By Lynn Darrah
Health Information Technology
When Medical Devices Speak to You
Could your implanted medical device soon speak to you?
Perhaps.
Two unlikely corporate partners, Ford Motor Company and Medtronic, are partnering on an interesting new “application” using continuous glucose monitors: a car that “speaks” to you:
Health IT Services: Huneo focuses on real-time data management
Huneo, LLC. is all about the data.
The young Cleveland, Ohio-based startup is looking to use its IT expertise to help capture and send data in real time to several different types of doctors for a number of different health applications — sleep studies, heart studies and athletic performance monitoring, for example.
Huneo fills a gap in traditional databases, CEO & co-founder Phil Ryder said. Most can’t handle the fire hose of information associated with real-time capture, in which data is recorded as often as 100 times per second, according to Ryder.
Do healthcare personnel expect too much from the cloud?
It’s been a bad month for the cloud.
First there was the major Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud) outage April 21-22 that brought down many business and websites. Some of the data was unrecoverable and transactions were lost.
Health care costs not sustainable: Daschle
Former U.S. Senator Tom Daschle was an ardent supporter of health care reform during his tenure in Congress and he came to the SAS Health Care & Life Sciences Executive Conference this week to address the topic.
But Daschle, who has since spent his time away from elected office as an adviser and speaker on policy issues, kicked off his keynote with a personal anecdote.
Daschle said that as he went through the metal detector sans shoes and metal at an airport recently, he caught the eye of a fellow traveler who felt the urge to strike up a conversation.
Medicine “can’t move forward” without information technology
(This post, the first of three, is adapted from a talk Jeffrey Burns, MD, MPH, gave at IBM’s Impact 2011 Global Conference in April. For the full talk, jump to 44:37 in this video.)
Appeals court to decide between conflicting health care law decisions
Starting tomorrow, when a federal appeals court mulls a pair of contradictory rulings on the constitutionality of the health care law, the next five weeks are slated for a series of challenges to the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit will consider two rulings from Virginia district courts, one upholding the health care law’s individual mandate and another ruling it unconstitutional.
After meeting federal health IT requirements, when will incentive checks arrive?
Now that eligible professionals and hospitals are attesting to Meaningful Use, they are asking how and when incentives payments will be made. Here’s the answer from CMS:
Surescripts launches “network of networks” for health information exchange
Cool Technology of the Week
I’m a great fan of creating networks of networks for healthcare information exchange. Point to point interoperability does not scale but creating local or regional collaborations that enable large numbers of organizations to connect with minimal interfacing works very well.
Today, Surescripts announced the Lab Interoperability Cooperative to connect hospital labs with public health agencies.
Cybercrime: RSA Security’s bout with poison ivy
I’ve worked with RSA Security, the security division of EMC Corp. (NYSE:EMC) since my days as an informatics fellow when I first used SecurIDs as part of my early health information exchange work.
New federal health IT chief “logical choice” after Blumenthal
Hail to the New ONC Chief
On Friday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that Dr. Farzad Mostashari will be the next National Coordinator: