolution is already underway.

Of course, there will always be holdouts who will have no part of a new technology. But it's not fair to compare doctors' resistance to using EHRs to digital health products with easy-to-use, consumer-facing interfaces-​primarily because there isn't anything like a usable EHR out there yet.

I've been keeping a close eye on the emergence of digital health tech that is poised to play a very meaningful role in transforming how care is delivered. Here's some trends that are likely to flower in 2015.

1. Population health via mobile

As early adopters have experimented with mobile health technology, some have begun to leverage mobile devices as a means of tracking populations more closely. In particular, early research suggests that several chronic illnesses, including asthma, diabetes and heart disease, can be managed more effectively when consumers and providers share data in real time. It's important to note that population health management platforms, designed to organize mobile data, are new and immature. Still, IT vendors with immense resources are also creating products, including Philips, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung. Someone will get it right, and probably soon.

2. Cheap, accessible diagnostic testing

Startups across the mobile health world are hoping to lower the costs of diagnosing patients. For example, a California startup named Scanadu is preparing to roll out a gadget allowing consumers to do urine tests at home, to be priced, sources suggest, at a consumer-accessible level. Another vendor, Mobisante, has developed ultrasound platform which requires only a wand, a smartphone and an app to run. These two approaches alone could dramatically reduce testing costs for many patients, and in turn take some of the cost burden off of employers and payers.

3. Team-based care enabled digitally

Though this is still a very new market niche within digital health, it could grow rapidly this year. A small handful of companies are developing software that when implemented will leverage the "always on" relationships people have with their phones. These companies hope to make patient care hand-offs simpler, keep providers informed when a patient's data stream suggest they're struggling and reinforce a team ethos among everyone caring for a patient.

4. The marriage of sensor arrays and mobile tech

Most professionals outside the digital health scene may not know this, but there's some very active development efforts going on to build more sensor-laden watches, clothing and even ingestible "pill" sensors. As with other mobile health models, these objects will feed data to patients' smartphones, and the smartphone will speed the data to providers and even amateur caregivers. It's too soon yet to determine whether new forms of monitoring, such as smart clothing, will be an industry hit. But the very fact that such alternatives are being discussed in the mHealth world suggests that these entrepreneurs have at least a little bit of traction. If they get it right, they could pick up a lot more this year.

5. Doctors and hospitals get more savvy

As we've covered here before, providers are investing in digital health and even taking incubators for connected/mobile health under their own roof. While some clinicians may still feel overwhelmed by the prospect of coping with lots of digital data, the vendors of tools to manage the flow are becoming more sophisticated daily. Ultimately, as the mobile health industry pulls one rabbit out of the hat after another, and clinicians see the value of digital health strategies, it will change the way medicine is practiced and almost certainly improve outcomes.

Top image credit: Fotolia

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5 ways digital health is going to evolve in 2015

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While most providers know that smart phones can run neat healthcare apps, with new products on the market every day, few healthcare stakeholders are up to date on the ways in which digital healthcare has blossomed in the US. Those who ignore digital health's potential will be left behind quickly-the revolution is already underway.

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A leading voice in the convergence of technology and medicine, John Nosta helps define, dissect, and deliberate global trends in digital health.

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The hidden digital health opportunities in Obamacare

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The hidden digital health opportunities in Obamacare

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I've worked in digital health for a while (I'm the co-founder of digital health start-up Care at Hand and a physician at Boston Children's Hospital and Boston Medical Center), so I was as surprised as you may be when I discovered a tough truth: despite over $5 billion in investments in digital health in 2014, there appears to be no correlation between that investment and improved quality of care for patients. This information comes from a recent study out of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).

When my colleagues from the IHI and I decided to conduct this study, we knew one thing for sure: most major healthcare organizations purchase healthcare technology with little guidance. We wanted to help organizations and individuals better choose and implement technology based on the various dimensions of the Triple Aim, one of the guiding principles of the $1 trillion Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Triple Aim includes improving patient experience, improving the health of populations, and reducing the cost of care. Which healthcare technologies were actually helping Americans achieve the Triple Aim?

Our study included a systematic, blind review of the top 100 most funded health startups in 2013. In our analysis, we sorted each of the technologies based on the dimensions of the Triple Aim, end-user, type of technology, level of investment, and level of evidence. And what we found is something I'd hoped not to see: the Triple Aim influences many of the provisions of the ACA, yet there are major gaps between where investor money is going and where we should be investing if we truly want to see change in our healthcare system. Only 2% of the technologies reviewed in our study hoped to improve all three dimensions of the Triple Aim.
Concentration and gaps in digital health
This begs an important question: If we're investing in technologies that don't support the Triple Aim, how do we decide where to refocus our efforts? Here are some of the little-known (and huge) business opportunities in healthcare reform - opportunities that may help us put our money where our stethoscopes are:

Only 23% of the technologies in our study had peer-reviewed research supporting their claims of improving medical outcomes, decreasing the costs of care, or improving patient experiences. What about the rest? They had little or no research supporting them at all.

It often seems intuitive to invest in a company with a strong mission, a good back-story or a well-rounded team. But what's important to note here is that unlike many other sectors, failed healthcare investments have implications beyond poor financial ROI, including morbidity and even mortality. So when we invest in healthcare technologies, we should, in fact, be focusing carefully on areas that promise real, research-backed advances. What does this look like? In our study, companies with peer-reviewed research to support their claims included Proteus Digital Health, the creators of ingestible sensors that track medication compliance; Lumosity, an online brain exercise program; and PatientsLikeMe, a patient network and real-time research platform. Technologies with evidence of impact are positioned to have a competitive advantage.

Technologies that expand their solutions beyond just improving patient outcomes, focusing instead of all three points of the Triple Aim, are positioned to grow. Why? ACA initiatives like the Readmission Reduction Program, Bundled Payment Program, Value-based Purchasing Program and STAR Quality Rating Program are built to incentivize companies that achieve the Triple Aim.

Our analysis suggested that many of the top-funded digital health technologies fall out of the Triple Aim loop because they cater to fee-for-service-based reimbursement. This reimbursement strategy dictates short-term success - success that the ACA is hoping to move away from. Investors need to focus on companies that develop outcome-driven technologies (i.e., population health management and telehealth options), as these companies have the potential for continued government financial support, rapid growth and Triple Aim achievement.

It may sound crazy, but organizations with evidence of failure often have better chances at success, as long as they use that failure as a mechanism for learning. I recognize that publishing peer-reviewed outcomes is time and resource consuming, especially at a boot strapped start-up. So intermediate and less resource-intensive alternatives that can be used to validate the impact of digital health startups are quality improvement (QI) initiatives. Entrepreneurial luminaries like Stanford's Steve Blank, Harvard's Clayton Christensen, and Penn's Roy Rosin espouse using rapid cycle approaches similar to QI, such as the Lean Startup, to expedite value discovery in organizations large and small. So keep an eye out for technologies with using QI - they're well worth the investment.

***

Our healthcare system is a mess. The Triple Aim is a lofty goal, but one that could change our system for the better with ground-level changes that allow the initiative to fully take shape. What's required now is a major investment in technologies that pack a big punch, proving that they can learn from failure, that they are focusing on all three aspects on the triple aim, and that their research demonstrates the true potential of their creations. We need to invest in companies that will move us toward, not away, from a system that lowers the costs of care, improves health outcomes and streamlines the patient experience.
[Photo from Flickr user Will O'Neill]

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The hidden digital health opportunities in Obamacare

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I've worked in digital health for a while (I'm the co-founder of digital health start-up Care at Hand and a physician at Boston Children's Hospital and Boston Medical Center), so I was as surprised as you may be when I discovered a tough truth: despite over $5 billion in investments in digital health in 2014, there appears to be no correlation between that investment and improved quality of care for patients.

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Google X Labs made synthetic skin to test a cancer-detecting bracelet

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Google X Labs made synthetic skin to test a cancer-detecting bracelet

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See, those arms serve as testers for the Labs' cancer-detecting bracelet project. For that to make sense, though, you need to understand how the system works: first you'll need to take pills packed with nanoparticles that circulate throughout the body looking for cancer cells. If they find any, they'll bind to those cells, which then literally light up. After that, the cell-particle combos make their way underneath the bracelet, since it has a magnet that attracts the nanoparticles.

Since the team wants to make sure that an illuminated clump of cancer cells is visible through human skin, they created those practice arms. They're covered in skin exhibiting different properties (thickness, etc.), as well as skin mimicking those of different ethnicities and skin tones. The bracelet probably won't be sniffing out cancer in the real world anytime soon, though, so watch the interview for now to see what it's like inside Google X Labs' Life Sciences department.

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Google X Labs made synthetic skin to test a cancer-detecting bracelet

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See, those arms serve as testers for the Labs' cancer-detecting bracelet project. For that to make sense, though, you need to understand how the system works: first you'll need to take pills packed with nanoparticles that circulate throughout the body looking for cancer cells.

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These New Gadgets Make Parenting Look Easy

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These New Gadgets Make Parenting Look Easy

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Out of all the tech trends for 2015, gadgets for babies and kids have definitely grown the most since years past. This was certainly evident as we walked the booths at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year. An entire section was dedicated to technology for families, and here are the highlights that anyone with a child in their life should know about. Many of the products are finally on sale on available for pre-sale. From smart pacifiers to trackers that do more than just keep tabs on baby's location, this is what parenting in the digital age looks like.

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The Best New Gadgets Every Parent Should Know About

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Out of all the tech trends for 2015, gadgets for babies and kids have definitely grown the most since years past. This was certainly evident as we walked the booths at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year.

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2015: The Year of the Technologically Engaged Patient?

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2015: The Year of the Technologically Engaged Patient?

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In 2014, wearables and the quantified self continued to grab headlines, from the de-emphasis of the Nike Fuel Band to the launch of Runkeeper's Breeze activity sensor app to the backlash against attempts to feminize trackers by making them pretty. The Affordable Care Act continued to change healthcare, most notably when state insurance exchanges became live. And "big data" was a phrase on many people's lips, with major healthcare players such as the Mayo Clinic and the MD Anderson Cancer Center partnering with IBM's Watson to bring big data to the bedside.

What will 2015 bring? To find out, I spoke with Devin Gross, CEO, and Greg Blew, Chief Creative Officer and VP of Product Management, of Emmi Solutions, a health care technology company focused on helping providers empower people to be active in their own care. Gross and Blew identified three major themes that they believe will dominate the 2015 landscape:

Big data gets personal. Healthcare has lagged behind other industries such as banking and retail in its use of big data to predict people's behavior and provide personalized outreach. Gross thinks this is about to change. "We look at the world as consumers," he says, noting that data can be pulled together in service of "individuals taking greater control of their care and their self." Wearables are certainly one piece of the growing data pool, alongside the same type of consumer data that other industries have used for years. Passive data and data from " the internet of things " are other new sources of information about individual behavior and characteristics that may also play a role in helping health care organizations understand their end users.

Engaging patients across a lifespan. To date, many interventions focus on acute medical episodes in a patient's life, such as a diagnosis of an illness or a hospitalization for a surgical procedure. However, Gross and Blew predict that widespread changes in the health care system will require organizations to build a relationship with patients . Coinciding with this change will be the availability of a deepened pool of data and sophisticated analytics to segment populations, two factors essential to making the conversations more meaningful and valuable. "It isn't enough to throw something generic over the fence and expect people to take action or trust that you know and understand them as a person," says Blew. The health care organizations that come out on top will be the ones who understand this and figure out how to do it at scale. Technology will play a role but keeping the conversations personalized is key, an approach that Emmi is taking with their own product roadmap.

As to concerns about how patients will react when health care companies have information about their consumer activities or other non-health behaviors, Blew says "building trust takes time but if you do it right, the sharing of information becomes natural. The exchange of data between patients and providers is private and personal but it's also really important to both parties to make sure they're each getting the best out of that relationship." And that relationship also "hinges on being able to talk to people as a person and not just a member of a population that they can talk to the exact same way." When that happens, Gross adds, the "conversation transforms to being about the person and not about the problem."

Increased transparency for consumers. Several factors make increased transparency a likely fact for 2015. First, as a result of the Affordable Care Act, many people are paying real attention to their health insurance purchases for the first time. Blew notes that now, "people can see what they're paying and that means something to them." Second, the proliferation of data sources about any one individual makes some transparency necessary to come down on the right side of the privacy line.

The three trends identified by Gross and Blew dovetail together nicely. One can imagine a rich tapestry of consumer data used to craft a personalized, technology-driven intervention that recognizes unique characteristics of an individual in a way that helps a person feel understood but within their level of comfort. The details of how that would work are to be determined, but the vision is there: The technologically engaged patient.

"If we can begin tailoring the data under the quantified self umbrella with transparency, you're really changing the dynamics of the system," promises Gross.

Both Gross and Blew are optimistic about the future of health technology, citing the strong foundation laid in the areas of wearable technology, big data, and health care infrastructure. Gross believes that "trying to leverage what exists rather than replacing it is key," reminding us that the while the current system is imperfect, it's also complex and entrenched. The key is not to jettison the current system as much as use its components in more innovative ways to improve outcomes. "People are figuring out that the data alone doesn't change behavior," Gross says.

What are your predictions for health technology in 2015?
Amy Bucher is a psychologist who focuses on designing programs that help people live healthier and happier lives by changing their behaviors. She is Associate Director of Behavioral Science for Wellness & Prevention, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson Company.

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2015: The Year of the Technologically Engaged Patient?

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In 2014, wearables and the quantified self continued to grab headlines, from the de-emphasis of the Nike Fuel Band to the launch of Runkeeper's Breeze activity sensor app to the backlash against attempts to feminize trackers by making them pretty. The Affordable Care Act continued to change healthcare, most notably when state insurance exchanges became...

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Digital health driver? Think aging at home, not readmission rates

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Digital health driver? Think aging at home, not readmission rates

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MobiHealthNews is digital health's publication of record covering breaking news and contextualizing the trends for healthcare in

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Smartphones may Predict Stroke with Samsung’s Wearable Stroke Sensor

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Smartphones may Predict Stroke with Samsung’s Wearable Stroke Sensor

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http://www.healthexpress.co.uk/blog/general-health/ehealth.html - HealthExpress.co.uk reveals what your daily routine will look like in 2025. How do you think eHealth will affect our lives? Visit the link above to get the opinions of industry experts.

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Infographic: Facilitating Change—The Top 100 Global Digital Health Companies of 2014

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Infographic: Facilitating Change—The Top 100 Global Digital Health Companies of 2014

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5 accelerants to the adoption of connected health

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5 accelerants to the adoption of connected health

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MobiHealthNews is digital health's publication of record covering breaking news and contextualizing the trends for healthcare in

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Is Social Media the New Doppler Radar for Tracking Diseases?

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Is Social Media the New Doppler Radar for Tracking Diseases?

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In today's world of social media, oversharing is the norm. Twitter is great for discussing everything from that great new movie to what you had for breakfast. Facebook users often post status updates on everything under the sun, including their interactions, frustrations, struggles and even locations. If someone is feeling under the weather, they might post that fact on social media and get an almost instant stream of well-wishes, commiserations and remedy recommendations in return.

By contrast, an outbreak of illness typically follows a slower reporting and response process. The patient goes for medical care, and the health worker determines what might be the problem. The diagnosis is confirmed by lab tests, which might take a few days to complete. When too many people have the same diagnosis, an outbreak is suspected. This is then reported to health officials, who determine when a public alert will be released concerning the outbreak. The entire process can take several weeks or even months.

Social media platforms can speed up the process significantly by tracking what individuals say about their health in public forums. In late 2011, McHenry County in Illinois proved that social media could get to the truth faster than any public health announcement. This suburb of Chicago was hit hard by whooping cough, starting with the high school cheerleaders, athletes and band members, according to Bloomberg. Students, families and citizens began talking about the illness on Facebook and Twitter. Sickweather LLC spotted the surge in comments online - about two weeks before an official health statement was released on the whooping cough outbreak in that area.

Social media was responsible for the early warning of the recent Ebola outbreak in Guinea, according to Government Technology. HealthMap, a program that mines social media, local news reports and government websites to search for evidence of disease outbreaks, pinpointed a "mystery hemorrhagic fever" in Guinea a full nine days before the World Health Organization announced the Ebola epidemic.

These early warnings have made it clear that social media is poised to spot everything from flu outbreaks to Ebola concerns to mental health issues. Figuring out how to harness the information and use it properly is the next step in making social media work for healthcare.

What Social Media Platforms Can Reveal

When someone is sick, they want to know what's wrong. It's not unusual for individuals to turn to Wikipedia for more information about their diagnosis, looking up key search terms in a pursuit of a better understanding. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory are using that human tendency to search for answers as a foundation to predict outbreaks of influenza, Dengue fever and more. According to FierceHealthIT, algorithms that connect Wikipedia searches with information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could lead to disease predictions in real-time.

Facebook has long been a gold mine of information for those who want to weed through millions of updates. Individuals who use the social media site tend to share a great deal of information, including their illnesses, the friend who is feeling under the weather or a family member who is in the hospital. By sifting through the information that is readily available, scientists can find pockets of the world where illnesses and diseases are spreading. When compared with similar information from other social media sites, a stronger picture of a healthcare crisis can be painted, sometimes long before the government of that particular country catches on.

One of the most surprising uses of social media to track flu symptoms is following cancellations on the popular restaurant app, Open Table. According to MedPageToday, those who are very sick will usually chose to cancel reservations and stay home; those cancellations tend to peak in a particular city where illness is running rampant.

Those who are feeling just fine and choose to go out to dinner but find themselves very sick afterward often talk about it online, particularly on websites like Yelp. In fact, 10 percent of all reviews of restaurants on Yelp are related to food-borne illness. That can serve as a surprisingly powerful tool for health departments, allowing them to plan inspections of restaurants that seem to have a great number of customers falling ill.

Twitter has proven to be a very adept tool for uncovering issues, including mental illness. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University designed a computer algorithm to read over eight billion tweets, looking for specific words and phrases commonly associated with anxiety and insomnia, according to Tech Times. The idea is that individuals are more likely to talk openly on an online platform about their life struggles, including issues with mental illness. The program has shown success in pinpointing flu outbreaks, higher incidences of depression in areas affected by unemployment and even higher levels of post-traumatic stress disorder in areas with a high population of veterans.

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Is Social Media the New Doppler Radar for Tracking Diseases?

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In today's world of social media, oversharing is the norm. Twitter is great for discussing everything from that great new movie to what you had for breakfast. Facebook users often post status updates on everything under the sun, including their interactions, frustrations, struggles and even locations.

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The Future of Wearables Isn’t a Connected Watch

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The Future of Wearables Isn’t a Connected Watch

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At Intel's big Make It Wearable competition in San Francisco late last year, the theme of the day was "no way." As a parade of entrepreneurs took the stage to promote their Next Big Things, the phrase erupted in my brain again and again. A glove that tracks workers' movements on a factory floor? A turtle-shaped bionic baby that new mothers, whose premature infants have to stay in incubators, wear on their chests? No way. A drone that attaches to your arm, flies off when you flick your wrist, hovers, and snaps a selfie? I mean, come on!

And yet all of these notes from a sillier future were real-at least real enough to compete for a half-million-dollar prize from one of computing's Godfather companies. Intel is covering itself in wearables. It bought Basis, maker of a multisensor watch that monitors movement, heart rate, and skin temperature to track your activity and sleep; it rolled out a line of technologized jewelry; and it is rumored that the next-generation Google Glass will have Intel inside. The reason for this push? Intel thinks wearables will be more ubiquitous than computers or phones. And it's right. You won't have just one wearable-you'll have dozens. The biggest mistake everyone makes is assuming we're going to wear the same one all the time.

That's because, traditionally, wearables have done bits and pieces of what our phones already do. Aside from tracking movements, what are these bands and glasses besides proxy screens for our phones?

Well, wearables are about to explode into an array of novel, single-function devices. They will suit discrete situations rather than peeling off multiple functions from your phone-it's use-case engineering. Think of activity-specific clothing, like Hexoskin, that monitors workouts. Or medical devices like Vital Connect, a patch that tracks your vital signs and lets doctors access the data. Or earbuds that aren't quite hearing aids but which you can wear when there's too much background noise.

We will wear them when we need them and take them off when we don't. Despite the success of devices like the Jawbone Up or even the limitless hype around the Apple Watch, what we're about to see will be more like compression socks than Swiss Army knives.

One of the most immediately applicable ideas from the Intel competition was the ProGlove, a device meant for factory workers. Sure, it is supposed to be used on a factory floor, and maybe it's a little creepy to have a glove monitoring your position at work. But it's also a pretty great example. Because in addition to tracking your movements, it could also suggest them.

"Suppose you had to change a tire on the car, and in the back was a glove similar to the ProGlove that connects to your iPhone. It knows you have an Audi and it knows where it is in relation to the car and walks you through the steps knowing whether you've got the jack in the right place or not," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich says. "You could learn to play the piano with a set of gloves, you can do all sorts of things with haptic feedback beyond just industrial applications."

Now that is inarguably cool. A glove that trains your muscle memory by monitoring movements would be new and different from anything we've experienced before. Contrast that with my junk drawer, full of wounded wearable soldiers: Jawbone Ups, Fitbits, a Basis band, even a Moto 360-little devices whose batteries died and that I never bothered to recharge because they didn't end up doing anything that my phone can't already do.

And that's been the problem with wearables. Too many of them were just new wrappers on candies we've already spit out. But these latest task-specific devices are exciting. They are finally ready for us to wear-and take off until we need them again.

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The Future of Wearables Isn't a Connected Watch

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At Intel's big Make It Wearable competition in San Francisco late last year, the theme of the day was "no way." As a parade of entrepreneurs took the stage to promote their Next Big Things, the phrase erupted in my brain again and again. A glove that tracks workers' movements on a factory floor?

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Digital Future of Public Health | Rachel McKendry

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Digital health is the convergence of the digital and genomic revolutions with health, healthcare, living, and society. As we are seeing and experiencing, digital health is empowering us to better track, manage, and improve our own and our family's health, live better, more productive lives, and improve society.

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115 Mind Blowing mHealth and Telehealth Statistics and Trends

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115 Mind Blowing mHealth and Telehealth Statistics and Trends

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115 Mind Blowing mHealth and Telehealth Statistics and Trends as the third installment of our 4 part Mind Blowing HIT Stats and Facts series.

Thanks to the rise of telehealth and mHealth, a transformation in the delivery of health information and services is quickly taking place, both in the US and abroad. Telehealth use in the US alone is expected to double in the next two years, according to Jonathan Linkous, CEO of the American Telemedicine Association (ATA). So what's to come from this rather swift shift in the healthcare landscape?

In this third edition of HIT Consultant's Mind Blowing HIT Stats and Trend s series, we take a look at the facts and figures surrounding both telehealth and mHealth to shed light on some potential answers to that rather large question. While the power of both movements has yet to be realized, the influence from their emergence is already evident. Take a look:

MHEALTH STATISTICS & TRENDS

HIMSS Analytics conducted the web-based and telephone-based research with 180 IT professionals in October and November 2012 responded to the . Survey findings include:

1. Two-thirds of health IT executives indicate that the use of mobile technology will substantially or dramatically impact the delivery of healthcare in the future

2. Use of mobile devices by physicians to view patient information or access non-protected health information is widespread, and the percent of clinicians using apps to actively engage in direct patient care has grown in the past year in several key areas, including:

3. Collection of data at the bedside (45 percent compared to 30 percent);

4. Use of bar code reader on mobile devices (38 percent compared to 23 percent);

5. Monitoring data from medical devices (34 percent compared to 27 percent); and

6. Capture visual representation of patient data (27 percent compared to 13 percent).

7. 36% reported allowing patients/consumers the ability to access information using a mobile device, up from 32 percent one year ago.

8. 13% of respondents indicated that their organizations had developed an app for patient/consumer use.

9. Respondents continue to characterize their mobile maturity as average - 3.33 on a scale of one to seven, where seven is highly mature.

10. One-quarter of respondents reported that all data captured via mobile devices is integrated directly into the organization's EHR.

11. Nearly all IT professionals reported that their organizations supply mobile devices to clinicians to support day-to-day work activities.

12. Two-thirds reported their organization has a mobile technology plan in place, up from the 38% of respondents that reported this in 2011.

13. More than one-quarter of respondents (27%) are currently implementing a mobile technology plan.

14. Use of apps by clinicians is widespread at organizations; approximately half of survey respondents reported they will increase their use of apps in the next 12 months.

15. 5% of respondents now offer an app marketplace, and 11 percent are considering the creation of a marketplace in the future.
Source: 2nd Annual HIMSS Mobile Technology Survey
16. 70% of Americans are self-trackers, but only a fifth are using technology like mobile devices

17. 9% of cell phone owners say they receive any text updates or alerts about health or medical issues.

18. 31% of cell phone owners have used their phone to look for health information

19. 17% of cell phone owners had used their phones to look for health advice

20. 52% gather health information on their phones, compared with 6% of non‐smartphone owners

21. 19% of smartphone owners have at least one health app on their phone.

22. Most popular type of mhealth apps include:
Source: Pew Research Center
23. More than 100 providers declare securing patient data a primary concern as clinicians increasingly use mobile devices to access medical information

24. Methods Providers Use to Protect Data Accessed by Mobile Devices include:
Source: KLAS: 2012 Mobile Applications: Can Enterprise Vendors Keep Up?
A recent KLAS survey of 105 CIOs , IT specialists, and physicians in the US, found that:

25. 70% used mobile devices to access their electronic health records, including customers of nearly every major EHR (Epic, Cerner, GE, Allscripts, Siemens, MEDITECH, and McKesson)

26. 94%, were supporting Apple

27. 49% and 44% supporting Android and Microsoft

Source: KLAS

28. Employees increased their steps by over 40% according to one insurance company who ran a scientific experiment with FitBit, to test if employees who use devices get healthier than those who don't.
Source: California Report
29. 69% of hospitals indicating that their nurses use their personal mobile devices

30. 96% of hospitals interviewed believe that 1st generation TabletPCs were not the right device to support bedside nursing.
Source: Spyglass Consulting Group mHealth Patents
31. The number of mHealth patents issued by the Patent Office has increased steadily since 2000 (when the number of mHealth patent applications was negligible), and will continue to surge until at least 2014.

32. Large companies are winning the mHealth patent race by obtaining the vast majority of newly-issued mHealth patents.

33. Intellectual Ventures, a non-practicing patent aggregator, is patenting aggressively in the mHealth space. Licensing demands and litigation from IV (and possibly other NPEs) are sure to follow.

34. Almost half of the top twenty mHealth patent holders are not mHealth companies, or even medical device developers.

35. The incidence of mHealth patent infringement conflicts likely will increase as companies become more profitable and patent portfolios mature.

36. The volume of patent litigation in the mHealth industry is low relative to related industries such as the computer, smartphone, and medical device industries.
Source: Mobihealthnews Text Messaging
In a survey of 106 physicians at pediatric hospitals, researchers from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita found that:

37. 27% of named texting their preferred method for brief communications

38. 23% favored hospital-issued pagers

39. 21% that said face-to-face conversation.

40. 57% reported sending or received work-related text messages

41. 12% send at least 10 messages per shift

42. 5% said they received more than 20 messages each time during a typical shift
Source: American Academy of Pediatrics
43. A new meta-analysis of 11 studies shows that mobile device-enabled interventions can help increase people's physical activity according to study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research

44. Smartphones are #9 on Health Tech Hazards list thanks to texting during surgery

Source: ERCI Institute

45. 3 million people are expected to be using smartphone-powered remote patient monitoring devices by 2016

46. 44 million mobile health applications will be downloaded this year, and about 142 million will be downloaded in 2016

47. Electronic health records will become an important component of mobile health offerings

48. Increased use of smartphones for remote patient monitoring will lower costs by reducing the need for expensive dedicated medical devices

49. Further guidance from FDA on the regulation of mobile health apps will help boost usage

50. The greater use of smartphones will increase remote monitoring of chronic diseases such as diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

51. Wearables will be a $1.5 billion market by 2014, up from just $800 million this year.
Source: Juniper Research Key Drivers of mHealth are:
52. . Consumer Demand

53. . Affordable Distribution

54. . Free Information

55. Knowledge is Power

56. Social Networks

Source: Why Wireless Health Matters
Reasons Physicians Will Embrace the iPad Mini
57. Portability

58. Display Capability

59. Better Buy-In

60. Address BYOD

Source: HIT Consultant
Touching Lives through Mobile Health: Assessment of Global Market Opportunity PWC report
61. PWC predicts mHealth global revenue to reach $23 billion in 2017

62. Diagnosis services are expected to comprise nearly 15% of the mobile health market with US $3.4 billion in revenues in 2017

63. A majority of the revenues from Diagnosis services are expected to come from call-centre and mobile telemedicine solutions with approximately US$ 1.7 billion and US$ 1.6 billion in revenue in 2017.

64. Treatment will be the third largest revenue opportunity with around 10% of the total mobile health market share. Wellness and Prevention will comprise approximately 3% and 1% respectively of the total mobile health market.

65. Healthcare Systems Strengthening services and applications are expected to contribute about 6% to the overall mobile health market (corresponding to US$ 1.4 billion) in 2017.

66. Among opportunities in Healthcare Systems Strengthening, Healthcare Practitioner Support will have the largest share with about 5% of the total mobile health market opportunity (US$ 1.1 billion), followed by Administration, Healthcare Surveillance Support, and Emergency Response

67. Mobile operators are expected to be the key beneficiaries of the expected growth in the mobile health market and command about 50% share of the overall market, corresponding to US$ 11.5 billion, in 2017.

68. For mobile operators, a majority of the revenue, nearly US$ 8.8 billion, will accrue from their revenue share from Monitoring services. Diagnosis and Treatment solutions will also be attractive opportunities for operators, and contribute US$ 1 billion and US$ 0.9 billion to operator revenues.

69. 75% of current mobile health deployments in Africa focus on improving the efficiency of healthcare workers and systems

70. Current status of mobile health projects in Africa split by countries where they are implemented

71. Solutions that help spread prevention and awareness messages have also been widely deployed and comprise about 20% of the mobile health developments in the African region

72. Patient treatment and remote monitoring solutions constitute almost 60% of the total mobile health deployments in Europe.

73. The UK leads in mobile health development in Europe, with different kinds of solutions being offered and services being delivered through varied means, from simple SMS to complex apps.

74. 60% of mobile health deployment solutions in Latin America are targeted towards strengthening healthcare systems and include applications that aid healthcare practioners in storing and retrieving patient records and supporting decision-making.

75. 27% of mobile health deployment solutions in Latin America constitute remote monitoring of chronic disease patients, aiding the elderly through devices and services, and pill dispensers that remind users through SMS and generate adherence reports.

76. Almost 40% of the solutions deployed work towards strengthening the healthcare systems in the US

77. 25% of mobile health solutions aid monitoring and treatment of patients

78. Current status of mobile health projects in the US
Source: PWC Report: Touching Lives through Mobile Health: Assessment of Global Market Opportunity 79. Top 5 mHealth Regulatory Issues for 2013

Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS)

Federal Communications Commission

Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

Patent and Trademark Office (PTO)

Source: mHIMSS
80. 5 Reasons Why Your Consumer Health App Will Fail To Change Behavior

1. You are not solving a real problem

2. You are solve trying too many problems

3. You are not providing your users with data they can action

4. Your app is too complicated to use

5. Your solution is too easy to clone

Source: Healthy Startups
81. Key Barriers to Implementation of mHealth

Priorities

Knowledge

Policy

Cost Effectiveness

Legal

Operating

Demand

Technical Expertise

Infrastructure

Source: cube LABS
82. 5 Common Threads of Success for Consumer Health and Medical Apps

1. All Health and Medical Apps Should Be Seen As Components Of A Digital Health Ecosystem

2. The Adoption and Success of both consumer and medical apps will defend upon demonstration of reliability and efficacy

3. Successful health, fitness, and medical apps all require sustainable business models

4. Behavior change must be a goal of all these apps

5. Maximizing the power of app-generated data is critical

Source: Dr. David Lee Scher, MD
TELEHEALTH STATISTICS AND TRENDS

83. The global telehealth market is expected to grow steadily over the next several years and reach $2.5 billion by 2018

84. The global telehealth market was valued at $736 million in 2011.

85. In 2011, telehealth table devices cost about $350 and the average price of the software was about $75 per unit

86. The telehealth services market will grow from $7 billion in 2011 to nearly $16 billion in 2016.
Source: Companies & Markets
According to U.K. Dept. of Health Study:

87. Using remote monitoring technology to keep tabs on patients' blood sugar and cardiopulmonary disease can reduce the risk of patient mortality by up to 45%

Telehealth can deliver:

88. 15% reduction in emergency room visits

89. 20% reduction in emergency admissions

90. 14% reduction in elective admissions

91. 14% reduction in bed days

92. 8% reduction in tariff costs.
Source: U.K. Department of Health
93. The U.S. market for advanced patient monitoring systems has grown from $3.9 billion in 2007 to $8.9 billion in 2011 and is forecast to reach $20.9 billion by 2016 according to a study by Kalorama Information

According to the American Hospitals Association:

94. 70% of the "most wired" hospitals in America already provide telehealth.

A previous pilot study conducted by the NHS reviewed three cities with over 6,000 patients suffering from three primary conditions: diabetes, heart failure or COPD. The results include:

95. Remote monitoring reduced mortality rates by 45%

96. 15% reduction in emergency room visits

97. 20% reduction in emergency admissions

98. 14% reduction in bed days

99. 8% reduction in total costs per patient

Source: NHS

100. Patients who receive telemonitoring services and blood pressure management support from a pharmacist are more likely to lower their blood pressure than those who do not receive the extra support, according to a study presented at the American Heart Association's Quality of Care Outcomes Research Scientific Sessions 2012,

101. After six months, the study found that 71.8% of patients in the group that received telemonitoring support had lowered their blood pressure to healthy levels, compared with 45.2% of patients in the control group.
Source: American Heart Association 102. Top Areas for Growth in Telehealth Market

Home-based care and disease management monitoring;

Remote physician or specialist services;

Personal emergency response systems;

Video diagnostic consultations; and

Remote cardiac services

Source: Frost & Sullivan Telehealth Adoption Challenges
103. Some regulations require that physicians be licensed in the state where patients are treated, limiting the use of telehealth to in-state treatment.

104. In addition, insurance coverage for telehealth varies, with some insurers only covering telehealth in rural areas.

105. Moreover, some patients refuse to use telehealth, and some physicians are wary of the technology's shortcomings.
Source: iHealthBeat Study: Telemonitoring Might Not Reduce ED Visits, Hospitalizations
The study found that both groups had similar rates of hospitalizations and ED visits.

106. 64% of the patients in the telemonitoring group were hospitalized or visited the ED, compared with 57% of the control group.

107. Researchers also found that about 15% of the patients in the telemonitoring group died during the course of the study, compared with 4% of the patients in the control group.
Source: Archives of Internal Medicine Using Telehealth in ICUs
108. Combined implementation and first year of operation costs for a Tele-ICU program of $50,000 to $100,000 per monitored ICU-bed.

109. Changes in patient care costs after Tele-ICU implementation ranged from a $3000 reduction to a $5600 increase in hospital cost per patient.

110. VHA data suggested a cost for implementation and first year of operation of $70,000 to $87,000 per-ICU bed depending on depreciations methods applied.
Source: Chest Journal Robot Healthcare
A survey by www.CouponCodes4u.com of 1,723 Americans, aged 18-30, found:

111. About one third of Americans are willing to receive some of their healthcare from robots

112. 98% said they would receive robot care if it meant lower co-pays and health insurance costs

113. 34% said that they would opt for care from a remote presence virtual and independent telemedicine assistant robot (RP-VITA), if given the choice, while

114. 5% of respondents claimed to be "indifferent."-
Source: CouponsCodes4u 115. 8 Telehealth Trends from the Trade Show Trenches

1. 1. Patient Centered Tools

2. 2. The Financial Side

3. 3. Health & Wellness

4. 4. Privacy & Security

5. 5. Going Mobile

6. 6. In the clouds

7. 7. Bringing down the silos

8. 8. The Social Network

Source: Hands on Telehealth
The last and final installment will be social media.
Featured image credit: meremortalblog

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115 Mind Blowing mHealth and Telehealth Statistics and Trends

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115 Mind Blowing mHealth and Telehealth Statistics and Trends as the third installment of our 4 part Mind Blowing HIT Stats and Facts series. Thanks to the rise of telehealth and mHealth, a transformation in the delivery of health information and services is quickly taking place, both in the US and abroad.

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Digital health in the EU - moving 'beyond the pill'

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Digital health in the EU - moving 'beyond the pill'

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MobiHealthNews is digital health's publication of record covering breaking news and contextualizing the trends for healthcare in

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Future of healthcare: Sensors will lead to highly personalized care

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Future of healthcare: Sensors will lead to highly personalized care

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The future of health looks a lot like the fitness tracker you might already wear on your wrist or your waistband.

But instead of just keeping tabs on your activity level, high-tech sensors embedded throughout your home, your car and maybe even under your skin will keep tabs on your every waking moment.

And your sleeping moments too.

"A whole new day is coming," said Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, considered a pioneer in the field of digital medicine.

This near-continuous data dump will revolutionize our healthcare system, Topol predicted, and will lead to micro-personalization of our diets, workouts, homes and even medical treatments.

The upshot, he said, is that this data onslaught puts control of your health back where it belongs: with you.

His new book, slyly titled "The Patient Will See You Now," documents the looming power shift, courtesy of our smartphones.

Here's what it might look like: Light, temperature and movement sensors in your bedroom will help you craft night after night of deep, peaceful sleep, allowing you to wake rested and energized - and without an alarm clock.

A tricked-out bathroom scale might reflect not just your weight but also the air quality in your home, your stress level and your resting heart rate. An elevated heart rate could suggest a cold is on the way. So you might want to take it easy for the next day or two. (And maybe cozy up to a bowl of chicken soup.)

But if your heart rate is a beat or two lower, you'll know that your workout regimen - the one tailored for your precise fitness level, body shape and blood type - is progressing nicely. You'll polish your pearly whites with an electronic toothbrush that will tell you if you've brushed long enough or if you missed a spot, and will compile that information for your next dental visit.

Over the course of the day, you'll eat meals designed for your body type, family health history and fitness goals. (Luckily, you won't have to bother with dreaded food diaries because sensors in your plate, fork and even food scales and containers will do most of the work.)

You'll be able to order blood panels and Skype with healthcare professionals halfway around the globe (and for a quarter of the price). And you can continuously monitor yourself - or a loved one, such as an aging parent - for key health markers such as blood pressure, glucose and hydration levels, inflammation, oxygenation and even the quality of your waste.

At this point, you may be thinking, "Why would I want to know all that?"

But others wonder why wouldn't you want to know all that.

"We're all very unique, and everybody has a different lifestyle," said Shawn G. DuBravac, the senior director of research for the Consumer Electronics Assn., which just wrapped up its annual Las Vegas trade show, where many new gadgets and gizmos were unveiled, including that interactive toothbrush. "A data stream allows for a customized approach to your health."

All those personalized data will be seamlessly harvested, synthesized and organized into a personalized dashboard that provides you - and anyone you choose - with the biofeedback you'll need to continually tweak and finesse your way to optimal health.

That's why Sally Edwards, a member of the USA Triathlon Hall of Fame and fitness coach, is a proponent of heart-rate training, a trend she expects will spike as more wearables offer it. (Industry leader Fitbit just introduced two fitness trackers that measure heart beats per minute.)

"Your heart rate is individual to you. It's like your fingerprint," Edwards said. "This is the way cardiovascular exercise should be prescribed. The days of saying "Everybody go hard" are over. This individualizes the workout to each person's individual physiology."

Experts say this "datafied" future will eliminate the gap between the haves and the have-nots when it comes to basic healthcare. As smartphones become widely available, healthcare becomes more widely available. "It's really the democratization of medicine," Topol said. "Everyone will have access to this knowledge."

The bigger challenge, he said, will be bridging the gap with the less tech-savvy among us and making sure they aren't left behind.

In many ways, the datafied future is already here, as much of that data are available but not yet used.

The challenge, DuBravac said, will be to gather information from multiple sources and present it in a way that inspires more healthful activity and doesn't drive users to hypochondria.

Does your fitness tracker, for instance, motivate you to move 10,000 steps a day over the long run? But what if it alerted you that on days when you get 30 minutes less sleep than usual you tend to miss your goal?

"That might motivate you to get more sleep," DuBravac said.

The day for such an interface is drawing closer, he said, and the segments of the population that might benefit the most are baby boomers and their caretakers.

The potential uses are limitless if you look at the world as one big potential sensor, Topol said.

What if you were able to get an alert that your elderly mother's blood pressure was lower than usual, based on a wrist sensor? You could call and make sure she takes her medicine before something serious happens. A car's steering wheel could trigger an insulin warning for diabetics. Nano-sensors released in the bloodstream could monitor for heart attacks, autoimmune attacks, cancer and strokes before they happen, Topol said.

A microchip embedded in a pill could help document when someone takes - or fails to take - medication. "Study after study shows that 50% of people of all types don't take their medicines the way they are prescribed. We can do a lot better if we can track it."

The ability to monitor vital signs could even allow a stable patient to recuperate at home instead of in a hospital bed.

"I don't see this as Big Brother," Topol said. "You can keep all this information to yourself; you don't have to share it with anyone. You are in the driver's seat."
rene.lynch@latimes.com

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Future of healthcare: Sensors will lead to highly personalized care

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The future of health looks a lot like the fitness tracker you might already wear on your wrist or your waistband. But instead of just keeping tabs on your activity level, high-tech sensors embedded throughout your home, your car and maybe even under your skin will keep tabs on your every waking moment.

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A Balance of Regulation and Innovation Necessary for Continued mHealth Development

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A Balance of Regulation and Innovation Necessary for Continued mHealth Development

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FDA Clears Mobile Apps for Remote Glucose Monitoring

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FDA Clears Mobile Apps for Remote Glucose Monitoring

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared the first set of mobile medical apps that allow diabetics to automatically and securely share data from a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) with caregivers in real-time via an Apple mobile device.

According to the FDA, the Dexcom Share system manufactured by San Diego-based Dexcom, Inc., is the first of its kind to offer a legally marketed solution for real-time remote monitoring of a patient's CGM data. CGMs are worn externally and are devices that include a small, wire-like sensor inserted just under the skin that provides a steady stream of information about glucose levels.

The Dexcom Share system displays data from the G4 Platinum CGM System using two apps: one installed on the patient's mobile device and one installed on the mobile device of another person. Using Dexcom Share's mobile medical app, the user can designate "followers" with whom to share their CGM data. The app receives real-time CGM data directly from the G4 Platinum System CGM receiver and transmits it to a web-based storage location. The app of the follower can then download the CGM data and display it in real-time.

"This innovative technology has been eagerly awaited by the diabetes community, especially caregivers of children with diabetes who want to monitor their glucose levels remotely," said Alberto Gutierrez, director of the Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health in the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, in a written statement.

According to Gutierrez, the FDA's decision "paves the way for similar technologies to be marketed in the United States." The regulatory agency has classified the device as class II exempt from premarket submissions. Going forward, manufacturers that want to market devices like the Dexcom Share system will not need premarket clearance by the FDA, but they will still need to register and list their device with the agency, as well as follow other applicable laws and regulations.

The FDA reviewed data for the Dexcom Share system through the de novo classification process, a regulatory pathway for low- to moderate-risk medical devices that are novel and not substantially equivalent to any legally marketed device. Data provided by Dexcom showed the device functions as intended and transmits data accurately and securely, states the agency.

However, at the same time, FDA warns that the Dexcom Share system "does not replace real-time continuous glucose monitoring or standard home blood glucose monitoring" and that "CGM values alone are not approved to determine dosing of diabetes medications" and that "CGMs must be calibrated by blood glucose meters, and treatment decisions, such as insulin dosing, should be based on readings from a blood glucose meter."

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FDA Clears Mobile Apps for Remote Glucose Monitoring

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared the first set of mobile medical apps that allow diabetics to automatically and securely share data from a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) with caregivers in real-time via an Apple mobile device.

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Major Healthcare Initiative Forecasts the Future of Digital Health in the U.K.

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Major Healthcare Initiative Forecasts the Future of Digital Health in the U.K.

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Healthcare Is Headed Down A New Road With New Rules In 2015

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Healthcare Is Headed Down A New Road With New Rules In 2015

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Every year I sit down with our team of healthcare futurists to carefully choose the right cards and place our bets on what we can expect to see in the coming year. It's always both a terrifying and exciting experience because at the end of the year, you can always go back to validate what trends our team was able to key in on and the degree it shaped the events of that year, and, yes, even identify what might have caught us by surprise.

Without getting into a deep retrospective, unequivocally the rate and scale to which the Ebola pandemic spread was an unforeseen game-changer for 2014. In terms of predictions that came to pass, our team really was honed in on some of the major players that would become involved in mega multi-billion dollar M&A transactions, a trend that should continue into 2015. However, I believe there is plenty of time to look back at 2014. But for now, onwards into 2015. Here's what you can expect this year.

Landslide Acceptance of Private Exchanges
We expect growth of nearly 300% for 2015 in terms of the number of enrollees who will select their health plans through private healthcare exchanges. While Healthcare.gov and the clunky roll out of the public insurance exchange got all the attention in 2014, the real action is in the private exchanges. While reports of employers dropping healthcare benefits for their employees en masse following approval of the Affordable Care Act were more hype than reality, businesses are definitely looking at making significant changes to the types of plans and defined contributions they make available to their employees. Negotiating options through private exchanges is fast becoming one of their primary means to accomplish that goal. Serving approximately 2.5 million enrollees in 2014, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, many more businesses are expected to buy into the model over the coming years.

Employers Incentivizing mHealth
As a carrot on the other end of the stick that is employers pushing a greater degree of the healthcare cost burden to its employees, we project as many as 70-80% of large businesses will soon or already provide employees vouchers or discounts for mHealth products and service platforms by the end of 2015. The obvious rationale behind these initiatives is that employers are hoping their employees will have greater awareness about their health and take more preventative measures to avoid more acute outcomes. For example, in 2014, energy giant America purchased 25,000 Fitbit devices for North American employees in order to encourage a healthier lifestyle.

Consumers Spending Out of Pocket on Health & Wellness
Just this week (January 20), the FDA put out new guidance on where it believes the delineation exists between clinical wearables that fall under the regulatory scrutiny of its agency and those geared to more general well being and healthy living. It's a preliminary guidance report that is not binding in its statements, but we believe this preliminary release speaks to the agency's expectations for the explosion of new wearables that will be launched and used by consumers in 2015. We project consumer out-of-pocket spending on non-clinical health, wellness, and self-disease management technologies and services to grow by 60-70% from 2014. High-profile launches like the Watch and its hyped Health Kit are among a confluence of factors that make 2015 the year wearables and mHealth-centric applications reach significant mass.

Boom or Bust for Wearables
While seemingly contradictory to our previous prediction, we see the market as being over saturated with me-too products with similar functionalities, lacking a distinctive value proposition to the consumer. As our analysts walked the halls of the consumer electronics show (CES) this past month, they were amazed at the number of product developers with wrist-wearable products that tracked similar metrics and lacked a distinctive value proposition for consumers. Traditional dynamics of consumer markets dictate that the market will contract over the next year, settling on only a handful of developers with distinct feature sets and capable of catering to defined user segments. In context of our previous prediction, what we are saying is that there will be more business for fewer companies. In either case, smart investors know the real money is in the apps ecosystem.

E-commerce Giants Take First Steps in Healthcare
In their quest to be everything to everyone, Alibaba and Amazon have truly disrupted the traditional business model for a wide spectrum of markets and industries. While they currently have some minor services geared toward healthcare customers, we believe that 2015 is the year both companies introduce dedicated services around healthcare. Capable of servicing both institutional organizations as well as individual customers, the traditional healthcare supply chain is about to witness a new breed of competition. In a more patient-centric healthcare model, it is possible these types of retailers are better suited to meet the needs of customers.

Healthcare Hacked
It is almost inevitable that a high-profile healthcare stakeholder will experience a significant data breach on the scale of high-profile attacks we have witnessed by and Sony in recent history. Industry watch groups have long pointed out that many hospital networks continue to rely on outdated software systems, have less than robust redundancies in their security measures, and lack a coordinated strategy across all its departments and personnel. The influx of new mobile technologies and connected medical devices are only further straining the limits of existing security measures. According to the Identify Theft Resource Center, attacks on hospitals and other healthcare organizations accounted for 42.4 % of all major data breaches in 2014. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the top breaches could have affected nearly 7.4 million individuals in some form or another. Despite these red flags, either due to bureaucracy or costs, many care networks are highly susceptible to outside attacks.

Cognitive Analytics Becomes Commercial
Healthcare analytics and cognitive computing markets are expected to grow by 27% in 2015 with the commercial launch of several SaaS modules that, to date, had been only in academic or pilot use.Issues preventing prior use such as cost, product maturity, scalability, and demonstrated track record are now at a point enabling commercialization. The most high-profile participant is, of course, IBM, which in 2014 announced access to customers of the Watson analytics engine for specific B2B initiatives. The ability to process natural language and unstructured data offers a functionality to healthcare analytics that is currently not addressed by more dedicated HCIT vendors.

Opportunity Meets Promise in India
India will continue to see growth in private-sector healthcare delivery despite investments made by the government in public health, as there is an under served population for which the government needs to develop healthcare access. With the largest CAGR expected in HC expenditure up to 2020 at 19.8 percent, India is expected to become the third-largest in APAC in terms of total HC expenditure; the private sector is expected to continue to increase share from the current 65% as more investments pour into private primary care services, diagnostic services and hospitals from within the country and international investments.

Chinese Competitors Stake Claims in Global Markets
By offering capabilities and functionalities at price points 20-30% lower than their other global competitors, Chinese medical technology and healthcare IT manufacturers establish a significant footprint in fast-growing emerging markets. Chinese manufacturers of medical imaging and other capital equipment have already begun to chip away at the share of larger multinational corporations based in the US, Europe, and Japan. Similarly, it's is projected China will lead the tech disruption in APAC, with its share of the APAC healthcare IT market forecasted to grow from 21% in 2013 to 32% by 2020.

Undoubtedly, in addition to these predictions, there are a number of other key trends and topics that we will be keeping our eyes on in 2015. I'll be discussing these and other during an expert panel webinar that might interest you: "2015 Healthcare Industry Outlook." Here is the info to register: http://bit.ly/1yAT4NN

I'd love to hear what you are expecting for 2015. Maybe around this time in 2016 we can get together and compare notes to see how we did.
The article was written with contribution from Frost & Sullivan Advanced Medical Technologies Principal Analyst Venkat Rajan.

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Healthcare Is Headed Down A New Road With New Rules In 2015

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The Top Trends Shaping the World of Healthcare Every year I sit down with our team of healthcare futurists to carefully choose the right cards and place our bets on what we can expect to see in the coming year. It's always both a terrifying and exciting experience because at [...]

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Engineers create a temporary tattoo that tests blood sugar

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Engineers create a temporary tattoo that tests blood sugar

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for The Atlantic

A painful prick of the fingertip reveals a mountain of medical information for many diabetes patients. But health professionals have long struggled to find a reliable and painless way to gather blood sugar measurements. Just last year, Google announced that it was developing contact lenses that measure glucose levels in its user's tears. But now, nanoengineers may have found an even easier way for diabetes patients to monitor their vital levels: temporary tattoos.

Amay Bandodkar, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, has created a flexible sensor that uses a mild electrical current to measure glucose levels in a person's body. Measuring blood sugar levels multiple times a day is vital for diabetes patients because it shows how well their body is managing their disease as well as the dose of insulin they require, if they need any at all. But because many people find needles unpleasant, they tend to avoid measuring their levels, which puts them at risk of developing serious medical complications. The new device is painless - It contains electrodes printed on a thin tattoo paper that patients can even dispose after use. "Presently the tattoo sensor can easily survive for a day," Bandodkar said in a statement. "These are extremely inexpensive - a few cents - and hence can be replaced without much financial burden on the patient."

The tattoo has already provided accurate glucose measures for seven healthy patients, the team reported in a recent issue of the journalAnalytical Chemistry. The patients, all male non-diabetics between the ages of 20 and 40, wore the tattoos before eating a sandwich and drinking a soda. Following the carb-rich meal, the tattoo recorded the spike in each patient's glucose levels as accurately as a traditional finger-stick device. The tattoo is a few steps away from providing the numeric value of glucose levels, so scientists have to remove and analyze the it in order to retrieve its measurements. Eventually, Bandodkar said the tattoo will have "Bluetooth capabilities to send this information directly to the patient's doctor in real-time or store data in the cloud."

The researchers hope the tattoo will eventually be used to monitor levels of other compounds in the blood, like metabolites, medications, or alcohol and illegal drugs. Whatever the application, the less needles the better.

This article originally published at The Atlantic here

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Engineers create a temporary tattoo that tests blood sugar

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for The Atlantic A painful prick of the fingertip reveals a mountain of medical information for many diabetes patients. But health professionals have long struggled to find a reliable and painless way to gather blood sugar measurements. Just last year, Google announced that it was developing contact lenses that measure glucose levels in its user's tears.

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5 Reasons Why Digital Health Needs More Doctors as Investors

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5 Reasons Why Digital Health Needs More Doctors as Investors

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With so many reports highlighting the increasing investment in digital health it stands to reason to ask whether investors are making the right choices. Clinical insight might make the crucial difference. Here's why.

I am fortunate to have many interactions with investors within my network ranging from angels to later round focused venture capitalists. Here in Europe, investment in healthcare IT and digital health companies has started to become an area of interest because of the boom in the United States.

My personal view has always been that increasing investment doesn't mean that a sector is doing great or will have a meaningful impact. In fact, many companies that I see receiving investment I personally would not have validated. With that in mind there are many great startups out there that are missing out. Could a clinician's insight and knowledge address these imbalances? I think so and here are five reasons why:

For many startups their end-users will be a broad mix of clinicians (doctors, nurses, allied professionals). It makes sense therefore to have the prospective end-user assessing a product's functionality for the clinical setting. Product development to reach a minimum viable product (MVP) is essential to the success of any health tech startup and doing it with the right expertise on board makes a significant difference.

Doctors are often seen as tough critics and most likely cynical about technology. However, that mentality is essential to support investors that are reviewing many pitches. There are many clinicians with the right mindset to look for a winner and having one on board can streamline the process of identifying potential investment opportunities.

3. Clinical due diligence

Beyond screening prospects, a clinician's role can be far more significant when it comes to the due diligence process. Clinical due diligence goes beyond product viability and safety. Clinical workflow and process mapping are essential to identify how a product will fit within the clinical environment while identifying any challenges it might cause for stakeholders throughout a local health economy. No one is better placed to judge this than a clinician and their interactions.

Following an investment, a clinician should be appointed to the board of any healthcare IT or digital health company whether as a medical director or non-executive director. Doing so means that there is always a clinician on hand assessing the direction of the company and guiding the development of its key messages to the market both for clinicians and patients. This is an increasingly important role at larger IT organizations that I am taking and I think it should be replicated for startups and investor groups too.

5. Doctors create opportunities

One of the biggest challenges for digital health startups after the product development phase is business case development. It can be tremendously difficult to identify potential clinical pilot sites willing to engage with new vendors. Without it, it can be impossible to develop a viable business case. Having a clinician on board will provide access to a clinical network that can streamline this process by creating appropriate engagement with healthcare providers.

Doctors aren't perfect and will not have all the answers that investors are looking for and when I refer to doctors it's important to note that I also include nurses and allied healthcare professionals whose insight is equally as important. However, clinicians provide a level of technical and clinical expertise that investors and technology experts simply will not have. Bring the two together and you might just identify more lucrative digital health opportunities.
Dr. Saif Abed is the Founding Partner of Abed Graham Healthcare Strategies, a provider of clinical analysis and intelligence to support UK (NHS) market research, strategy development and sales acceleration.

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5 Reasons Why Digital Health Needs More Doctors as Investors

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With so many reports highlighting the increasing investment in digital health it stands to reason to ask whether investors are making the right choices. Clinical insight might make the crucial difference. Here's why. I am fortunate to have many interactions with investors within my network ranging from angels to later round focused venture capitalists.

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By 2016, There Will Be Three Handheld Devices That Can Diagnose 15 Diseases Better Than Doctors

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By 2016, There Will Be Three Handheld Devices That Can Diagnose 15 Diseases Better Than Doctors

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Remember how in the Star Trek TV shows and movies they were able to hold up a handheld device to a wounded or sick patient and diagnose immediately what the problem was?

This device was called a tricorder.

Here at the World Economic Forum in Davos, we have learned from a source that, by the end of this year, there will be working prototypes of three handheld devices that are each able to accurately diagnose 15 diseases as well as any doctor.

We'd describe the source of this information more, but the World Economic Forum is held under something called "The Chatham House rules," wherein reporters are able to share information they've heard here, but not allowed to describe its source.

We can say that the creation of the three devices is the result of a competition put on by an organization called XPRIZE.

XPRIZE is an organization that awards multi-million dollar prizes to groups that are able to invent certain technologies.

For example, in 2004, XPRIZE awarded $10 million to Mojave Aerospace Ventures after it successfully flew SpaceShipOne on the world's first private space mission.

The three diagnostic handheld devices are each entries into another contest, called the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE. According to the XPRIZE website, "the winners will be the (up to) three solutions achieving the highest diagnostic score regarding a set of 15 distinct diseases in a group of 15-30 people in three days."

Currently, there are 10 finalists vying for the prize. Our source says it looks like three of them will have working gadgets by the end of the year.

Here's a video XPRIZE put together when it launched the competition:

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DAVOS SOURCE: By 2016, There Will Be Three Handheld Devices That Can Diagnose 15 Diseases Better Than Doctors

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Remember how in the Star Trek TV shows and movies they were able to hold up a handheld device to a wounded or sick patient and diagnose immediately what the problem was? This device was called a tricorder.

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The FDA will regulate wearables making health claims

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The FDA will regulate wearables making health claims

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The agency has published a draft guidance note that, as yet, isn't legally binding and requests opinions from the public. As far as it's concerned, "general wellness devices," i.e. watches that vaguely encourage people to get fitter, aren't any sort of risk to the public. This means that your Fitbit is okay to tell you to go for a walk, your Aura can coach your sleeping and Lumosity can pretend to make you smarter without any worries. Mostly the FDA is concerned with risk, and there isn't much risk if your smartphone tells you to lay off the burgers one every now and again.

If, however, the device begins to make specific claims about its uses, it's another story all together. If you see a product that promises to treat your obesity, autism, muscle dystrophy or erectile dysfunction -- plus anything that's physically invasive or prosthetic -- then the gear will have to jump through the FDA's numerous hoops.

Of course, as the world of fitness wearables matures and we see more medical applications for this tech, it's likely that the FDA will probably take another look at this area. After all, there were plenty of devices that we saw at CES that look a lot more like gear you'd find in a hospital than in a Best Buy.

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The FDA will regulate wearables making health claims

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The agency has published a draft guidance note that, as yet, isn't legally binding and requests opinions from the public. As far as it's concerned, "general wellness devices," i.e. watches that vaguely encourage people to get fitter, aren't any sort of risk to the public.

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Mobile diagnosis device to help reduce unnecessary antibiotics prescribing

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Mobile diagnosis device to help reduce unnecessary antibiotics prescribing

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New biosensor-based technology could help to reduce the over-prescribing of antibiotics by giving GPs and other frontline healthcare staff an accurate and fast method of identifying the nature of infectious diseases.

The innovative hand held device developed by the UK-based OJ Bio Ltd. uses specially developed biochips with a dedicated reader and supporting software carried on a mobile phone app or a PC.

When biological samples, from serum, saliva or blood, are applied to the biochip (held in a disposable cartridge), the presence of a disease antigen is translated into an electronic signal which is then converted to display the result of the test on the supporting software.

Formal clinical trials using the device are due to start in 2015 for the detection and diagnosis of the influenza A and B viruses, common flu strains previously linked to some major epidemics, and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), a major cause of coughs and chest infections.

In addition, the device can also be used to detect the presence of C-reactive protein - a biomarker of inflammatory disease, which can be used to rule out serious bacterial infections and which has therefore been proposed as a useful tool in the reduction of the inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics.

Dale Athey, chief executive of OJ Bio, said: "Our new device provides a low cost test that dramatically improves the speed of diagnosis and treatment of diseases without sending samples to the laboratory.

"Currently, GPs and frontline health workers have no easy way of determining if a patient with flu-like symptoms is suffering from a bacterial or viral infection and may therefore take the cautious decision to prescribe antibiotics. However, by providing an immediate indication of a lack of bacterial infection at the point of care, the device removes this uncertainty, helping the patient to understand why antibiotics may not be necessary and are not being prescribed."

The state of the art biosensors at the heart of the OJ Bio system are a unique fusion of advanced technology from its parent companies, UK nano biotechnology specialists Orla Protein Technologies Ltd and leading Japanese electronics company Japan Radio Company Co, Ltd.

The surface acoustic wave (SAW) electronic chips developed by JRC are coated with disease-specific biocapture surfaces developed by Orla. The presence of a disease antigen causes a shift in the phase angle of the surface acoustic wave passing across the chip surface and this is translated into an electronic signal.

This signal can then be detected and its presence (or absence) determined, providing an unequivocal pass or fail result for the particular disease being tested for.

Bluetooth connection of the reading device to special diagnostic software enables the test results to be displayed within seconds. Unlike other rapid test systems this can also provide a measure of the target biomarker, rather than just a simple yes or no result.

The platform technology allows the detection of protein biomarkers, meaning the application areas are very broad.

Bio assay development is continuing in the UK and manufacturing facilities are already under development in Japan. There are opportunities for technology access and licensing.

Source: www.oj-bio.com

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Mobile diagnosis device to help reduce unnecessary antibiotics prescribing

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New biosensor-based technology could help to reduce the over-prescribing of antibiotics by giving GPs and other frontline healthcare staff an accurate and fast method of identifying the nature of infectious diseases. The innovative hand held device developed by the UK-based OJ Bio Ltd.

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How do you get patients to use health tech? Add people

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How do you get patients to use health tech? Add people

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by John Zicker, COO of Vree Health

Everyone talks a good game on patient engagement. So why isn't it working - and why aren't more people sticking with the many innovative apps, platforms and other technologies promising to foster better health?

Bottom line: There aren't enough people in the process. People develop trust with other people, not with touch screens.

Even the best technology only goes so far. Apps and trackers can't provide that all-important human connection. People require more than interactions with cold technology, no matter how personal, intuitive, or human-seeming it might be.

You know how people will exercise more frequently and more thoroughly if they have a trainer right there pushing them? Similarly, such person-to-person motivation is the key to patient engagement platforms.

At Vree Health we've achieved some success in addressing the lack of patient engagement stickiness. We do it by providing empathetic people who use motivational techniques to encourage patients to stay engaged. That personal connection can keep patients motivated to take their medications every day, reveal symptoms they may not be divulging to their doctor, show up for follow-up appointments, and so forth.

Using a balanced approach with people that combines personal interactions with automated email reminders provides a good foundation for the patient's success. These personal interactions can take place across the spectrum of communication channels - from phone calls to texting to mobile apps. The key is to continue to check in regularly.

But it's important to remember that these are the early days of patient engagement. I think that within five years it will be perfectly normal for the majority of patients in the First World to receive regular communications reminding them to take their medications and congratulating them for meeting their daily walking quota. It will be the norm for patients to have their glucose or blood pressure readings at their fingertips for review at any given moment, day or night.

Patients will routinely track their progress and outcomes working with plans of action in which they, their health care providers, families and caregivers all participate.

That will be a great day not just for patients, but for healthcare and even for the national economy. The result will be a healthier citizenry with fewer hospital readmissions. Insurance companies will be paying less and physicians will have more time to focus on chronic-care patients.

We know that patients who are more actively involved with their healthcare are going to have better health outcomes and lower costs.

It's simply a matter of finding the right blend of services, technology - and people. And since we're talking about the issue that's most important to people everywhere - health - you know we'll all keep working until we find that perfect combination.

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How do you get patients to use health tech? Add people

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by John Zicker, COO of Vree Health Everyone talks a good game on patient engagement. So why isn't it working - and why aren't more people sticking with the many innovative apps, platforms and other technologies promising to foster better health? Bottom line: There aren't enough people in the process.

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MobiHealthNews is digital health's publication of record covering breaking news and contextualizing the trends for healthcare in

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Survey: Patients expect more from pharma companies

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Survey: Patients expect more from pharma companies

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In today's so-called consumer-driven landscape, no provider is exempt from the shifting attitudes. When it comes to pharmaceutical companies, it turns out patient expectations - not wishes, mind you - are quite high, and the industry can ill-afford to ignore the prevailing sentiment.

According a survey of 2,000 patients by Accenture , 76 percent think pharma companies "have a responsibility" to provide complimentary information and services around the products they sell.

Another 74 percent indicated that they wanted outreach when they start taking a medication, not afterward. To that end, the top four areas were patients are proactively seeking information are:
- medications, at 80 percent
- chronic conditions, at 75 percent
- healthcare services, at 71 percent
- illnesses and ailments, at 65 percent.
Images from Accenture.

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Survey: Patients expect more from pharma companies

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In today's so-called consumer-driven landscape, no provider is exempt from the shifting attitudes. When it comes to pharmaceutical companies, it turns out patient expectations - not wishes, mind you - are quite high, and the industry can ill-afford to ignore the prevailing sentiment.

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Infographic highlighting the use of digital, mobile, apps, and clinical resources online by US Primary Care Physicians (source: Digital Insights Group).

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3 cost-saving mobile apps your hospital can launch within a month

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3 cost-saving mobile apps your hospital can launch within a month

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Today's healthcare providers are facing unprecedented financial pressures. For the third year in a row, costs are the #1 concern for hospital CEOs. Among various cost reduction strategies employed by hospitals, many are turning to branded mobile apps.

And why not? In 2014, health app usage increased 89%. It makes perfect sense for providers to engage patients on mobile. But how can apps save costs?

Below are three great mobile use cases.
ER/Urgent Care App
When a medical emergency strikes, the last thing people can afford is to waste time digging for information. A branded Urgent Care app offered by their trusted provider can be a handy mobile tool, allowing patients to:

Check dynamically updated ER and Urgent Care wait times;

Find and map the nearest Urgent Care facilities;

Get GPS directions, hours, and tap-to-call.

By providing a branded app like that, a healthcare system can significantly reduce its ER traffic and route some of the potential ER clients to more affordable Urgent Care facilities within their reach.
Medication Tracking App
Last year, 2,610 hospitals were hit with Readmission penalties. One of the top problems identified as contributing to preventable readmissions is poor adherence to prescribed medications and regimens. Mobile apps can empower patients to take better control of their health and improve adherence:

Track medication dosage/intervals;

Set and receive timely reminders;

Track appointments, diet, and various health indices.

A customized Medication Tracking app is not only a great cost-saving tool, but also a potential community-building resource. Include health tips, interactive gallery and social media - let patients get hooked!
Physician Referral/Directory App
These are great tools for both patient and physician. An instant mobile directory, like the one provided in the UCLA Health app, helps foster physician relationships and streamline appointment-setting. Users can:

Search physicians in the system by name, location or specialty;

Request appointments or contact physicians;

Explore services, insurance & billing.

A branded, native app is great for patients on the go, or with limited or no Internet access. As more patients engage with their provider on mobile, interactive mobile tools can help them get care easily and efficiently.
How to Save on Building a Cost-Saving App
Despite the engagement power of mobile apps, they are still perceived to be an extremely costly and troublesome endeavor. A custom-developed native app may take months to complete - only to disappoint in the end.

A great alternative many hospitals have discovered is a code-free app development platform that allows non-programmers to easily prototype, test, launch, and manage a variety of useful apps.

With such a flexible tool, organizations can save up to 70% in native app development costs, as well as bring the process closer to the people who know their patient best - and who can quickly measure whether an app is working or not. After all, mobile technology is only as good as it delivers on key business metrics. With apps that deliver, CEOs can breathe a little easier!

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3 cost-saving mobile apps your hospital can launch within a month

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Today's healthcare providers are facing unprecedented financial pressures. For the third year in a row, costs are the #1 concern for hospital CEOs. Among various cost reduction strategies employed by hospitals, many are turning to branded mobile apps . And why not? In 2014, health app usage increased 89%.

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14 Sensor Innovations Driving Digital Health

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14 Sensor Innovations Driving Digital Health

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The domain name bionicly.com is for sale.

A cool and clever play on the word "bionic". Bionicly is intelligent and modern, perfectly suited for specialized health and medical focused technology and services.

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The domain name bionicly.com is for sale

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The domain name bionicly.com is for sale. A cool and clever play on the word "bionic". Bionicly is intelligent and modern, perfectly suited for specialized health and medical focused technology and services.

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Healthcare IT: VC funding more than doubles with $4.7 bn, reports Mercom Capital

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Healthcare IT: VC funding more than doubles with $4.7 bn, reports Mercom Capital

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SAGITTARIUS Your creative energy should now be at a peak, but not perhaps because the stars are all on your side. On the contrary, challenging romantic stars remind us of the cliché that all great art stems from... read more

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Business News, India Stock Market, Personal Finance, IPO, Financial News Headlines - The Financial Express

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Business News Headlines, Financial News India Stock Market News, Live Stocks, Economy News. Check out the latest business news headlines including Market analysis on Mutual funds, commodities forex, personal finance, IPO news, Live BSE and NSE stock price at The Financial Express.

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How iPhone health gadgets could change what 'see your doctor' means

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How iPhone health gadgets could change what 'see your doctor' means

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Image: Mashable composite. Luke Leonard/Mashable

Apple's Health app had a quiet rollout in late 2014, and months later many iOS users still aren't sure how the platform works on their new (or newly updated) iPhone.

Sure, we've already seen a series of apps like Nike+ Running, MyFitnessPal and the MayoClinic work with the iOS-based hub for tracking personal health data, but as of now, Health's forecasted impact on the medical industry has yet to be proven.

But there's another emerging trend that's shaping up to have a profound impact on the future of doctor visits and getting faster treatment: iPhone gadgets.

From a device that helps identify when a child has an ear infection to FaceTime sessions with a physician for only $49 a pop, startups are looking for ways to make the most of Apple's Health platform and are doing some pretty revolutionary things along the way.

CellScope's Oto Home device ($79) is an accessory that looks like a traditional otoscope that doctors use to look inside a patient's ear. It attaches to the iPhone's camera and captures video of what's happening in the ear canal. The clip can then be sent to a doctor via email (for an additional $49 fee), so they can diagnose and provide a prescription nearly on demand. The gadget can share data with the Health app (so doctors can see a running history). The idea is to help connect families in remote areas (think: rural Alaska) with pediatricians quickly.

"We want to bring the doctor into your home," said co-founder and CEO Erik Douglas. "In the same way that banking has moved from the branch office to the mobile phone, CellScope aims to deliver healthcare wherever you are."

Ear infections bring more kids to the pediatrician's office each year than anything else - an ailment that costs the U.S. healthcare system about $3.5 billion annually - and most children (80%) have one by the age of three, so the opportunity for the startup is clear. While the device is only available in California right now, you can sign up to be notified once the CellScope is approved for use in other states. The company anticipates a greater rollout in the second quarter of 2015.

Another gadget called the Swaive is an intelligent in-ear thermometer (also $79) and syncs up to Apple's Health app via Bluetooth to keep track of body temperature over time.

The device not only monitors the health of someone who is sick but can also serve as a tool for measuring temperature when trying to get pregnant (fluctuation often indicates when a woman is ovulating). Readings from a user's profile are automatically sent to Apple Health when they are recorded and can then be sent to doctors.

"It's designed to help parents or users in general send their temperature measurements directly to doctors," Gurpal Bhoot of Swaive told Mashable. "In the app, there is a feature to record occurring physical symptoms and medicines the patient is currently taking, which allows for a complete recent medical history for the doctor to use to diagnose in a relatively quick manner."

For those who don't want to visit doctors in person - or don't have health insurance - there's a way the iPhone can help. An app called AmWell lets you FaceTime with doctors 24/7, no appointment needed. Physicians who are a part of the AmWell network provide real-time feedback, diagnosis and treatment for $49 a virtual visit, with printable receipts available for insurance reimbursement. Patients load up the app and can peruse through a collection of doctors (including information related to their education, years of practice and ratings).

So while there hasn't been much fanfare around the Apple Health app since its debut - or too many obvious examples of how the iPhone itself can influence the medical field - these integrations are starting to point the way, and may be the firsts steps toward tapping the potential of the company's HealthKit platform. For millions of iPhone users, the benefit is clear: getting medical attention faster than ever.

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How iPhone health gadgets could change what 'see your doctor' means

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Apple's Health app had a quiet rollout in late 2014, and months later many iOS users still aren't sure how the platform works on their new (or newly updated) iPhone.

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In 2015, ecosystems will transform fragmented wearables market

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In 2015, ecosystems will transform fragmented wearables market

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The widespread availability of fitness wearables coupled with marginal use has created a relatively new trend in the market - ecosystems. After all, no one can afford to depend on the business of just a few devices and it opens up access to a bigger share of wearables users. Its also a way to add more value and ensure the longer term survival of the sector. For those who use more than one wearable, these ecosystems are helping to organize their data into useful visualization tools.

Validic has been active in the space for some time. Its FDA cleared platform has helped it developed partnerships not only with medical device companies but fitness trackers as well and integrate data from both for users.

These communities are not only about device agnostic platforms to help users aggregate their data and see the cause and effect of diet, exercise and heart rate.

Valencell represents an ecosystem of a different kind. Its sensor technology PerformTek has been used to create more accurate measures of heart rate, respiration rate, and other blood flow measures and integrated into licensing partnerships such as with earphone makers like SMS, Jabra, and iriver. CEO Steve LeBoeuf noted at CES earlier this month that it was key to embed its biometric sensor technology into products that people would use for their workout, so the tracking becomes more passive. But he also pointed out that one benefit to its approach is that for people looking to lose weight, other indicators will change before their weight begins to go down such as arresting heart rate and the maximum volume of oxygen that an athlete can use.

"You can storyboard exciting experiences for customers based on how their biometrics are changing and improving." He added that there will be a lot more ecosystems developed around core technology.

Even fitness garment maker Under Armour created an app called UA Record to pool together data from apps like MapMyFitness, which it acquired last year, and wearable devices such as Jawbone, Withings and Garmin, among others.

Human API is yet another example. Its clients include smartwatch maker Pebble, BodyMedia, Fitbit and Omron, as well as Bluetooth scale makers like Withings and glucose monitors such as Glooko.

Its most recent client is 4D a healthcare analytics platform. 4D CEO Star Cunningham sees participation in the kind of ecosystem Human API offers as part of a broader mission of helping consumers do a better job of managing weight, medication , diabetes and cardio together.

"There has to be a marriage of wellness devices and medical management devices to really impact patient health," she said.

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In 2015, ecosystems will transform fragmented wearables market

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The widespread availability of fitness wearables coupled with marginal use has created a relatively new trend in the market - ecosystems. After all, no one can afford to depend on the business of just a few devices and it opens up access to a bigger share of wearables users.

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FDA clarifies the line between wellness and regulated medical devices

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FDA clarifies the line between wellness and regulated medical devices

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PwC predicts “DIY Healthcare” will be the top trend of 2015

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PwC predicts “DIY Healthcare” will be the top trend of 2015

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New Jersey hospital sets up an on-site digital health store

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New Jersey hospital sets up an on-site digital health store

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Millennials Leading the Digital Health Revolution

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Millennials Leading the Digital Health Revolution

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Patient Engagement Isn’t Easy When mHealth Apps are Subpar

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Patient Engagement Isn’t Easy When mHealth Apps are Subpar

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We are still in the dark ages when it comes to health and fitness data. It reminds me of the early 1990s when I had a paper day planner for a calendar, a business card holder for contacts, and a map.

Then along came the Microsoft Outlook and LotusNotes platform. These two platforms slugged it out like Uber verses Lyft. Then Microsoft integrated MS Office with MS Outlook and it was "game over." I finally had one place to find everything I needed to do 90% of my job.

I'm waiting for that moment to come to the realm of my fitness data. It's extremely difficult for me to access my medical and fitness data as it is, and yet the recent CES conference presented hundreds of new ways to collect more of my data. There will be wearables, scales, patches, contact lenses, smartphones, watches, etc. Maybe even a drone to fly overhead and watch what I eat for lunch. It is overwhelming. How overwhelming, you ask?

Let's start with AppleHealth (HealthKit).

There is a reason Apple gave this app out for free on iOS 8.0. I recall getting the Brickbreaker game for free on my Blackberry in 2004. I played it once on a long flight and never used it again.

There are so many ridiculous data categories in HealthKit. Note at right that I have to go past my Biological Sex every day - which hopefully doesn't ever change - to get to my Blood Alcohol Content, which typically does change every day. After Caffeine, there are categories for Calcium, Chromium, Copper, Folate, Iodine, Iron, Molybdenum, etc. I can also track the "Number of times I've fallen", which I guess is useful for some older folks. But how many older folks that fall frequently are using this app on their iPhone? And how many times per year am I gonna check my Molybdenum levels? I don't even know what a good Molybdenum level is. So I gotta scroll past my Chromium, Copper, and Folate categories to get to my Heart Rate. If I go up a level, I get to Calories, Steps, Walking + Running Distance, and Nike Fuel. The Nike Fuel category is really great, but Nike has fired everyone and is no longer making wearable hardware, so it's already obsolete.

The majority of the data I collect on personal fitness does not map to Apple HealthKit. So I'm tracking tons of information on multiple apps and sites. Right now, my Apple HealthKit dashboard contains the following data: Steps, Walking Distance, Weight, BMI, Body Fat, Active Calories, and Heart Rate. Like the data coming from wearables, most of this data is totally useless to me. As a reasonably healthy person, I'm not that interested in how many steps I take each day. At 13% body fat, I'm also not that concerned with minor fluctuations in BMI.
In my Bathroom
I use a Withings Smart Body Analyzer. Fancy term for a scale in my bathroom. I weigh myself and that data wirelessly transmits to my Withings iPhone app. With two clicks I can access every weight reading for the last year. It captures my weight, Body Fat, BMI, Heart Rate, Steps, and the Air Quality in my bathroom. This information maps to Apple HealthKit, but it's just about the only data that is useful that maps directly where it is supposed to go.
At my Doctor
My Primary Care Physician now has my medical records in a secure electronic site using Epic MyChart. At my home page I am reminded to have a Tdap/td Age 18-65. I have no idea what this is, but apparently I'm overdue for it.

My last blood test is there, but there is no history beyond that test. There are lots of cool tools like graphing and trending capabilities, but with one blood test there isn't much to graph. Luckily I maintain the results of 15 blood tests going back to 1997. It's a basic MS Excel spreadsheet on my desktop.

Of course, none of this will map to Epic MyChart or AppleHealth unless I manually enter it. So even with all the recent digital advances, I am still comparing my current results from Epic/MyChart to my old Excel spreadsheet. Of course, none of this data maps over to AppleHealth or any other app. So this is pretty much dead data. Once I've looked at my blood test results, there is no reason to go back.

I could not find any other test results or images, such as a recent colonoscopy. Maybe that's a good thing. But what if I have chest pains during an overnight trip to Oklahoma City? How will the emergency department get my last EKG? What if I need an MRI, but I just had one last week in Atlanta? Having a cloud-based repository is not only convenient, it will reduce over-testing and excess cost from the system.
At the Gym
Flywheel Spin Class: The Flywheel app is the most useful app on my phone. It's tied to the joint where I do spin classes. I use it 4-5 times each week. I can schedule classes, track my performance, average speed, calories burned, distance, etc. Everything maps immediately to my Flywheel iPhone app. I can also graph all my rides against each other back to my first ride in January 2014. I can look at each ride and determine the percentile vs. every other rider in Atlanta. Again, none of this maps to Apple HealthKit.

Polar Beat/Flow: I use Polar Beat/Flow and a chest strap to track my heart rate, distance, calories, exercise zones, etc. when I'm doing aerobic activity. This information does map to a Polar app on my iPhone and then to AppleHealth. In terms of improving my cardiovascular health, this is probably the most useful app. I can actually see (graphically) how hard I'm working and whether my performance is improving. But it is only useful to me at 160 heart beats per minute. For the other 23 hours in the day, it is useless to me.

FitBit: I started using a FitBit activity tracker last December. I made it to about February before I put it in a drawer. My daily steps and calories just aren't that interesting or useful to me. And I can typically tell you whether I slept okay last night or not. The other features were useless. Surprisingly, it did not allow me to track my heart rate during exercise. This "one-dimensional" wearable category will die unless the diagnostic technology ramps up fast. Even then it will likely become siloed into different devices for chronic conditions such as diabetes, cardiac, etc. It will soon be as useful as the hieroglyphics text I used on my old Palm 3 PDA.

The prognosis

The Apple HealthKit app seems haphazardly put together. A beta user could have figured out how useless most of the categories are in a matter of days. Even for a data geek like me who tracks everything, the vast majority of the categories are useless.

Most people think Apple will just be the "repository." But getting all my apps to sync to Apple HealthKit is frustrating or impossible. If I was a betting man, I'd say that Apple has intentionally created a site that is rather useless. A teaser, of sorts. If the consumer gets frustrated enough they will either give up or go looking for an easier way to collect and aggregate data. It would seem that Apple is merely setting the stage for one device that does it all: the Apple iWatch. After all, there isn't much profit margin in a free app. There is a high margin in a category killing iWatch.

Then again wearing a geeky smart watch is an invitation to get beat up and stuffed into a school locker during homeroom. The iWatch will never be as cool as the iPod, iPad, or iPhone, even if Steve Jobs personally makes the pitch in a hologram from heaven.

What the world needs now is a category killer like MS Outlook. It needs to be user friendly and have a killer GUI. I need one site where my fitness and my medical data can coexist happily. A place where I don't have to scroll past my Molybdenum levels to see results from yesterday's spin class. Where data analytics can begin to predictively model my health risks and let me know when something is wrong. A place where I can begin to control my own data and take proactive steps towards better health. After all, what good is all this data if I cannot use it?

We need the "Domo" of healthcare.
Tom Greene is a healthcare consultant with Alliant and works with Fortune 500 companies. He is also an author, Angel Investor, evangelical Digital Health thinker, and Board member at Mana Health. You can follow him on Twitter @greene_tom.

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We are still in the dark ages when it comes to health and fitness data. It reminds me of the early 1990s when I had a paper day planner for a calendar, a business card holder for contacts, and a map. Then along came the Microsoft Outlook and LotusNotes platform.

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VIVEK WADHWA: My prediction is that 2015 will be the year in which tech takes baby steps in transforming medicine. The technologies that make this possible are advancing at exponential rates; their power and performance are increasing dramatically, even as their prices fall and footprints shrink. The big leaps will start to happen at around the end of this decade. With health data from millions of patients, technology companies will be able to take on and transform the pharmaceutical industry - which works on limited clinical-trial data and sometimes chooses to ignore information that does not suit it. These data can be used to accurately analyze what medications patients have taken, to determine which of them truly had a positive effect; which simply created adverse reactions and new ailments; and which did both. ...

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Vivek Wadhwa: How Technology Will Eat Medicine

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VIVEK WADHWA: My prediction is that 2015 will be the year in which tech takes baby steps in transforming medicine. The technologies that make this possible are advancing at exponential rates; their power and performance are increasing dramatically, even as their prices fall and footprints shrink.

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80% Of All Online Adults Now Own A Smartphone, Less Than 10% Use Wearables

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80% Of All Online Adults Now Own A Smartphone, Less Than 10% Use Wearables

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If people are looking to Apple and its new smartwatch to kickstart wider consumer interest in wearable computing gadgets, the maker of the iPhone will have a lot of work ahead of it. New research out from the GlobalWebIndex indicates that in a survey of 170,000 adult internet users across 32 markets, only 9% report having a smartwatch, and 7% said they owned smart wristbands. In contrast, among online adults, 80% now own a smartphone.

The proportion of smartphone ownership has reached a new high, but it has not yet overtaken legacy ownership and usage of PCs, which is currently at 91% of all online adults.

Some other interesting data points highlighted in GWI's research:

- Wearables. Within the wearables category, the biggest number of device owners are affluent males in the 25-34 year-old group who reside in the Asia Pacific region. This points to these smaller, portable and more narrowly functional devices continuing their market placement as niche products that have yet to find a groove to appeal to a wider range of consumers.

- Platform 'wars' are over and Android won. Breaking out how different mobile platforms are performing in the smartphone and tablet sectors, it's no surprise to see that Android is firmly ahead of iOS. What's interesting to see, however, is just how far they have diverged and when.

We have heard various market analysts point out that Apple's iPhone sales have seen a big bump in the wake of the launch of the iPhone 6 models, but it's not clear that the ownership picture as depicted by GWI supports that.

While Android was creeping up quarter on quarter, the difference between Q2 and Q3 noticeably got flatter, which could indicate slowing sales, except that the iPhone numbers appeared to flatten/increase only very slightly.

In other words, if there has been an impact, it will have to be sustained by Apple to show any meaningful shift in ownership. As it stands now, Android's 54% share represents a 38-point lead over iPhone/iOS, with the gap widening.

Back in 2011, the ratio of Android to iOS users was just under 2:1; in 2014, it has increased significantly to approach 3.5:1, GWI notes.

Whether that divergence will ultimately start to play out in where developers invest their time and efforts will be the really important question for users (and Apple).

- Tablets. In tablets, to me the most interesting point is a historical one: we like to talk about how Apple and the iPad dominate tablets, and while that may be the truth as far as the single brand is concerned, when it comes to platform dominance, Apple hasn't been in a leadership position since Q4 2011, and really dropped away from a close position in 2013.

- Mobile internet use. GWI says that 75% percent of smartphone users are accessing mobile internet services on their smartphones - meaning a whole 25% are still not. The average amount of time that people are spending on their mobile devices is 1.85 hours/day, up by about 40 minutes on 2012. Because emerging market consumers often replace PCs with phones, they are using those phones the most, on average at more than three hours/day in the Middle East and Africa.

As you can see in the chart, mobile is used for Internet access far more than tablets, TVs and e-readers, but as with device ownership, it's not yet passing PC/laptop usage, which is around 90%.

- VPNs, popular content. GWI also delves into what kinds of content is being consumed on the Internet access front, and how users are getting to it. The rising tide of restrictive firewalls in some markets has led to increased usage of VPNs to access the Internet. These VPNs effectively let you appear on the Internet as if you are somewhere that you are actually not. Currently, GWI says that some 27% of respondents, of 400 million users, say that they have used VPNs to go online, with China alone accounting for 150 million people.

Among those users, they are unsurprisingly significantly more avid online consumers of content than those not using VPNs. Google Play scored the highest of all services accessed by VPN and regular Internet users, who would be turning to the search giant's store not for apps but for video and audio and gaming content.

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80% Of All Online Adults Now Own A Smartphone, Less Than 10% Use Wearables

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If people are looking to Apple and its new smartwatch to kickstart wider consumer interest in wearable computing gadgets, the maker of the iPhone will have a lot of work ahead of it. New research out from the GlobalWebIndex indicates that in a survey of 170,000 adult internet users across 32 market...

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Digital Single Market - European Commission

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211 separate responses from public authorities, healthcare providers, patients' organisations and web entrepreneurs, inside and outside the EU, gave feedback on eleven issues related to the uptake of mHealth in the EU. While recent statistics confirm that national and EU funding initiatives are bearing fruit and that Europe is set to become the largest market by 2018, responses indicated that more remains to be done so that EU entrepreneurs can effectively access this booming market.

97 respondents believe that strong privacy and security tools (such as data encryption and authentication mechanisms) are needed to build users' trust. Half of the respondents called for a strengthened enforcement of data protection and the rules applicable to mHealth devices.

Nearly half of the respondents ask for more patient safety and transparency of information, by means of certification schemes or quality labelling of lifestyle and wellbeing apps. Nevertheless, some warn against the risks of over-regulation.

Web entrepreneurs consider it difficult to access the market due to the lack of a clear regulatory framework, interoperability and common quality criteria.

71 respondents think performance and safety requirements and liability rules applicable to lifestyle and wellbeing apps should be clarified, through legislation, self-regulation or guidance.

A fifth of respondents believe more evidence is needed on the cost-effectiveness of mHealth. 21 respondents referred to specific studies and projects which have demonstrated efficiency gains. For example, according to one study, trials in the Nordic countries have shown that mHealth could generate a 50-60% reduction in hospital nights and re-hospitalization for patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. The same study estimates that mHealth could reduce overall elderly care expenditure by 25%.

Respondents also suggested that:

EU and national actions should ensure interoperability of mHealth solutions with Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for continuity of care and for research purposes.

Greater emphasis should be put on actions to promote open standards and the use of the common open architecture or open Application Programming Interfaces.

Health professionals, care-givers and users should be actively involved in co-designing mHealth solutions.

Next steps

The Commission will, in the course of 2015, discuss with stakeholders the options for policy actions (legislation, self- or co-regulation, policy guidelines, etc.).

A series of actions to support mHealth deployment are already foreseen under Horizon 2020 and will be taken into account in future work programmes. mHealth will be one of the key topics on the agenda of eHealth Week in Riga in May 2015.

Background

The public consultation on mHealth was open from 10th April until 10th July 2014. It invited stakeholders to provide their views on 11 issues related to the uptake of mHealth in the EU. These were: data protection, including security of health data; big data; state of play of the applicable EU legal framework; patient safety and transparency of information; mHealth role in healthcare systems and equal access; interoperability; reimbursement models; liability; research &innovation; international cooperation; and access of web entrepreneurs to the mHealth market.

Of the 211 responses received, 71% were provided by organisations and 29% by individuals. Responses were received from industry, national and regional authorities, health professionals, the research community, non-governmental organisations and patient associations.

Figure 1: Distribution of responses by sector and type of the organisation

The largest number of responses came from Belgium (47), the United Kingdom (26), Germany (20) and France (19). The Commission received 19 replies from outside the EU, including 8 from the United States.

Figure 2: Country distribution of responses

mHealth is an emerging part of eHealth, where Information & Communication Technologies are used to improve health products, services and processes. It is a promising area to supplement the traditional delivery of healthcare. It includes applications which

perform measurements (e.g. of glucose levels)

complement medical devices (e.g. helping in the delivery of insulin by transmitting control signals to the pump from a mobile platform)

remind patients they should take their medication

provide recommendations (e.g. meditating techniques) to improve users' overall health & wellbeing

Published in 2012, the Commission's eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020 already recognised the current and potential benefits of mobile health apps, as well as potential associated risks, and announced this Green Paper on mHealth.

The Green Paper was accompanied by a Staff Working Document to raise app developers' awareness of EU rules on data protection, medical devices (helping them determine whether such legislation applies to their apps or not) and consumer directives.

Useful links

Find the summary report and all the responses here

Green Paper on Mobile Health

Staff Working Document on the existing EU legal framework applicable to lifestyle and wellbeing apps

eHealth in the Digital Agenda

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mHealth in Europe: Preparing the ground - consultation results published - Digital Single Market - European Commission

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211 separate responses from public authorities, healthcare providers, patients' organisations and web entrepreneurs, inside and outside the EU, gave feedback on eleven issues related to the uptake of mHealth in the EU.

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The Future of Medicine Is in Your Smartphone

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The Future of Medicine Is in Your Smartphone

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essay (discontinued from 13th january 2015)

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The Future of Medicine Is in Your Smartphone

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From smartphone attachments that can diagnose an ear infection to apps that can monitor mental health, new tools are tilting health-care control from doctors to patients.

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25 Best Health Tech Infographics of 2014

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25 Best Health Tech Infographics of 2014

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Over the past 12 months, HIT Consultant has covered some of the most in-depth and well designed healthcare technology related infographics in this industry. Infographics provide a great way to display complex information or research data in a visually appealing format. Themes this year covered the gamut of healthcare technology including trends transforming health IT (EHR, meaningful use), mobile healthcare, patient engagement, big data and much more.

For our annual recap, we've collected 25 of our favorite healthcare technology infographics of 2014 shown below based on the following criteria:

- Storytelling

- Valuable information

- Data Visualization & Design Creativity

- Data Sources

- Insightful key takeaways

- Popularity (number of social shares)

Illustrates Cleveland Clinic's annual top 10 medical innovations that are likely to have a major impact on improving patient care in 2015.

Created by Career Glider features statistics on how wearable technologies is transforming mobile health, including how they're affecting the way Americans stay active and healthy.

Illustrates the public health impact of ICD-10 in supporting the biosurveillance of the eBola outbreak created by the Coalition for ICD-10 . If the ICD-10 delay was not announced back in spring, the U.S. would be able to use the ICD-10 code for the Ebola virus - A98.4 to assess the efficacy of treatment and outcomes

Key findings from Xerox's annual survey on the usage of electronic health records reveals differences between Millennials and Baby Boomers when it comes to online patient portals.

Meaningful Use audits could recover $33M in EHR incentives, according to data from the HHS published.

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25 Best Health Tech Infographics of 2014 - HIT Consultant

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Over the past 12 months, HIT Consultant has covered some of the most in-depth and well designed healthcare technology related infographics in this industry. Infographics provide a great way to display complex information or research data in a visually appealing format.

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In-Depth: Digital health news from CES 2015

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In-Depth: Digital health news from CES 2015

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Read on for a round-up of news and notable quotes coming out of the big tech event in Las Vegas:

CES organizers predict 20M health and fitness wearables sold in 2015: The CEA, which puts on the CES event, published its forecasts for various consumer electronics categories in the years ahead. The report's press release led with wearable devices, which the group is particularly bullish on: "The wearable device revolution is a key category to watch in the coming years, and especially in 2015. CEA projects overall wearable unit sales will reach 30.9 million units (a 61 percent increase from last year) and generate $5.1 billion in revenue in 2015 (a 133 percent increase). CEA's wearables category encompasses fitness activity bands and other health and fitness devices, as well as smartwatches and smart eyewear."

The CEA expects that -- thanks to strong sales for activity tracking devices -- the health and fitness wearables category will post a projected 20 million units sold in 2015. Revenues from the subcategory will be more than $1.8 billion, the group predicts. More

FTC urges connected device makers to invest in privacy, too: FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez took the keynote stage at the event to remind all in attendance that the era of The Internet of Things (IoT) brings with it an era of increased privacy risks in addition to the many benefits companies are more willing to discuss at events like CES15.

"To be sure, these potential benefits are immense, but so too are the potential risks," she said, according to her prepared remarks. "Connected devices that provide increased convenience and improve health services are also collecting, transmitting, storing, and often sharing vast amounts of consumer data, some of it highly personal, thereby creating a number of privacy risks."

Ramirez pointed out that given the billions of dollars invested in IoT already, the industry should be making "appropriate investments in privacy and security" too.

"I believe there are three key steps that companies should take to enhance consumer privacy and security and thereby build consumer trust in IoT devices: (1) adopting 'security by design'; (2) engaging in data minimization; and (3) increasing transparency and providing consumers with notice and choice for unexpected data uses," she said.

Giving consumers the choice of whether their data will be used for purposes beyond the immediate services the connected device offers was one of Ramirez's key suggestions.

"Will [the collected data] be shared with data brokers, who will put those nuggets together with information collected by your parking lot security gate, your heart monitor, and your smart phone?" she asked. "And will this information be used to paint a picture of you that you will not see but that others will - people who might make decisions about whether you are shown ads for organic food or junk food, where your call to customer service is routed, and what offers of credit and other products you receive? And, as businesses use the vast troves of data generated by connected devices to segment consumers to determine what products are marketed to them, the prices they are charged, and the level of customer service they receive, will it exacerbate existing socio-economic disparities?"

Ramirez said the argument that big data is so new and shouldn't face limits related to retention of data yet -- because the potential value of such data may not have yet been fully realized -- isn't convincing: "I question the notion that we must put sensitive consumer data at risk on the off-chance a company might someday discover a valuable use for the information."

Samsung name-drops EarlySense, working on fall detection: Boo-Keun Yoon, president and CEO of Samsung's Consumer Products division, included a few mobile health gems in his keynote presentation. For one thing, Samsung is looking into consumer applications of EarlySense's noninvasive hospital bed sensor: "It's originally a medical device used in hospitals to protect heart patients," he said. "It keeps them out of intensive care and gets them out of the hospital early. Now imagine meshing such a device with consumer electronics. This sensor is about the size of my hand. Put under my mattress, it checks how I sleep and my vital functions. It monitors my health trends and shows them on my smartphone. Another clever little feature: It senses the best time for me to wake up based on my sleep pattern, and I don't have to change my habits or lifestyle. It just works."

Yoon also talked about new sensors Samsung is developing for its phones, and included fall detection as an example use case for the highly sensitive range sensor the company is currently developing: "What if your grandmother falls out of bed during the night or slips in the shower?" he said. "The sensor will allow your smartphone to call the nurse or even an ambulance."

Walgreens working with Qualcomm Life for rewards program: Walgreens has tapped Qualcomm Life to integrate its 2net platform into the retail pharmacy's Balance Rewards program. Walgreens customers will be able to use 2net to sync certain mobile health devices, including a wrist-worn blood pressure cuff, a traditional blood pressure cuff and a blood glucose meter, directly to their Balance Rewards account, earning points each time they check their vitals.

"Whether transitioning from a hospital to the home or managing a chronic condition such as heart disease or diabetes, Walgreens connectivity solution powered by Qualcomm Life will allow us to help our customers achieve improved health through regular biometric communication with their providers," Adam Pellegrini, Walgreens divisional vice president of digital health, said in a statement. "Additionally, Qualcomm Life's platforms help us to reward participating customers for their choice to become more informed and engaged in their health care." More

Novartis tapped Qualcomm Life to power its mobile-enabled clinical trials program: Novartis selected Qualcomm Life as a partner for its global Trials of the Future program, in which Novartis is endeavoring to use more mobile technology in its clinical trials and to provide connectivity for future Novartis products. Novartis will use Qualcomm Life's 2net platform and various connected devices to collect medical data directly from trial participants in their homes.

The first trial in the new partnership has already begun, evaluating the use of mobile devices for patients with chronic lung conditions. The trial is observational and doesn't involve any Novartis products or other pharmaceuticals. According to Qualcomm, the study "leverages 2net mobile-enabled smartphones and 2net Hubs to seamlessly collect and aggregate biometric data from medical devices and transmits this data to the cloud-based 2net Platform, which securely sends the data to the study coordinator." More

Misfit offers up a solar-powered activity tracker: Misfit, maker of the Shine and Flash activity trackers, has partnered with Swarovski to create two new versions of the Shine that feature a crystal face and look even more like jewelry than the company's original polished aluminum device. One of the devices, the violet Swarovski Shine, uses solar charging to stay powered up - sunlight, LEDs, or halogen lighting all keep the device up and running.

Intel shows off button-sized wearable tech and partners with sunglasses maker Oakley: This year, at CES15, Intel unveiled Curie, a low-power module the size of a button that developers can use to build wearable devices. Intel explained that some form factors include rings, bags, bracelets, pendants, fitness trackers, and buttons. Curie offers 384 kB flash memory, a low-power integrated DSP sensor hub with a proprietary pattern matching accelerator, Bluetooth LE, a 6-axis combo sensor with accelerometer and gyroscope, and battery charging capabilities. It's expected to ship in the second half of the year. Intel also announced a strategic partnership with sunglasses maker Oakley. Intel and Oakley plan to build luxury sports eyewear that will include integrated smart technology. The project they are working on, which will be unveiled later this year, is designed to enhance an athlete's performance.

Aterica unveils a smartphone-connected case for an EpiPen: Ontario, Canada-based Aterica announced that first product, a smartphone-connected case for an EpiPen, called Veta, is open for pre-orders. The case has a flashing light and audio alerts that can help the user locate the EpiPen if its been misplaced. Veta also has a proximity alert that will tell users via their mobile device if they left the case behind. Users can customize the proximity alerts by providing flexibility if they are in low-risk locations, like their home. Temperature sensors in the case can alert the user if the EpiPen gets too hot or too cold and if the user has an allergic reaction and take the cap off the smart case, an alert will be sent to caregivers in the user's network.

Beyond Verbal launches Empath: Beyond Verbal announced its new app, called Empath, which tracks personal emotional wellness through a phone. When users speak into a phone, Empath identifies how they felt during an activity, or during a specific time of day, and then records these emotions. After a period of time, based on these records, Empath will determine the emotional effects of daily activities and track mood shifts according to the time or day of these activities. The company already offers an API that enables app developers and wearable device makers to add emotion sensing capabilities to their offerings.

BlackBerry's relationship with NantHealth isn't brand new. The two companies were talking about this kind of a partnership - particularly Nant Health taking advantage of BlackBerry's QNX operating system - when BlackBerry made a large investment in Nant Health last April. In addition, last month the two companies launched the NantOmics Cancer Genome Browser, an app for the BlackBerry passport smartphone that allows doctors to compare the genetics of individuals at a highly granular level, which helps oncologists deliver the best personalized treatment to each patient. That technology similarly relied on BlackBerry's infrastructure to keep patient data safe and secure.

Fitbit also announced additional features added to the Charge HR: on-device exercise summaries, which were already available on the Surge. The company has also released more information about the technology that provides the heart rate tracking for the two devices, called PurePulse. It will provide truly continuous, optically measured heart rate tracking that users can monitor during a workout to maintain optimal intensity, as well as consult after the fact to learn about their heart rate trends. Heart rate will also factor into the device's calculation of calorie burn, which should increase accuracy in cases like cycling, elliptical work, or group exercise classes.

Aging in place technology: CES produced a few headlines related to aging in place technology. Independa, a remote care and aging in place technology company, announced that its Independa TV offering, previously available only through a health system, will launch direct to consumer in 2015. The Independa TV system allows older people who might be less familiar with technology to access picture sharing, messaging, video chat, calendaring, reminders, a help button, and more through a familiar technology. Independa also announced the launch of a mobile app version of its caregiver web portal, complete with HealthKit and (planned) Apple Watch integration.

Honeywell HomMed announced a name change to become Honeywell Life Care Solutions, and also announced a mobile patient engagement and population health management tool, called Seymour. According to Honeywell LCS, Seymour "addresses the needs of both consumers and healthcare providers to aggregate and securely exchange meaningful health-related data - from biometric information to data from consumer devices and applications such as fitness activity trackers - and help make it actionable."

On top of that, the show floor had a new mPERS device from Epic Safety and new iPhone-connected hearing aids from Siemens.

Scanadu demos the Flo, names a date for FDA clearance: Portable medical device maker Scanadu was on hand for its third CES, and was demoing not just the Scanadu Scout (which the company has showed off before) but also the Scanadu Flo, the urinalysis peripheral device for the system. Check out the video here wherein Scanadu cofounder Sam DeBrouwer shares some details about the technology: that the colorimetry is designed to work in any lighting, for instance, and that drug testing applications could be coming down the road. In addition, HealthLeaders Media talked to Walter DeBrouwer about Scanadu's road to FDA in an interesting interview. In it, DeBrouwer predicted FDA clearance for Scanadu by the end of Q3 2015.

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In-Depth: Digital health news from CES 2015

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Health devices were a bigger deal at CES last year: After compiling a thorough roundup of health device news from CES 2015, the MobiHealthNews team has concluded that last year's event had bigger and more novel launches.

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The 4 things your mobile health app needs for a breakout in 2015

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The 4 things your mobile health app needs for a breakout in 2015

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The launch of Apple HealthKit and Google Fit in the latter half of 2014, along with the pending launch of the Apple Watch in the first quarter of this year, has the world of mobile health applications poised to truly go mainstream in 2015. The mHealth application market is estimated to be worth $6.4 billion in 2015, and more than double that in 2016 ($13.5 billion), up from $4 billion in 2014.

But the explosion of interest around mobile health has led to fierce competition, with more than 100,000 applications now available for iOS and Android in the health and fitness categories. It's no wonder that more than 70 percent of all mobile health developers achieved fewer than 50,000 downloads and less than $10,000 in revenue.

With such a huge opportunity and fierce competition, how are mobile health app developers supposed to stand out and join the top tier of publishers with more than 500,000 downloads? Here are four trends driving mobile health app success in 2015. Make sure your app has these to make it a success in the years to come.

1. Connectivity to other apps

Most mobile health apps today are islands. They don't interact with other applications beyond simple sharing to social networks. This lack of integration hurts mobile health apps in more ways than one. First, it limits their value. Data from other applications can't flow into or out of the app, limiting utility for the user and creating redundant tasks that require input into multiple application databases.

Second, the lack of connectivity and redundancy makes it all too easy for users to abandon the app shortly after downloading it, if they bother to download it at all. User retention is critical for application success in any category, and connectivity is one of the main ways the top health apps stay relevant and at the top of the download charts.

One example of this is the integration between My Fitness Pal, a calorie tracker, and RunKeeper. The two apps sync caloric intake and calories burned during runs and walks to give the user a better understanding of how their eating and fitness activities work together. It's easy to see how this integration increases the value of both apps to the user, making user retention more likely for both in the process.

With the growth of the digital health category, there are more and more application programming interfaces (APIs) available to developers to integrate into their mHealth apps, including personal health data such as that collected via My Fitness Pal, device data with connected devices like the Withings scale, and wearables such as the Fitbit. Mobile health app developers need to take advantage of these APIs and form partnerships to make their apps more valuable to their customers.

2. Remote monitoring and consultation with physicians

While fitness apps comprise the largest portion of the mobile health application marketplace today, they are decidedly not where the opportunity lies for app developers in 2015 and beyond. A recent survey by research2guidance found that fitness applications are likely to fall from their top spot in the coming years, to be replaced by monitoring and consultation apps.

The reason is simple and profound. With the launch of the Affordable Healthcare Act in the U.S. and the increased cost of managing an aging population, health care providers are looking for ways to reduce expenses related to health care, particularly chronic care management and mitigation. Mobile health apps that can reduce costs through remote consultation and compliance in health management programs will be the most sought after by these organizations.

Alliances like the one between MDLive and Walgreens to provide mobile-based physician consultations will become a fixture of the healthcare landscape. And new mobile health applications like the gambling addiction app developed by the University of California, Los Angeles, will be focused on use cases that deliver monitoring and preventive care to improve patient outcomes while reducing treatment costs. Building applications that go beyond the fitness and reference use cases to truly improve patient outcome will be essential for apps that want to make an impact in 2015.

3. Priority on data security and compliance

Thirty-four of respondents to the mHealth App Economics 2014 survey agreed that if there is a show stopper for the mobile health promise, it's data security. With high-profile breaches of user data a fixture in the headlines, it's little surprise that user concern over privacy of health data is the top priority for developers as well.

More than 60 percent of consumers surveyed in a recent poll on privacy were more concerned about their data security in 2014 than they've ever been. And in a December 2013 poll by Radius Global Market Research, more than three quarters of Internet users at least "somewhat agreed" that they would stop using a service, product, or retailer if they felt their privacy was violated.

With electronic health records worth more than 10 times a stolen credit card number, data security will be essential to adoption and growth of mobile health applications. Combined with the rise in HIPAA violations- - the number of complaints filed by July 31, 2014, was 71 percent higher than the number filed during the same time period in 2013 (5,814 to 9,956) - app developers looking to breakthrough in 2015 must ensure their apps protect consumer data in a compliant manner.

For more exclusive insights from tech industry insiders,
explore VentureBeat's selection of recent guest posts.

4. Access to medical databases

The demand for apps that allow for monitoring, compliance, and consultation will by default require connectivity to medical databases and patient records at the physician, hospital and service provider offices where care is administered, even if done remotely. This connectivity will be driven in part by hospitals and healthcare organizations and their electronic medical records management services, and by a host of new providers building connectivity tools that act as a secure bridge between application and patient databases.

This is the frontier of mobile health applications. Apps that can hook into patient records and patient management systems will enable the valuable interactions and functionality that will drive long-term value and growth. API aggregators such as Validic, app aggregators like Aetna's CarePass, and connectivity providers like Apigee and Qualcomm Life are platforms that will bridge the gap between app and provider. Developers who take advantage of this growing new layer of interoperability can bring new solutions to the market and create a whole new category of powerful mobile health solutions.

The opportunity

The opportunity for mobile health developers is clear. With a growing market and interest in improving health care from both the patient side and the provider side, the market is aligned to make the promise of mobile health a reality. New initiatives such as Apple HealthKit and Google Fit have instantly made massive platforms available to connect consumers to better health care through connected apps.

The need of health care providers and payers to reduce costs will drive the demand for new mobile health solutions in the coming year from the industry side. The growing trend in wearables and health apps will fuel interest from consumers. App developers who can help providers and patients improve compliance to prescribed regimens and reduce costs will be the winners in the mobile health space in 2015 and the years to come.
Jason Wang is chief executive of TrueVault. Prior to TrueVault, he was employee No. 1 and vice president of Technology at ScoreBig.

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The 4 things your mobile health app needs for a breakout in 2015

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The launch of Apple HealthKit and Google Fit in the latter half of 2014, along with the pending launch of the Apple Watch in the first quarter of this year, has the world of mobile health applications poised to truly go mainstream in 2015.

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The future of wearable technology is not wearables – it's analysing the data

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The future of wearable technology is not wearables – it's analysing the data

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The future of wearable technology is not wearables - it's analysing the data

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Wearable technology's evolution is not about the gadget on the wrist but what is done with the data they collect, says computational biologist

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Digital health should see major VC investments in 2015

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Digital health should see major VC investments in 2015

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Last year was certainly a great year for many digital health startups-and there are reasons to think that 2015 could be even better.

While it's still seen as a novelty by some providers, rather than a staple of clinical and personal caregiving, digital health technology is clearly on the rise in the U.S. It looks like some of the money that once flowed into traditional health IT investments (such EMR and business intelligence vendors), is now being diverted to digital health solutions.

While many digital health companies are in their early stages of growth, the promise of emerging digital health is enormous. Seldom has any healthcare technology category shown such explosive growth and acceptance. After all, 20% of Americans already own a wearable device, according to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers. That's an astonishing figure given that it's only been a couple of years since the first ones hit the market.

Last year was certainly a great year for many digital health startups, many of which are growing the market rapidly. But there are reasons to think that 2015 could be even better.

VCs targeting mHealth, population health

As digital health has started to take root in medicine, VCs have been dropping huge piles of money on startups targeting mHealth apps and technologies. While there's no way to be certain, it seems likely that VC investors will make progressively larger bets on digital health this year.

According to research by Mercom Capital Group, consumer-focused technologies took in 65% of all VC investment in Q3 of 2014, including $345 million in mobile health deals and $101 million in telehealth funding. VC firms also invested $85 million in personal health firms, $70 million in social health companies, and $23 million for tech supporting medical scheduling, rating and shopping. These investments are up sharply from 2013, and should shoot up again in 2015 unless something dramatic happens to dampen investors' enthusiasm.

Some big deals in the digital health space last year include a $135 million investment in connected cancer care-based NantHealth, $130 million for oncology-based cloud platform Flatiron Health; $125 million for population health-based Alignment Healthcare, $120 million for digital medicine startup Proteus Digital Health and $78 million for MedHok, which has created a platform for population health and medical compliance.

Just the beginning

Though it's a downer to think about, it's possible that the amount of money flowing into the mHealth world could create a bubble that pops abruptly within the next few years (In fact, some may argue that the bubble already exists.)

But there's a big difference between these times and the dotcom bust in 2000. While startups and investors were trialing creative concepts on the web-often with little attention to controlling their burn rate or even defining their customer base-today's crop of entrepreneurs are largely working on real, well-defined business models.

Also, with clinicians, payers, employers and patients adopting mHealth/connected health technologies, and even investing in companies that create digital health technology, it seems clear that demand for digital health innovations will remain in force-and that'll keep VCs interested.

The bottom line: independent VC firms can and will continue to fund digital health startups with an open hand in 2015, possibly generating funding levels that surpass even 2014's surge. It's just a matter of seeing who gets in the fastest and solves the biggest problem.
Anne Zieger is a veteran journalist who's been covering the U.S. healthcare scene for over 25 years. You can follow Anne on Twitter @ziegerhealth. The nuviun blog is intended to contribute to discussion and stimulate debate on important issues in global digital health. The views are solely those of the author.

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Digital health should see major VC investments in 2015

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Last year was certainly a great year for many digital health startups-and there are reasons to think that 2015 could be even better. While it's still seen as a novelty by some providers, rather than a staple of clinical and personal caregiving, digital health technology is clearly on the rise in the U.S.

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Scanaflo brings hospital-quality urinalysis to your home

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Scanaflo brings hospital-quality urinalysis to your home

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The Snanaflo lets you do at-home urinalysis test. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
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LAS VEGAS - Taking a urine-analysis test to check your most vital and private health stats usually requires an hour-long visit to the doctor. But in 2015, you'll be able to pee on a stick and get 12 vital health measurements without having to leave your bathroom.

Scandu, the Silicon Valley-based medtech company behind the tiny Scandu Scout analyzer, has created an at-home urinalysis device called the Scanaflo that bridges the gap between the medical community and consumers.

Scanaflo is a full-panel urinalysis test with 12 reagents that give home users quantifiable results without having to visit a doctor. It uses tiny sheets of chemicals on a disposable paddle to test for important vitals, like whether you have a urinary tract infection.

To use it, you simply pee on the paddle, then take a pic of the paddle. The Scanaflo app will tell you if your vitals are out of whack.

The Scanaflo app uses Scandu's algorithms to give users immediate and actionable indications about their liver health, kidney disease, heart disease, diabetes, preeclampsia (protein), pH levels, dehydration and urinary tract infection. For now the company says it's focusing on health stats, but it could provide pregnancy tests, drug tests or pretty much anything else you can identify via chemical indicators.

HealthKit integration is still being considered for the future so you can also see how your health stats affect your tests. There's no word on pricing yet, but Scandu tells Cult of Mac each paddle will cost just a couple bucks each. You'll be able to purchase them in small sets or in bulk when it launches later this year, pending Food and Drug Administration clearance.

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Scanaflo brings hospital-quality urinalysis to your home | Cult of Mac

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LAS VEGAS - Taking a urine-analysis test to check your most vital and private health stats usually requires an hour-long visit to the doctor. But in 2015, you'll be able to pee on a stick and get 12 vital health measurements without having to leave your bathroom.

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CES 2015: Digital Health Trends, What’s Hot, What’s Not?

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CES 2015: Digital Health Trends, What’s Hot, What’s Not?

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There is a vast array of technology that companies, researchers and physicians are trying to apply to health care today to allow us to be more in-tune with our bodies. One glance at the showroom floors at International CES is enough to prove that point. Inflation of health care costs, development of apps and devices, and a surging connectivity are all factors contributing to the onslaught of digital health trends. With so many different types of technology at our fingertips, how can we decide which ones will lead the way for health care advancements in the next decade?

A few leaders in the field -- people with unique perspectives on digital health -- sat down for a panel discussion at the CESDigital Health Summit on Wednesday, Jan. 6. Dr. Daniel Kraft of Singularity University and Exponential Medicine, Tim Moore of Rochester Optical, and Robert Scoble of Rackspace Hosting joined moderator John Nosta, president of NostaLab, to give their input on which current and upcoming digital health technologies are hot.

Wearables, telemedicine, nanotechnology, 3D printing, visualization, artificial intelligence, genomics, cybersecurity, and traditional medical facilities each went under the microscope for an in-depth description of how it aids digital health, if it's following an upward trend, and, if it's not, what needs to happen to ensure its future relevance.

When it comes to wearable technology, accuracy and integration of data are key factors in whether a device will stay relevant. Speakers had a wide range of opinions on the importance of wearables in the digital health sector, ranging from four to ten on a scale of numerical importance.

Telemedicine, a growing trend in digital health, then took over the conversation, as it seems to have done over much of the Health and Wellness showroom floor at this year's CES. Speakers gave telemedicine, the practice of physicians advising, diagnosing and treating over a live video chat through a smartphone or computer, an average rating of 6.5 for significance in digital health. Much of the popularity stems merely from a dislike of waiting rooms and hospitals. But the overall cost of chatting with a physician through programs such as Doctor on Demand or MD Live can be vastly less burdensome than paying a visit to the emergency room just for advice and a prescription, which can easily be sent electronically. Often patients find themselves in need of medical advice while they are thousands of miles from their primary care physician. In such cases, telemedicine's accessibility and lower costs come in handy.

Next on the list of digital health trends was nanotechnology. The speakers believe nanotechnology's application to medicine is a natural evolution and a game changer for our bodies. Given an average rating of six, nanotechnology's precision and accuracy in helping to design drugs specifically matching our needs or tracing a small cancerous tumor in a patient's body make it a significant digital health trend, one that will see more action in the next few years.

3D printing took the cake as far as being the most impactful trend in digital health today. Its projected growth over the next decade also surpasses most. From printing medical devices at the space station to frames for surgeons, the "design it, print it, ship it" mantra is expected to advance digital health the most in the next few years. The panel stressed the use of 3D printing in medical education. The ability to print models of a heart for a medical student to operate on and to provide that safeguarded, practical method for students is helping 3D printing bring digital health into the future.

Which brings us to the next topic discussed - visualization. This rated highly among the speakers on the relevance scale in digital health, and was described by Moore as "an open runway for what we can do" with medicine. One of the problems with consumer health and digital health is that consumers don't always know what a certain number, e.g. blood pressure result, means. Visualizations (e.g. virtual reality, models, etc.) can turn wearable data into something meaningful. The newfound techniques we have to visualize what's happening in, and to, our bodies will bring digital health into a new, consumer-centric era.

Artificial intelligence is another digital health trend the speakers rated highly, and also called "frightening" - mostly because it's hard to tell exactly where AI will take us. However, the abilities granted to us by AI are endless. For example, AI can help physicians track a patient's health trends to catch dangerous signs before a heart attack or stroke occurs. It could usher in a new era of preventative medicine.

Panel w\ @daniel_kraft @ExponentialMed @JohnNosta @Scobleizer @rocoptical #DigitalHealthCES #WebMDCES #CES2015 pic.twitter.com/RXKDbEAXIJ

- DigitalHealthSummit (@dhsummit) January 7, 2015

Genomics was rated slightly lower than previously mentioned trends, though its importance in digital health is recognized. Genome sequencing, at the rate it's developing, is about to run the gamut from expensive $1,000 sequences to much cheaper $100 genomes. Integration of personal genetics and research (e.g. 23andMe collaborating with Genentech) will bring genomics slightly more to the forefront in the next few years.

But with all that data sharing and collaboration, what's ensuring consumer privacy? Cybersecurity was the next topic of discussion on the panel and was rated equally high by all speakers. However, cybersecurity in digital health was stressed to be relevant not because it makes users feel good, but because we feel we have to use it. Particularly in light of recent events, data donors must be even more careful and only share with sites and companies they trust and understand, if they want to use digital data to improve their health and well-being.

Lastly, the panel discussed the importance of traditional medical facilities -- from physicians' offices to hospitals -- in digital health. With the growing popularity of telemedicine, and cheaper and more ubiquitous digital health platforms, the dynamic of health care is clearly shifting away from traditional facilities.

As digital health moves into the mainstream, expect to see some exciting new ways to personalize medicine and understand your body in the next few years.

ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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CES 2015: Digital Health Trends, What's Hot, What's Not?

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There is a vast array of technology that companies, researchers and physicians are trying to apply to health care today to allow us to be more in-tune with our bodies. One glance at the showroom floors at International CES is enough to prove that point.

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6 Keys to Designing Digital Health Tech for Seniors

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6 Keys to Designing Digital Health Tech for Seniors

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With the population of Americans over the age of 65 expected to soar to 19 million by 2050-more than tripling since 2010-makers of digital health technology are homing in on this potentially lucrative demographic.

Digital technologies promise to help older people age at home, hopefully more comfortably than generations past. But there's one problem: Getting older consumers to adopt digital health solutions.

Today at the Digital Health Summit at CES in Las Vegas, David Inns, CEO of GreatCall Inc., a provider of mhealth solutions for seniors including medical alert devices, shared some pointers for creating digital health devices to appeal to the older demographic.

Mobile applications alone aren't the answer.

Many of the seniors who need digital health technology the most don't either don't have a smartphone or don't know how to use one effectively, Inns said. Without a smartphone or the tech savvy to work it, apps aren't much help.

Simplicity and service are the keys to adoption.

The more things you put into your digital health solution for seniors, the more confusing it will likely be-and the less likely they are to adopt it, Inns said.

Focus on solving problems, not technology.

Most older consumers don't buy technology for technology's sake. They buy it because they have a problem they believe the technology can solve, Inns said.

Engage family members.

Caregiving costs Americans $522 billion per year, and families want technology to help ease that burden, Inns said. It's your job to give it to them.

Caregivers also play an important role in making purchasing decisions for their older charges.

Go direct to the consumer if you can.

"So many companies are trying to go through commercial healthcare channels and are struggling to get adoption," Inns said.

Part of the problem is "pilot-itis," he added. "Everybody's piloting, and nobody is rolling out."

It makes sense: Providers require loads of evidence and often must get approval from multiple stakeholders. On the consumer side, however, there are a "lot of people with a lot of money who really have a problem," Inns said.

He cautioned that going the direct-to-consumer route requires a lot of capital but insists that market is there.

Understand that it's still early, and be patient.

Inns showed an interesting statistic that there are 20 million seniors who could benefit from active aging technology, 40 million family caregivers that want help, and only 4 million babies born in the United States each year. However, "caregiving" turns up in only 28,000 Google searches and "independent living" in only 48,000, while "baby monitor" garners 450,000 searches.

He said that's proof that the market for digital health solutions for seniors is still young.

"People aren't waking up in the morning and saying they're going to go down to the store and decide which aging technology to buy for Mom today," Inns said. "We still have to get people to understand that there's technology out there that can help."
Jamie Hartford is the managing editor of MD+DI. Reach her at [email protected] .
[image courtesy of AMBRO/FREEDIGITALPHOTOS.NET]

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6 Keys to Designing Digital Health Tech for Seniors

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With the population of Americans over the age of 65 expected to soar to 19 million by 2050-more than tripling since 2010-makers of digital health technology are homing in on this potentially lucrative demographic. Digital technologies promise to help older people age at home, hopefully more comfortably than generations past.

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When Medical Apps Do More Harm Than Good

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When Medical Apps Do More Harm Than Good

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In 2013, when Julie Hudak read about an iPhone app that could diagnose skin cancer, she downloaded it right away. Her husband and sister-in-law had both died of melanoma, and she didn't want to miss any early signs of the disease in her three children. It was easy to use-simply upload a photo of a mole and get a color-coded result: Green meant cancer was unlikely, yellow was a maybe, and red indicated danger. Even though the dermatologist had assured Hudak just a week earlier that her children's skin looked fine, she decided to snap photos of her 11-year-old daughter's moles. Seconds later, the results appeared. "Some came up yellow, and one was red," Hudak recalls. "I panicked." She called the dermatologist for an emergency appointment.

Online retailers like iTunes and Amazon offer thousands of apps promising all kinds of real-time information about your body-they can measure blood pressure, take your pulse, track your menstrual cycle, and tell you how well your lungs are working. Mobile health is one of the fastest-growing app categories: According to the consulting firm research2guidance, there are 100,000 mobile health apps on the market, double the number available two and a half years ago. The industry is worth some $4 billion today, and analysts predict that it will reach $26.5 billion by 2017.

It's not hard to understand why these apps have taken off. For one, doctors are busier than ever; the Health Resources and Services Administration reports a shortfall of 8,200 primary-care physicians. Yet replacing clinic visits with smartphones can be a risky move. A few years ago, for example, Nathan Cortez, a law professor specializing in health care regulation, noticed an app that claimed to treat seasonal affective disorder: Patients who felt depressed in winter months could simply gaze into their phones, which supposedly emitted mood-lifting light. "The phones couldn't possibly give off enough light to make a difference for people with this disorder," Cortez told me. "Here was this burgeoning industry creating all of these apps that could be really useful-or really dangerous."

Even most simple pedometer apps don't count your steps correctly.

Indeed, a number of recent studies have identified medical apps that failed to measure up. In 2011, pharma giant Pfizer recalled a rheumatology calculator app after the company found that its swollen-joint measurements-calculated using self-reported data-were off by as much as half. Even most simple pedometer apps don't count your steps correctly, a 2012 study found. For a 2013 paper, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center tested four skin cancer diagnosis apps -similar to the one Hudak used on her kids-and three of them missed at least 1 in 3 melanomas.

You might expect that the Food and Drug Administration would regulate these apps, and it does-but mainly the ones paired with diagnostic gadgets like, say, a blood-pressure cuff. Even then, its database is full of app-related complaints. One blood-glucose tracker had 59 "adverse events" since 2012-many involving diabetics who took too much insulin based on false readings and had to be rushed to the hospital.

Most health apps, though, are classified as "informational" or "entertainment" to escape FDA oversight. But their marketing talk can send confusing signals. WebMD's Symptom Checker, for instance, lets you "select the part of the body that is troubling you, choose your symptoms, and learn about potential conditions or issues," even as the website notes that it "does not provide medical advice." The description of Real Blood Pressure Calc says, "Now you won't have to carry heavy equipment with you. All you need is this ever useful application." But a disclaimer states that it's "just meant to give you a hint of your actual BP measurements."

All of this fuzzy language caught the attention of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which over the past few years has held hearings on the safety of health apps and whether they warrant a shorter leash. Tech companies such as IBM, McKesson, and Qualcomm argue that requiring all health-related apps to undergo rigorous FDA review would stifle innovation. Cortez, meanwhile, argues that tighter rules would strengthen the industry by discouraging fly-by-night operators.

For now, it's consumer beware. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and medical-device researcher, suggests that people choose their health apps with care. Be skeptical, for example, of the unregulated ones that rely solely on your smartphone. One promising development? Apps that involve actual doctors in the process. (The one successful skin cancer app from that 2013 study showed users' photos to a physician.) There's also Google Helpouts, which lets people consult with a vetted doctor. It can run you $5 to $8 a minute on the high end, but the price may be worth it if a worrisome symptom is costing you sleep.

As for Hudak, she rushed her daughter back to the dermatologist, only to learn that the app had gotten it wrong: The red-alert mole was benign. She decided to trash the program. "It's not worth feeling comforted when you really are in danger-or panicked when there is nothing to worry about," she says. "I can't live in fear."

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When medical apps do more harm than good

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In 2013, when Julie Hudak read about an iPhone app that could diagnose skin cancer, she downloaded it right away. Her husband and sister-in-law had both died of melanoma, and she didn't want to miss any early signs of the disease in her three children.

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This Is the Year Wearables Will Stop Being So Ugly

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This Is the Year Wearables Will Stop Being So Ugly

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Fitness trackers are getting a whole lot more stylish.

The latest batch of wearables lets you have your fitness tracking and your fashion, too. They're ditching neutral monochrome and sporty, almost utilitarian, styling for a rainbow of colors, faux gems, and other flair that make them suitable for any time of day, and any occasion. The change reflects the maturation of the market and the growing sophistication of consumer tastes.

"When the first activity trackers started coming out, that sporty look was what people wanted. Now we're moving away from that," Garmin media relations associate Amy Noury said. The company just launched its first smartwatch, the $250 Vivoactive. It's a handsome, sleek gadget that resembles the Pebble smartwatch and builds on its general purpose activity trackers, the Vivofit and Vivosmart. It's GPS enabled and can track activities like cycling, running, swimming, or golf. Garmin also updated its Vivofit fitness tracker with additional features and a host of bright silicon strap colors and styles, including ones patterned with designs by Jonathan Adler.

We started seeing more attractive fitness trackers from the likes of Withings last year, but the trend has firmly established itself here at CES. Gone are the somewhat flimsy, totally utilitarian bands that go around your wrist or dongles that clip to your pocket. The newest trackers are sleek, almost sexy, drawing design cues from high-end jewelry and Swiss watches. Many of these changes are designed to make wearables more appealing to women, whose tastes and needs were largely ignored in the first wave of wearables. That's changing as manufacturers realize they are missing out on a huge potential market. In response, they're designing health, fitness, and safety trackers that look more like jewelry than gadgetry. Cuff was among the first to do so with a wearable that serves as a personal safety monitor and notification alert yet looks like something you'd wear to dinner.

"People were able to relate to [Cuff] not as pieces of technology but rather as things they wanted to wear, with added benefit," says company CEO Deepa Sood.

Others have followed that lead, working alongside designers and jewelry makers to create wearables that are as attractive as they are useful. Take Misfit, for example. Swarovski, the Austrian producer of fine crystal and cut glass, worked with Misfit to develop the Swarovski Shine collection, a pair of bejeweled activity trackers that can be worn on an array of crystal-covered bracelets, bands, and necklaces. The two companies got together during a wearable tech event in New York in 2013, and Swarovski thought Shine's clean, modular design made it a great opportunity to create a new high-end accessory that won't be obsolete within months.

"[It] has a set of features people will find interesting now, as well as four years from now," says Tim Golnik, Misfit's vice president of product and design. "And it's not hinged on a large display that needs a certain number of colors or pixel density."

You can get Shine in silver or violet-the latter of which runs entirely on solar power. Joan Ng, a Swarovski v.p., says each of the crystal's facets direct light onto a tiny embedded photovoltaic cell. Of course, adding all that flair and tech boosts the price; the original Shine costs $99, but if you want the fancier model (and its accessories) you'll pay as much as $250.

Withings went the other way, introducing the fun, colorful Activité Pop smartwatch. It costs $150, compared to $400 for the handsome Activité that resembles a Swiss watch. Although the Pop offers some of the same features as the more upscale Activité, it uses less expensive (and less durable) materials. The company went for fun, eye-catching colors-including teal, orange, and blue-that would encourage people to wear the watch every day. The Pop still has the masculine design common to high-end watches-a large dial with a wide strap-but is aimed at both men and women.

"The different color and material options allow men and women to pick the watch that is the best fit for them," Withings CEO Cedric Hutchings said. The Pop has a Bluetooth radio and uses the Withings Health Mate app to connect to your iPhone and track all your activities-including swimming.

This new era in wearables is exciting. For the first time, gadget makers aren't thinking about more than function. They're thinking about form, and trends, and what consumers want. If people are going to embrace wearables as something they use every day, they need to fit consumers' needs in terms of function and design, as well as their personality. Now, we'll finally have the option to choose the wearable that's exactly what we're looking for.
This post was updated at 10:10 am ET 01/06/15.

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This Is the Year Wearables Will Stop Being So Ugly

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Fitness trackers are getting a whole lot more stylish. The latest batch of wearables lets you have your fitness tracking and your fashion, too. They're ditching neutral monochrome and sporty, almost utilitarian, styling for a rainbow of colors, faux gems, and other flair that make them suitable for any time of day, and any occasion.

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These 11 Technologies Will Go Big in 2015

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These 11 Technologies Will Go Big in 2015

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If you thought 2014 was thrilling, here's a look at what I'm most excited about for 2015. Here are 11 of the most exciting new technologies moving from deceptive to disruptive this year.

1. Virtual reality: Expect a lot more action on the virtual and augmented reality front. 2014 saw the $2B acquisition of Oculus Rift by Facebook. In 2015, we'll see action from companies like Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity (the successor to Second Life), immersive 3D 360-degree cameras from companies like Immersive Media (the company behind Google's Streetview), Jaunt, and Giroptic. Then there are game changers like Magic Leap (in which Google just led a $542 million investment round) that are developing technology to "generate images indistinguishable from real objects and then being able to place those images seamlessly into the real world." Oculus, the darling of CES for the past few years, will be showing its latest Crescent Bay prototype and hopefully providing a taste of how its headset will interact with Nimble VR's hand- and finger-tracking inputs. Nine new VR experiences will be premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this year, spanning from artistic, powerful journalistic experiences like Project Syria to full "flying" simulations where you get to "feel" what it would be like for a human to fly.

2. Mass-market robots: Late 2013 saw the acquisition by Google of eight robotics companies. 2015 is going to see the introduction of consumer-friendly robots in a store near you. Companies like SU's Fellow Robots are creating autonomous "employees" called OSHbots that are roaming the floors of Lowe's and helping you find and order items in their store. We'll also see Softbank's Pepper robot make the leap from Japan to enter U.S. retail stores. Pepper uses an emotion engine and computer vision, to detect smiles, frowns, and surprise, and it uses speech recognition to sense the tone of voice and to detect certain words indicative of strong feelings, like "love" and "hate." The engine then computes a numeric score that quantifies the person's overall emotion as positive or negative to help the store make a sale. At CES, Paris-based start-up Keecker will show off a robot that doubles as a movie projector after raising more than $250,000 for the idea on Kickstarter.

3. Autonomous vehicles: In 2015, we will see incredible developments in autonomous vehicle technology. Beyond Google, many major car brands are working on autonomous solutions. At CES, Volkswagen will bring the number of car brands on display into double figures for the first time this year. Companies like Mercedes say they will show off a new self-driving concept car that allows its passengers to face each other. BMW plans to show how one of its cars can be set to park itself via a smartwatch app. And, Tesla, of course, has already demonstrated "autopilot" on its Model D.

4. Drones everywhere: 2015 will be a big year for drones. They are getting cheaper, easier to use, more automated, and are now finding more useful and lucrative applications. These "drones" include everything from the $20 toys you can buy at RadioShack to the high-powered $1000+ drones from companies like DJI and the super-simple and powerful Q500 Typhoon. These consumer drones equipped with high quality cameras and autopilot software are military-grade surveillance units now finding use in agriculture, construction and energy applications. Drones get their own section of CES in 2015 with a new "unmanned systems" zone. Wales' Torquing Group could provide one of its highlights with Zano, a Kickstarter-backed quadcopter small enough to fit in your hand but still capable of high-definition video capture.

5. Wireless power: "Remember when we had to use wires to charge our devices? Man, that was so 2014." Companies like uBeam, Ossia and others are developing solutions to charge your phones, laptops, wearables, etc. wirelessly as you go about your business. And this isn't a "charging mat" that requires you to set your phone down... imagine having your phone in your pocket, purse, or backpack, and it will be charging as you walk around the room. Companies are taking different approaches as they develop this technology (uBeam uses ultrasound to transfer energy to piezoelectric receivers, while Ossia has a product called Cota that uses an ISM radio band, similar to WiFi, to transfer energy and data). Look out for a key "interface moment" in 2015 that will take wireless power mainstream.

6. Data and machine learning: 2014 saw data and algorithm driven companies like Uber and Airbnb skyrocket. There is gold in your data. And data-driven companies are the most successful exponential organizations around. In 2015, data collection and mining that data will become more turn-key. Platforms like Experfy, for example, allow you to find data scientists who will develop algorithms or machine learning solutions for your business/project. Larger companies can explore partnering with IBM's Watson Ecosystem, which is creating a community of everyone from developers to content providers to collaborate and create the next generation of cognitive apps. Companies built around algorithms, like Enlitic (a company that uses machine learning to detect tumors and make medical imaging diagnostics faster and cheaper), will become much more prevalent and common in 2015.

7. Large-scale genome sequencing and data mining: We are at the knee of the curve of human genome sequencing. In 2015, we will see explosive, exponential growth in genomics and longevity research. As the cost of sequencing a single human genome plummets by orders of magnitude (now around $1,000) and the amount of useful information we glean from mining all that data skyrockets. At Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI), a company I co-founded, we are aiming to sequence 1 million to 5 million full human genomes, microbiomes, metabalomes, proteomes, MRI scans, and more by 2020. We're proud to have Franz Och, formerly the head of Google Translate, as the head of our machine learning team to mine the massive amount of data so that we can learn the secrets to extending the healthy human lifespan by 30-40 years.

8. Sensor explosion: In 2015, expect "everything" to be "smart." The combination of sensors and wearables, increased connectivity, new manufacturing methods (like 3D printing), and improved data mining capabilities will create a smart, connected world-where our objects, clothes, appliances, homes, streets, cars, etc., etc. will be constantly communicating with one and other. Soon, there will be trillions of sensors throughout the world. These sensors won't just power smart ovens and sweatshirts-the same technology will allow companies like Miroculus to create a "microRNA detection platform that will constantly diagnose and monitor diseases at the molecular level." Sensors are going to be taking over CES this year. Among the many applications: a shirt that can read your heart-rate by Cityzen Sciences, a device from HealBe that can automatically log how many calories you consume, a garden sprinkler system from Blossom that can decide when to switch on based on weather forecasts, pads for the pantry from SmartQSine that allow you to keep track of how much of your favorite foods are left, a pacifier from Pacifi that sends the baby's temperature to the parent's smartphone, and a new home security system from Myfox with tags you can attach to a door or window that trigger alarms before a break-in is attempted.

9. Voice-control and "language-independent" interaction: Using our fingers to operate smartphones/technology was "so 2014." In 2015, we will see significant advances in voice-controlled systems and wider mass market adoption. Think the first steps towards a Jarvis-like interface. Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and other voice-control systems are continuing to get better and better-so much so that they are being almost seamlessly integrated into our technology, across platforms. Soon, almost all connected devices will have voice-control capabilities. Companies like Wit.ai are creating their own open-source natural language interfaces for the Internet of Things and for developers to incorporate into their apps, hardware, and platforms. Jarvis-like systems like the Ubi and Jibo, plus IBM's Watson and XBOX One Kinect, already allow natural language interactions and question/answer like commands. Then, Google Translate, Skype Translate, and others are creating software that allows real-time translation between languages, further eliminating cultural and geographic barriers-the Star Trek universal translator is just around the corner!

10. 3D printing: 3-D printing will continue to grow rapidly in 2015 as the number of applications increase and as printers, scanners, and CAD modeling software become more accessible, cheaper, and easier to use. 2014 saw the first 3D printed object in space, by SU company, Made In Space. 3D Systems continues to innovate around the clock and is releasing a plethora of exciting things in 2015, including 3D printed food and customized chocolates. Three years ago there were just two 3D printing firms at CES. This year there promises to be more than 24.

11. Bitcoin: While 2014 was a rough year for bitcoin (it was ranked the "worst performing currency"), I am optimistic that 2015 will be a better year for the cryptocurrency. Weak currencies and uncertainty in the global economy, emerging smartphone markets in developing countries (billions coming online for the first time), better "interfaces," and more commercial adopters who accept bitcoin as a form of payment will all play a role in a brighter bitcoin future. Finally, it's worth noting that Apple Pay will ultimately teach an entire generation how to navigate life without cash...making the transition to bitcoin natural and easy.
Image Credit: Nan Palmero/Flickr; Magic Leap; Fellow Robots; Zano/Kickstarter; IBM; Sensilk; Bhupinder Nayyar/Flickr; 3D Systems

Dr. Peter Diamandis was named by Fortune Magazine as one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders.

He is Executive Founder of Singularity University, a Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies.

He is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive co...

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These 11 Technologies Will Go Big in 2015

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If you thought 2014 was thrilling, here's a look at what I'm most excited about for 2015. Here are 11 of the most exciting new technologies moving from deceptive to disruptive this year. 1. Virtual reality: Expect a lot more action on the virtual and augmented reality front.

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2015: The Year of Health Care for wearables

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2015: The Year of Health Care for wearables

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SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. - In 2014, fitness was the name of the game in wearables and the broader Internet of Things category.

But in this fast-changing world of connected stuff, 2015 is destined to become the Year of Health Care. You'll really start to see that taking shape next week with a flood of new apps and devices introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

At first blush, the distinction between wearables for health care and fitness may sound subtle, even without the backdrop of one of the world's brightest and shiniest showcases for cool new stuff.

But make no mistake: the difference is crystal clear to industry players. That's because they know that connected health care devices have the potential to dwarf fitness in coming years. And the timing is good, because some medical professionals believe that connected devices and apps can be deployed to help them handle the expected spike in care sparked by the aging Baby-Boomer generation.

That's a huge problem. Consider that:

* There are about 78 million Baby Boomers, roughly a fourth of the total U.S. population.

* In 2016, the first of them will turn 70 years old

Jeffrey Baird, an attorney for health care interests, told a gathering of sensor industry executives last fall that bodies start to break down at 70, and he believes that Baby Boomers will live to 85 years old. (Life expectancy in the US, which has been rising steadily, currently stands at 78.8 years.) "We can't afford to have 78 million sick people," he said.

So now the industry has to transition from fitness to health care. The driving force is that the data from health care wearables and other connected devices will be used by physicians to make decisions for how to care for their patients. So even though they may deploy some of the same kinds of sensors to monitor the same vital signs as fitness wearables, the requirements are very different. The data has to be much more accurate and precise. And it has to be private, secure and compatible with health care systems. There is also a minefield of regulatory hurdles to navigate.

Broadly speaking, companies hoping to cash in on the coming boom in connected health care devices fall into two camps: technology-centric firms migrating their advancements into the health care field, and businesses already in health care that are adding connected devices and apps to their catalog.

Like Qualcomm, for example. It set up a subsidiary chartered specifically to enable connected health care. Executives at the three-year-old Qualcomm Life say that they're doing a lot of work with big pharmaceutical suppliers, which are focused on connected health care devices. One such effort is what I'll call stickables: sensor-equipped patches designed to be paired with specific drugs to help measure their efficacy. Big pharma is developing other connected devices as well, including: pill boxes, inhalers, and injectors. Most of them rely on an app on the patient's smartphone to transmit the data from the devices.

Samsung Electronics, which is active in the fitness tracker market, launched what it calls the Samsung Digital Health Initiative at its developer gathering last fall. The foundation for the initiative is a hardware platform and companion software architecture. The technology giant underscored the effort by launching a $50 million investment fund in digital health.

A&D Medical is an example of an established health care devices supplier that has been migrating into the connected world. At CES, A&D will show off its new Apple Health app, which connects to its suite of connected blood pressure monitors, scales, activity trackers and other biometric devices.

By the end of the year, we should start to spot wearables and other bio-sensing devices migrating from sporting goods stores over to drugstore shelves. And pretty soon, your personal trainer won't be the only one who knows how you're doing. Your doctor will too.
Mike Feibus is principal analyst at TechKnowledge Strategies, a Scottsdale, Ariz., market strategy and analysis firm focusing on mobile ecosystems and client technologies. You can reach him at mikef@feibustech.com.
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2015: The Year of Health Care for wearables

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SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. - In 2014, fitness was the name of the game in wearables and the broader Internet of Things category. But in this fast-changing world of connected stuff, 2015 is destined to become the Year of Health Care.

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Editor's note: Julie Papanek is a principal at Canaan Partners where she invests in healthcare startups.

Next year will be big for healthcare. We felt small tremors in 2014 of the seismic changes underway. In 2015, I predict five changes to the core of the U.S. healthcare system: insurance, pharmaceuticals, supplies, medical services and payments. Let's take a look at each of these trends, what they mean for the healthcare sector, and what they mean for you.

Walmart becomes your healthcare insurer

This October, Walmart tipped its hand by launching a healthcare insurance exchange online. However, the insurance products currently sold on its exchange do not have Walmart as the carrier, which will change in 2015.

Walmart's public announcements thus far provide a clear preview of the insurance plan's future design. Primary care through retail clinics and $4 generic drugs at the pharmacy will drive traffic into stores. For specialty care, the plan will leverage the Centers of Excellence program that Walmart already offers to its 1.2 million insured employees. In this program, consumers pay little to nothing out-of-pocket for knee, hip surgery, and cancer treatment if they go to a short list of high-quality medical centers like Mayo, the Cleveland Clinic, Mercy and Geisinger.

With a store within five miles of 95 percent of all Americans and retail transactional data from its consumers, Walmart can provided tailored population health services and incentivize healthier shopping decisions to prevent diabetes and heart disease.

Startups sell into big pharma and become profitable

Despite a 5x increase in venture investments, most digital health companies are not profitable. Digital health CEOs should look at pharma as its paying customer. Despite their vast differences, pharmaceutical manufacturers are starting to pay tech startups to solve their complicated problems.

One major issue pharma wants your help with is accessing and selling to physicians. In person detailing by trained sales representatives has been the core of pharma's sale strategy for decades.

Yet, one-fourth of all MD's offices and two-fifths of all offices with 10 or more MDs refuse to see pharmaceutical sales reps in their offices. The Sunshine Act, which compelled every pharma company to disclose what it spends on each MD, accelerated the problem. The problem of customer awareness and engagement is ripe for tech companies, particularly those focused on social media, mobile advertising and video, to capitalize on.

Next year is going to be a tipping point, because spending and hiring within pharma's commercial organizations are changing fast. Plus, the FDA published draft guidance on social media in July 2014. Suddenly, these corporations have large eMarketing teams and VPs of digital health. We are seeing CIOs from companies like Dell working at Merck. These indicators tell me that 2015 will be the year when pharma is willing to shop for best-in-breed companies that address their business problems.

Amazon undercuts the medical supply chain

Amazon sells a dizzying array of products. Catheters and surgical gloves are not on the market yet, but they will be soon. Doctors and practice managers are just like the rest of us - they love Amazon Prime for their homes, so why not for their practices?

Amazon will first target small practices and cutout group-purchasing organizations that take an undeserved cut of savings that could be passed on to physicians. If Amazon can ship you toilet paper in two hours, it can supply a small practice with gloves and gowns. The volume from these accounts will justify free shipping, especially when Amazon moves upstream into higher-margin products such as sutures, syringes and other commoditized supplies.

While medical professionals and business managers will be driven by price and convenience, Amazon's motivations will be financial. General surgical supply company Owens & Minor generated $9 billion in annual revenue last year. Amazon isn't known for letting glaring business opportunities go untouched, especially those that can move its stock price.

Hospitals become a channel for peer-to-peer lending

If you understand the flow of payments in healthcare, you can predict the trends. Consumers and employers are purchasing insurance plans with high deductibles. As a result, the first dollar that hospitals earn is now coming from consumers. Actually, the first $17,000 is coming from consumers. With an average income of $55,000, most American consumers simply can't pay their medical bills.

When they don't pay, it hurts providers financially. What consumers don't pay shows up as accounts receivable on hospital balance sheets and eventually turns into bad debt. Since many hospitals are financed by debt and their credit worthiness is partially determined by the health of their balance sheet, the problem of getting patients to pay is urgent.

This raises the question - how can we find the money to help consumers finance their health care payments? Many consumers are able and willing to pay their medical bills, they just can't do it all at once. Peer-to-peer lending companies have paved the way for unsecured structure notes, where an individual's loan can be financed by others. These have shown impressive growth. Peer-to-peer lending is already being used to finance plastic surgery and other cash-pay procedures. Now it could be used for the majority of medical expenses in the U.S.

Latinos become the most desired healthcare segment in the U.S.

There are 54 million Latinos living in the United States, constituting 17 percent of the population. Politicians have taken notice and are paying attention to Latinos as an important voting demographic. Healthcare providers are beginning to do so, too.

Latinos have been disenfranchised by the U.S. healthcare system because of legal status, English language skills and financial constraints. Fewer than 4 percent of healthcare providers speak Spanish and most do not know how to approach the cultural and economic diversity within the Latino population. Even native English speakers can't make sense of PPOs vs. HMOs. As a result, Latinos are 1 out of every 5 uninsured individuals in the U.S. and leverage healthcare services differently than other demographic cohorts

As hospitals compete for volume, they cannot ignore 1 out of 5 Americans. In order to win the loyalty of this untapped customer segment, we will see Latino-branded services with evening and weekend hours to serve dual-income families. Since these services will be built from scratch to provide high-quality care at low prices, they might leap frog the care that the rest of the population currently receives.

Change has historically come slowly and reluctantly to the healthcare industry, but thanks to widespread demand from the government, payers, and consumers for improvement in coverage and care, it seems to be speeding up.

These five predictions represent a power shift in the world of healthcare, where new players emerge as forces to be reckoned with, and consumers gain greater control over their care. I predict, and hope, that 2015 will be the year when leaders across the healthcare spectrum will welcome innovation and embrace much-needed change.

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Next year will be big for healthcare. We felt small tremors in 2014 of the seismic changes underway. In 2015, I predict five changes to the core of the US healthcare system: insurance, pharmaceuticals, supplies, medical services and payments. Let's take a look at each of these trends, what they m...