Breaking news – an NHS innovation failure

As a sad indication of the NHS’s – and the UK health & care system in general’s – inability to innovate, v-connect, previously known as Red Embedded, has made the following announcement:

“It is with great regret that we are discontinuing the v-connect service as of the 31st October 2016. I am sure that the reasons will be understandable to you but here is a short summary. The video technology has been in development for more than eleven years. The efforts to commercialise the technology, in care, have been in progress for more than seven. In that time we have developed many features that support people to live independently at home supported by a personalised set of connections and facilities matched to their needs. We were guided by the continual calls for integrated care, personalisation and care closer to  home. We have been somewhat successful in obtaining project and grant funding to facilitate this. (more…)

Widespread remote GP consultations getting closer; no shortage of implementation advice

Following our previous item on the topic, on January 16th, Tim Kelsey made it very clear to this editor at a PICTFOR event that the £1b promised to GPs for premises improvement included a strong requirement that GPs also invest in electronic support, including remote consultation technology.

It is therefore particularly pleasing to see in yesterday’s Pulse Today, an item on a Skype trial in Central London that both patients and GPs seem to love. Some key quotes:

Almost all patients surveyed about their experience of the remote consultation service said they ‘would use it again’ (95%).

Although patients were warned that ‘the security of Skype isn’t 100%’, 83% also said (more…)

Looking back over Telehealth & Telecare Aware’s predictions for 2014

Looking back over our predictions made on 31st December last year, it’s hard to quibble with any, and worth hanging on to those that didn’t come good this year.

Our first was

Security and data privacy issues will become a serious mHealth issue in 2014; developers failing to take great care over security and privacy issues will risk very adverse publicity and worse.

Job done: that certainly proved correct, with many being exposed as either selling or potentially selling private information. Clinicians were not immune from privacy invasion eitherHere is a US summary of the issues. Attention was drawn to an EU Article 29 data protection opinion (actually published in 2013) that sought to clarify the legal framework applicable to the processing of personal data in the development, distribution and usage of apps on smart devices, and the obligations to take adequate security measures.   Many apps got hacked too, including FDA-approved ones. There were also items, such as this one, demonstrating how complex the law is in this area in the US. In the EU, the arrival of the Data Protection Regulation in 2015 (now some say 2016) will undoubtedly improve data privacy significantly, though the failure to treat data used for health purposes differently from (more…)