What happens when a medical app…vanishes?

July 28, 2014 | by

You have just entered The App Twilight Zone…. Our readers know that concussion and diagnosis have been a focus of this Editor’s, and validating apps a focus of Editor Charles’, who brought this to my attention. The app’s name: The Sport Concussion Assessment Tool 2 (SCAT2). The news report states: “It contains all the essentials you would want in a concussion app: a graded symptoms checklist, cognitive testing, balance testing, Glasgow coma scale, Maddocks score, baseline score ability, serial evaluation, and password protected information-sharing via email.”  The plot: it was deactivated without warning or notice by the developer, Inovapp (link to sketchy CrunchBase profile) yet still listed on the iTunes store.

What happened? There was a modified standard (SCAT3) developed in 2012, which updated SCAT2 with non-critical additions: indications for emergency management, a slightly more extensive background section, a neck exam and more detailed return-to-play instructions. SCAT3 is only available on (inconvenient) paper. No word from Inovapp on why it discontinued the app nor any plans for updating.

The SCAT2 had gained, in a short time, a following among coaches and sports medical professionals because it was the first app based upon the international standard (Zurich, 2008, 3rd International Conference on Concussion in Sport) transferring a paper assessment tool to an easy to use app. In fact, the NHL (National Hockey League) has its own version. The revised 2012 standards  Users have a right to be upset, but moreover, this points to a glaring shortcoming of medical apps–their developers vanishing into the night without a by-your-leave. And read the comments by (mainly) doctors on securing patient information after the app is used (HIPAA standards) and one physician’s criticism of apps such as this as a ‘crutch’.  A Pointer to the Future we don’t want to see. The authors Irfan Husain and Iltifat Husain, MD are to be congratulated. Popular app being used to manage concussions fails, failing patients (iMedicalApps)

Eye feels the pain of Google’s Brin and Page

July 10, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/gimlet-eye.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /] Oh, the discomfort that Sergey and Larry must be feeling being grilled interviewed by “billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla” (grudgingly respected in TTA 30 May) at one of his eponymous Summits. Here they are with Google Glass in all sorts of adaptations from Parkinson’s to gait improvement to surgery [see multiple TTA articles here], a ‘moonshot on aging and longevity’ dubbed Calico [TTA 19 Sept 13] and even a contact lens to measure blood glucose in tears [TTA 17 Jan]. All good stuff with Big Change potential. Instead they whinge on about how the health field is so regulated, and all the cool stuff you could do with the data but for that privacy thingy (those darn EU, UK regulations and in US, HIPAA). Page to Khosla: “I do worry that we regulate ourselves out of some really great possibilities that are certainly on the data-mining end.” Brin to Khosla: “Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It’s just a painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to spend my time.” Gee. Whiz. What is apparent here is a lack of personal respect for us ‘little folks’ privacy and our everyday, humdrum lives.

Advice straight from The Gimlet Eye: My dear boys, you’ll just have to get people’s data with that old-fashioned thing, permission. (And you’d be surprised that many would be happy to give it to you.) Or if it’s all too painful, Sergey can play with his superyacht, latest girlfriend and follow his estranged wife Anne Wojcicki’s 23andme‘s ongoing dealings with the FDA. At least she’s in the arena. Google leaders think health is ‘a painful business to be in’ (SFGate) Mobihealthnews covers their true confessions, with an interesting veer off in the final third of the article to Mr Khosla’s view of Ginger.io’s surprising pilot with Kaiser and then to WellDoc’s Bluestar diabetes therapy app–the only one that is 510(k)Class II and registered as a pharmaceutical product [TTA 10 Jan].  Also interesting re the Googlers’ mindset is a SFGate blog piece on Larry Page’s attitudes towards leisure and work in a Keynes-redux ‘vision of the future‘. < work + > people may= >leisure, but certainly<<<$£€¥ for even the well-educated and managerial!

BlackBerry’s investment: what’s in it for NantHealth

April 17, 2014 | by | 1 Comment

This week’s news of BlackBerry Ltd’s minority investment in the Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong eight-company combine called NantHealth has generally focused on BlackBerry. Across the board, BlackBerry is depicted as the party badly needing a raison d’être. Down for the count in both retail and enterprise mobile phone markets it dominated for years, BB’s six-months-in-the-saddle CEO is now going back to those same enterprises singing the wonders of their QNX operating system and upcoming BBM Protected communication platform to highly regulated verticals which need max security: healthcare, finance, law enforcement, government. Although FierceCMO inaccurately reported that BlackBerry was acquiring NantHealth (Reuters/WSJ reports to contrary), it’s generated yawns from former tea-leaf readers such as ZDNet as yet another flail of the Berry as it sinks beneath the waves. Add to this the bewilderingly written CNBC ‘Commentary’ under BlackBerry CEO John Chen’s byline–who should fire the ghostwriter for inept generation of blue smoke and mirrors–and you wonder why the very smart Dr. Soon-Shiong even desires the association with a company most consider the equivalent of silent movies. It is certainly not for the investment money, which the doctor has more than most countries–an expenditure carefully considered at BlackBerry, undoubtedly. 

Cui bono? NantHealth first, BlackBerry second is your Editor’s contrarian bet. Consider these three factors:

  1. Way down the column in most coverage is that BlackBerry and NantHealth are developing a healthcare smartphone. It will be optimized for 3D images and CT scans but fully usable as a normal smartphone. Release date: late 2014-early 2015 (Reuters). (more…)

Box.com’s odd swerve into healthcare cloud storage and PHRs

March 20, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/gimlet-eye.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /] Both The Gimlet Eye (filing from a remote island) and Editor Donna have been pleased users of the Box.com file storage site for storing all sorts of files in the ‘cloud’ (a/k/a Somewhere Out There On A Whole Bunch Of Internet Servers), sharing and collaboration. It’s simple to use, it works and, for our needs, actually free. However founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, who look barely old enough to shave (but smartly have A Touch of Grey in their management team), have their eyes set on far bigger prizes than our mediocre needs. Now they have added ‘special advisers’ Aneesh Chopra, first US CTO, and Glen Tullman, former CEO of Allscripts. Mr. Tullman certainly does add major luster (and connections) and Mr. Chopra, despite the Eye’s consideration of him as hyperbolic and politically, not technically, qualified for his previous positions in the Government and the state of Virginia, adds the inevitable political ones. Having them on the roster also adds heft to their imminently rumored IPO (TechCrunch; update, filed 24 March) and ultimately acing out other file sharers Dropbox in the enterprise area. Expectations are high; Box has $414 million in funding from a roster of investors (including Telefónica and Australia’s Telstra) through a Series F (CrunchBase) with a valuation of $2 billion (TechCrunch) and undoubtedly they’d like some of it back. Soon. (The completely overheated Castlight Health IPO only whets the appetite.)

Healthcare one key to a rich IPO. Box’s healthcare moves point in the enterprise direction. (more…)

VA Department data breaches soar (US)

October 14, 2013 | by

If after the Healthcare.gov debacle, there’s still any confidence that centralized Federal systems are secure and trustworthy, please read this HealthcareITNews tally of the multiple data breaches and HIPAA violations taking place at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

From 2010 through May 2013, VA department employees or contractors were responsible for 14,215 privacy breaches affecting more than 101,000 veterans across 167 VA facilities, including incidences of identity theft, stealing veteran prescriptions, Facebook posts concerning veterans’ body parts, and failing to encrypt data, a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review investigation revealed.

The two-month investigation by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review published this weekend found that the VA led the way in HIPAA violations–17 in the past few years–for reasons centering on lack of accountability, shoddy safeguards, sloppiness in handling data and failure to encrypt data even after the 2006 theft of a laptop put records of 26.5 million veterans in danger. There are few firings, disciplinary actions or HHS fines.

This should put telehealth and telemedicine providers on notice that their encryption will have to be ‘stronger than the VA’, as both they and Department of Defense (DOD) are the single largest users of telehealth in the US.