Category: news

  • Scientific American profiles 10 mobile health apps on the iPhone

    Scientific American has a short video titled “Mobile Medicine” which highlights a few mobile apps on the iPhone. According to the video, medical apps are one of the fastest growing areas for development, with over 2000 applications and growing.

  • Health care is not immune from innovation making jobs obsolete

    An interesting report from NPR.org, titled “The jobs of yesteryear: Obsolete occupations” got me thinking about what health care will look like in 10, 20, and 30 years from today. In the article/slideshow, several occupations are shown to be obsolete because they are no longer relevant due innovation. What all of these jobs had in…

  • Twitter is not a good source for health advice

    A recent article published in the American Journal of Infection Control [1] titled “Dissemination of health information through social networks: Twitter and antibiotics” [link to abstract] demonstrates how social networks, specifically Twitter, is being used to share health information on the web. In this case, Twitter was a great conduit to share health information, but…

  • HBR: Turning doctors into leaders

    A very interesting article from Harvard Business Review titled “Turning doctors into leaders” by Thomas H. Lee. Lee explains some of the challenges in health care and offers some potential solutions. I get the sense that the main thrust of the article is that for physicians to let go of the notion that leadership is…

  • Introducing bant – a diabetes management iPhone app

    Just wanted to congratulate the folks at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation for releasing bant, a diabetes management app for the iPhone. From the bant website: bant simplifies your diabetes management. Enter your readings with a single swipe. Store it instantly to your Google Health account. Share your experience with the diabetes community through…

  • eHealth is now officially mainstream

    I guess that it had to happen eventually and now, I think ehealth can officially be considered “mainstream”. With the US government planning to spend $50 BILLION to push adoption of electronic health records by 2015, it was inevitable that the use information and communication technologies would be a major topic of discussion. Much to…

  • Securing health data – just another challenge in moving towards a modern health system

    Not sure if this is news to people regularly involved in IT, but securing the increasing amounts of electronic health information will be a major issue as organizations move to adopt electronic health records (EHRs). The scary thing is that the perception is that health care organizations are behind the current best practices (yet again)…

  • Physicians and “lean” health care

    A very interesting post about “Getting physicians to buy in to lean health care” is available on HBR.org. The author presents three suggestions on how to encourage support from health care professionals: Physician leaders must anticipate and respond to questions about the appropriateness of applying concepts from outside health care to their organizations Change efforts…