Takuya Homma's Library tagged Health2.0 →  View Popular, Search in Google

Given the plethora of opportunities burgeoning in the healthcare sector, which increasingly calls for robust and secure Internet connections and mobile devices that can access, update, and exchange data as well as provide remote patient monitoring, it's natural to think that Google might be eyeing opportunities in healthcare. 

"Mobility and connectivity are driving new technology adoption in healthcare both in professional and in remote and home care locations," Jonathan Collins, ABI Research's principal analyst covering wireless healthcare and M2M, told InformationWeek Healthcare. "A Google/Motorola combination brings together two key gateway devices--home set top boxes and mobile handsets--necessary for an emerging generation of wearable sensors. In addition, there is the ability to drive application and connectivity support in handsets through Android that can support and integrate wearable wireless sensor monitoring and related online applications." 

Linkous provides multiple statistics to support his claim that telemedicine arrived long ago, including: At least half of the 5,000 U.S. hospitals are using teleradiology or other forms of remote imaging; The Ontario Telehealth Network manages over 100,000 live physician-patient video consults a year for a variety of specialty and primary care services; The MedTrix Group provides 10-12 thousand video-based pediatric consults per month for the largest HMO plan in the Israel; The VA is using remote health monitoring for 55,000 veterans; Revenue generated from telemedicine has resulted in profits for independent service providers and is a self-sustaining business within some healthcare delivery systems; A recent survey of Washington, DC hospitals found that every hospital in the metropolitan area was using one or more telemedicine applications as part of their normal delivery of health care for area residents.

Be sure to read the full blog post here. 

A unique social networking platform for medical professionals, called SMTSN (Social Media Time Share Networking), was launched this Sunday, in Kolkata, according to a latest report from The Times of India.

• Knowledge Sharing : The Profile Page feature enables doctors to participate in online chat and video conferencing, and share their knowledge with the patients, medical professionals and students
• Networking:  With the Invite Friends feature doctors can establish a network with fellow doctors and stay connected with their patients.
• Patient –Doctors Interactions: Patients can discuss post-operative complications with their respective doctors via the Patients Corner.
• Resource of Medical Research Information:  The Research Hub section allows registered doctors to update innovative ideas related to medical science, and information on research being carried out in the field of medical research.
 

What I learned at Health Foo

Examples, please: peer-to-peer healthcare

Peer-to-peer healthcare: Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Obvious.

And here are the reports from which I’m drawing most of my data and insights:

Smartphone Adoption and Usage

Social Networking Sites and Our Lives

The Social Life of Health Information, 2011

Peer-to-peer Healthcare

Connoly highlights the growth of mHealth in developed countries from text message medication reminders to the expected rise of wirelessly connected medical devices. She mentions Pfizer’s recent clinical trial that is being conducting remotely via smartphones and the internet, as well as the demise of Google Health. One of the reasons for Google Health’s failure, echoing statements in our “10 Reasons Google Health Failed“ analysis, was a lack of consumer appetite.

“Aggregating the world’s health information is where we ultimately want to head,” Jacobs said. “We looked at the landscape of everything we don’t yet integrate with and realized that the more inputs that come into the system, the more powerful the system becomes.”

Predictive Medical Technologies claims that it can use real-time, intensive care unit (ICU) monitoring data to predict clinical events like cardiac arrest up to 24 hours ahead of time. Effectively, the startup's algorithms are new types of medical tests that an ICU doctor can take into consideration when deciding on a course of treatment.

Bryan Hughes: We require that a hospital be at a certain technological level, in particular that the hospital has an EMR solution that is at minimum classified as Stage 4, or a Computerized Physician Order Entry system. Only about 100 hospitals in the U.S. are at this stage right now.

The online conversation about health is being driven forward by two forces:  1) the availability of social tools and 2) the motivation, especially among people living with chronic conditions, to connect with each other. Pew Internet has identified two important trends in our data. One is what we call the "mobile difference" — hand someone a smartphone and they become more social online, more likely to share, more likely to contribute, not just consume information.

  

The other is what we call the "diagnosis difference" — holding all other demographic characteristics constant we find that having a chronic disease significantly increases an Internet user's likelihood to say they both contribute and consume user-generated content related to health. They are learning from each other, not just from institutions.

According to the Pew Internet survey, 18% of wireless Internet users are tracking their own healthcare data, twice as many as those who do not have a wireless-enabled device. Open health data can spur better decisions for mobile users if they have access to a smartphone or tablet and the Internet. Without it, not so much.

Healthtech companies use mobile, cloud, and other information technologies to increase healthcare delivery efficiencies and deliver consumer-centric applications. Unlike traditional “health IT,” healthtech companies target applications everywhere along spectrum of health and wellness—from in-hospital workflow to in-home monitoring to consumer wellness applications.

In fact, healthtech was a “star” topic at the recent J.P. Morgan Annual Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, where panelists included Eric Schmidt, Google’s then-CEO, and other technologists not typically associated with health care. Further evidence of the shift in investor attention towards healthtech is the recent establishment of HealthTech Capital, the first angel investing group to focus exclusively on this space. Barely a year old, the group’s membership already is larger than many long-established angel groups and includes individual investors, VCs, corporate venture arms, and healthcare providers.

These reforms—and the $125 billion the government has committed to support them—will probably improve the quality of care and enhance health outcomes for the Chinese people. They will also stimulate China’s health care market and create opportunities for private payers, providers, and IT vendors.

 The size of that market—which we estimate at $240 billion, about 5 percent of China’s GDP—could exceed $600 billion within ten years. If China’s health care spending simply keeps pace with projected GDP growth, it will increase to $480 billion by 2018. We, however, believe that it is likely to rise faster than GDP, as a result of better insurance coverage, improved access to high-quality care, and rising demand (tied to aging, urbanization, and lifestyle shifts). If health care spending hits 6.5 percent of GDP by 2018, the market could increase by an additional $150 billion.

The government’s reforms clearly articulate the need to improve the health system’s poor IT capabilities. China’s Ministry of Health is therefore making a concerted effort to define what information should be in the electronic medical records (EMRs) to be used by payers and providers, as well as what should be in the personal health records of individual patients. Stakeholders (such as the provincial bureaus of health and industry) have not yet aligned on common IT standards and the path for developing them.

The initial agreement covers only WuXi, a city due east of Shanghai near Taihu Lake, but the aim is the whole market.

To accelerate solution development and market adoption, iSoftStone is launching a digital health innovation center in Wuxi, with support from Microsoft. This facility will include a HealthVault datacenter, a test lab for HealthVault software and device developers, and training facilities for solution providers that build on the HealthVault platform. Microsoft and iSoftStone will be responsible for the localization of HealthVault and will lead efforts to identify health and wellness scenarios for which they will recruit or build solutions in-market.