- Dallas-based Vivify Health is partnering with California’s InTouch Health to integrate their telehealth remote patient management with InTouch Health’s acute care video consult/device platform. For InTouch, it is a move into the home by using Vivify’s Managed Kit and BYOD and related APIs. For Vivify, this helps in their post-acute RPM sell to large healthcare organizations. (Is their VA partner Iron Bow somewhere in the mix?) Their VA Home Telehealth rival Medtronic announced their partnership with American Well a few months ago [TTA 21 Oct]. InTouch release via Telecom Reseller
- Updated. InTouch also announced their agreement on Jan 4 to purchase DTC telehealth provider TruClinic furthering their move into home telehealth. TruClinic will be merged into InTouch. Heading it up will be recently appointed EVP of Marketing and Consumer Solutions Steve Cashman, who founded and headed pioneering but overly ambitious for the market health kiosk HealthSpot [TTA roundup here]. Release (Our update on the state of health kiosks here)
- Speaking of Medtronic Care Management Services, MCCM touted its VA Home Telehealth ties to Healthcare Analytics News. Intriguing claim: they’ve treated 310,000 veterans since 2011 (Cardiocom, the 2011 awardee, was purchased in 2013). VA itself credits only 156,000 patients to Home Telehealth in Federal FY 2014 (the last official count), 43,000 patients in 2010 and 144,000 in 2013. A very rough estimate by this Editor is that they were about 25 percent of the veterans in the program.
- Announced at last week’s NYC Economic Development Commission (NYCEDC) Health 2.0 Digital Health Forum attended by this Editor were the winners of the third annual NYCEDC/HITLAB’s Digital Health Breakthrough Network accelerator program for pre-revenue startups: Altopax (VR behavioral health), Navimize (doctor/hospital scheduling), Tatch (sleep quality biometrics), and PainQX (pain level monitoring). The Forum also had Digital Health Marketplace matchmaking meetings for 65 NYC-based health tech companies with prospective clients. The Marketplace furnishes competitive grants to offset the cost of piloting between growth-stage tech companies and providers. Release, MedCityNews
- ActiveProtective‘s controversial protective airbag to cushion hips from falls by high-risk older adults [TTA 10 Jan] gained $4.7 million in Series A funding led by Generator Ventures. Mobihealthnews
- Adidas is shuttering its wearable device development unit and condensing its offerings, focusing on the Runtastic GPS-guided exercise offering and a shopping app. It follows similar moves at Nike and Under Armour proving that big names in sports fitness clothing couldn’t pull off wearables. Mobihealthnews
- Meanwhile, Fitbit’s Ionic continues to develop with now an App Gallery with 60 apps–11 of which are health/fitness related–and more than 100 watch faces. (Wonder if any are Mickey Mouse?) What we termed a ‘Hail Mary’ pass may actually get past the goal line. Mobihealthnews
Apple Health, minus the ‘book’, announced
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/healthkit-apple-wwdc-2014-87_verge_medium_landscape.jpg” thumb_width=”170″ /]Breaking and developing… Apple announced their long-rumored health tracking app [TTA 22 Mar] this morning at their WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) in San Francisco. The consumer app is called Health (not Healthbook) and the developer platform HealthKit which are both part of iOS8 for iPhones and iPads in the fall. HealthKit facilitates pulling in of health data from third-party developers so that all health-related information for the consumer user is in one ‘hub’, similar to what Apple’s Passbook app does now as a ‘virtual pocket’ for airline boarding passes, movie tickets and coupons. Apple’s Craig Federighi, senior VP of software (pictured, courtesy of The Verge), made the announcement of the app and platform as part of the broader debut of iOS8 this morning.
Already on board is Mayo Clinic with an app that logs information like blood pressure, tracking normal range and it appears from reports that a severe enough deviation will initiate a contact with medical professionals. Nike was prominently featured as an app provider, further confirming that it’s leaving the hardware to their close corporate partner now that it’s out of the FuelBand business [TTA 22 April]. Epic Systems, a leading large system (hospitals/practices) EHR, appears to be integrating integrating its personal health record (PHR) with HealthKit, “suggesting a framework for getting information collected via HealthKit into patients’ MyChart (Epic PHR–Ed.) app.”
Editor Donna wonders if the still-in-early-days Better iPhone health personal assistant app (PHA), developed in conjunction with and backed by the aforementioned Mayo Clinic [TTA 23 Apr], will prominently integrate into Health. (We’ll cover when this develops, as we think it will–but mum’s their word for right now.)
In Mashable, the news was applauded by the CEO of leading app MyFitnessPal as a big validation. In his opinion, Apple would work with the existing field of apps and devices. Leading fitness bands Jawbone and Fitbit had no comment. Fitbit was shown during the presentation: CNET (one of six pictures here) and The Verge (article below). The latter makes the excellent point that Jawbone, Fitbit and the Nike FuelBand have all been sold in Apple’s stores.
The speculation is that Health will be a key part of the features of the iWatch to come, but Mashable in quoting Skip Snow of Forrester Research does bring up a significant wrinkle. Bluetooth LE as a network protocol chews up a lot of battery power, and bigger batteries make for clunky devices. Not exactly the Apple design ethic. Could it be that what’s delaying the iWatch is development of a new, more power-efficient network standard?
Update 3 June: With iOS8 having apps communicating with each other, have the Apple-oids opened the door for a Happy Hacking Holiday? Stilgherrian in ZDNet points out that the ‘attack surface’ in info security-ese just got a whole lot larger. A future ‘oopsie’?
Hat tip to Editor Toni Bunting
More information: Mashable can’t stop mashing stories: Apple Reveals iOS 8: Interactive Notifications, Health App and More, Apple Gets Into Fitness Tracking With Health App and HealthKit for iOS 8, Apple’s First Step Into Health Tracking Is Small But Powerful. Mobihealthnews gets into the act noting Epic’s involvement: Apple reveals tracking app HealthKit and partners with Mayo Clinic, Epic. The Verge positively is on said verge with Apple HealthKit announced: a hub for all your iOS fitness tracking needs.
Nike FuelBand out of gas
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/FuelBand.jpeg” thumb_width=”175″ /]In what is the first of the major players in fitness bands and wearables exiting the category, CNet reported last Friday that Nike is winding up its hardware business with the layoff last Thursday of nearly 80 percent of its Digital Sport staff. Previously, Nike had canceled a new version of the FuelBand due for release later this year, but they will continue sales and support for the present iteration which only works with Apple. Their focus is now on fitness and athletic software, which can plug into smartphones and other companies’ devices at far less cost and greater profit than the hotly competitive band business. Much of the speculation surrounds their strong Apple connection; Tim Cook, Apple CEO, sits on the Nike board. This maneuver could benefit them both greatly when Apple finally gets into the smartwatch biz. Perhaps two world-class brands could better sort out what to do with the data, which is another sore point according to PC Magazine’s take on it. Further reasonable discussion on this courtesy of Gigaom. Hat tip on the last to David E. Albert, MD via Twitter @DrDave01. (Nike photo)
2013 fitness tracker sales…and a personal experience
As someone who has been wearing a Jawbone UP for some five months, I was interested to read that Mobihealthnews reports on a (pay-walled) survey that shows Fitbit, Jawbone and Nike as sharing 97% of the activity tracker market in 2013 present, the split being 68%, 19% & 10%, respectively (the rest 3%).
At the same time that news agency, along with others, reports on the rash apparently created by the recently-introduced Fitbit Force on some people. Closer to home, I have had cause to scrutinise (more…)
iPhone 5’s health tracker-friendly chip
Lost in the somewhat fizzled debut of the iPhone 5s (the pricey one) last week was their inclusion of a “motion coprocessor” chip called the M7, which measures data generated by the phone’s accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass. Apple has also created the CoreMotion API for developers to facilitate health tracking apps, including the Nike + Move app. It’s catchup time with Samsung’s S Health surely. Medical Device + Diagnostic Industry This has fueled the expected Apple-ologist divinations on Apple’s ambitions in the wearable computing area, a taste of which you’ll see in GigaOM, though the Trojan Horse analogy is a mite overblown. Hat tip to reader Chris Paton.
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