Nurses, China, ageing, longevity, TV, mobile data, Magna Carta, even logarithms – something for everyone!

June 5, 2015 | by

This editor has always felt that telehealth and allied technologies is a nurse’s friend, enabling them to treat more people, with less stress, in short delivering more care and driving less car. It’s therefore great to see the European Federation of Nurses so active in the mHealth event in Riga recently, and to see them making a strong case for nurse engagement in the mHealth care pathways.

However this editor could not restrain a small chuckle at presumably a wayward spellchecker resulting in the phrase “incorporating big data logarithms for clinical pathways” appearing in the Presidential Message in their June-July 2015 Update.

Staying, briefly, overseas – the UKTI and co want to take you to the Expo 2015 in Milan on 28 September to 1 October to find new export opportunities. Programme for the main day is here. Book for the whole event here. Looking further afield, there is more info about the China Healthcare & Life Sciences Roadshow 2015 taking place in London, Manchester, Belfast, Glasgow, Leeds, Cardiff between 29 June – 8 July here. For those interested in exporting to China, the roadshow will highlight the extensive work that has been done to identify and scope current opportunities in the healthcare sector there. Great stuff.

On a different tack, this editor has just been made aware that the University of Greenwich has established (more…)

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

January 1, 2015 | by | 1 Comment

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 either. Here 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…)

The sun is in his heaven and all’s well with the world?

November 3, 2014 | by

It’s tempting to think that nothing much has changed in the world of telehealth & telecare recently. For example the quality of healthcare PR looks to be unchanged, if the recent announcement by Telehealth Sensors is anything to go by. They claim to have developed  an incontinence sensor that is “a revolutionary advancement in the home healthcare and post-acute care monitoring market.” Careful reading suggests this “revolutionary advancement” is based on the property of water, apparently only recently recognised by Telehealth Sensors,  that it conducts electricity (especially if its impure) – so advanced in fact that such sensors with a rather longer lifetime than the 30 days claimed by Telehealth Sensors, have (more…)

NHS futures – more encouraging signs of change (UK)

March 23, 2014 | by | 4 Comments

Monitor has now released the output from the NHS Futures summit held on 21 November 2013, hosted by NHS England, Monitor and the NHS Trust Development Authority. The summit was designed to spark debate about how the landscape of health and care providers could evolve over the next decade to better meet the challenges outlined in the Call to Action. Over 100 senior health leaders took part including commissioners, providers (including GPs), health policy experts, and patient and charity representatives.

The summary Call to Action document makes encouraging reading for those who believe technology can help the NHS to improve patient outcomes at lower cost.  Contrary to the consultation exercise held by NHS England last August when we pointed out that remote consultation was not even mentioned, this features prominently in the Monitor summary (see especially Appendix 3, on pages 19-21), together with many other uses of technology such as smart homes, encouraging self-care, telemedicine, single patient record, interoperability, etc.

There are also some great videos – in particular (more…)