ATA 2015: Day 1 news

May 5, 2015 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ATA-15-show-floor.jpg” thumb_width=”250″ /] HealthSpot/Xerox, Sentrian/Scripps, American Well, Honeywell, vitaphone, more

HealthSpot unveiled the first results of its partnership with (and investment by) Xerox, leveraging their HIT cloud infrastructure and back-end for the HealthSpot Station. The telehealth/virtual consult walk-in kiosk has targeted over 30,000 retail pharmacies with a newly developed consumer retail pharmacy personal health record (PHR). Upgraded patient and portal interfaces process insurance claims through a payment data feed and integrates with EMRs. Release….The US/UK predictive data/remote patient intelligence company Sentrian, winner of this year’s ATA Innovation in Remote Care award, is a part of a year-long 1,000-patient COPD remote patient monitoring study by the Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) with members of Anthem’s CareMore health plan. The goal is to use the Sentrian platform data to accurately detect COPD patient decompensation in advance to reduce avoidable hospital readmissions, which on average in the US is 1 out of 11 within 30 days of discharge. Release….American Well launched a platform for individual physicians to connect with current patients (more…)

A good week for telehealth in Senate committee hearings (US)

April 24, 2015 | by

In contrast to last week’s deletion of telemedicine by the House Energy and Commerce committee from  ’21st Century Cures’, this past Tuesday’s Senate Commerce subcommittee on Communications hearing was far more cheering for both telehealth and telemedicine advocates. More than twelve Senators spoke on behalf of telehealth expansion, especially Medicare reimbursement for telehealth in rural areas where there is limited care access. Holding this expansion back, according to iHealthBeat, are four factors: the limited cross-state licensing for physicians; the sluggishness of the Federal Communications Commission–despite initiatives such as Connect2HealthFCC [TTA 6 Mar 14], the FCC has blocked subsidies for nursing home broadband; reimbursement and limited broadband access in the same rural areas (more…)

ATA announces award winners, Strategic Summit companies

April 24, 2015 | by

ATA announced the six winners of their Annual Awards recognizing innovators in telemedicine and telehealth for significant contributions, along with six new members of the ATA College of Fellows. One of the more intriguing winners (Innovation in Remote Care) is the US/UK company Sentrian which has built intelligent predictive data models (‘Remote Patient Intelligence’) that can monitor disease and co-morbidity in thousands of patients with the goal of preventing hospitalization and readmissions. Release. ATA has also selected 30 emerging companies to participate in the Telemedicine Investor and Strategic Summit  (more…)

ATA 2015: keynotes, concurrent sessions and trade show

April 22, 2015 | by

Now available on the ATA 2015 website are the full speaker lineup, including keynote speakers Sanjay Gupta, MD, CNN’s chief medical correspondent and Yulun Wang, CEO of InTouch Health, Patrick Soon-Shiong, healthcare investor extraordinaire and Chairman/CEO of NantHealth and Reed Tuckson, ATA’s president elect. Click here to investigate the concurrent sessions. Speaker abstracts are helpfully compiled in Telemedicine & e-Health (PDF).  There are also pre-meeting professional development certificate courses on Saturday and Sunday, a separate Telemedicine Investor & Strategic Summit on Monday and Industry Executive Sessions on Monday and Tuesday. TTA is a media partner of the 20th Annual Meeting ATA 2015.

Capita announces partnership with Medibank Australia

April 12, 2015 | by

Capita Healthcare Decisions is forming a partnership with Medibank, an Australian [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Capita-logo.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]insurance and healthcare company, according to a press release issued by Capita. One of the areas highlighted in the announcement is that Capita will provide its TeleGuide product which [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Medibank.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Medibank has customised to the Australian market.

Capita, with 68,000 staff, is a UK company providing process management and professional support services in the UK, Europe, South Africa and India and has a checkered history with UK Government health service contracts.

In Nov 2008 Capita won the contract to run UK’s NHS Choices website which provides information on medical conditions, treatments and services to UK patients on behalf of the UK Department of Health. The Cabinet Office then refused to renew the £60m 3-year NHS Choices contract with Capita in 2013. (more…)

Regulatory action may strengthen telehealth take-off: PWC

April 2, 2015 | by

PWC Health Research Institute has released a Spotlight Brief on the US telehealth (read telemedicine for telehealth) regulation which states that recent regulatory action may be the catalyst to spur the fledgeling telehealth market.

Expansions in Medicare reimbursements, Government telehealth grants amounting to several million dollars and legislative action in many States are all seen as supporting new entrants as well as traditional players and growing the US telehealth market that PWC says is estimated as high as $10 billion.

Benefit to consumers is of course lower costs and easier access. Challenges mentioned are licensing, reimbursement, privacy and security. Read the full report here.

Telstra expands telemedicine offering with acquisition

April 2, 2015 | by

Following our report earlier in the month on Telstra’s success in winning the Western Australia telehealth [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Telstra-Health.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]contract, Telstra announced the acquisition of UK based Dr Foster last week. Telstra has now announced that they are acquiring Medibank’s Anywhere Healthcare platform, further expanding its Telstra Health arm.

Since 2013 Telstra has had exclusive access to Dr Foster in Australia and supplies Dr Foster products to several health services in Australia.

Anywhere Healthcare is a middleman platform with specialists signed up to provide remote consultations and GPs signed up to use the services of those specialists. When a face-to-face consultation is considered not appropriate the GP can arrange for a remote consultation via Anywhere Healthcare. Typically, this has been used to date for patients in nursing homes.

The current Anywhere Healthcare directory lists 30 specialists covering 17 specialties and it is reported that there are 1600 GPs signed up to the service. Telstra have stated that they expect to expand the service, particularly into rural patient consultations.

 

A mélange of short subjects for Tuesday

March 17, 2015 | by

ATA accredits American Well, Apple ResearchKit, diabetic contact lenses, Hackermania Falls on Indiana, patent trolls get a haircut, and more

The ATA (American Telemedicine Association) has gained more than 200 applications for their US-only Accreditation Program for Online Patient Consultations [TTA 17 Dec 14]. First past the post in accreditation is American Well’s Amwell virtual visit app, which will shortly be listed on the ATA consumer website SafeOnlineHealth.org. Release, MedCityNews….Stanford University, one of the five academic centers using the Apple ResearchKit, had a mind-boggling 11,000 signups for a heart health study–in 24 hours. The downside is that they may not be representative of the whole population [TTA 10 Mar, see 11 Mar update] including us Android users. 9to5Mac….The Google-Novartis glucose-measuring contact lens [TTA 17 July 14] for diabetes management just gained some Canadian competition–Medella Health in Kitchener, Ontario, founded by a team of (more…)

State telemedicine legislation update (US)

March 12, 2015 | by

Here’s some brief updates on US telemedicine legislation scene to hit the news recently.

Florida

Florida is progressing the telehealth bill we reported on 12 Feb 2015. The Florida Senate [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Florida-House-of-Representattives.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Telehealth Policy Committee revised the draft bill on 18 Feb 2015 so the need for Medicaid reimbursements to be the same for telemedicine and face-to-face consultations is removed.

Mississippi

We have reported many telehealth initiatives from Mississippi and the state is now considered to be “a leader in telemedicine” according to a recent report in Politico. “Mississippi’s telemedicine program, ranked among the seven best in the country, has inspired neighboring Arkansas to take bigger steps in some areas of the field, and the impact of its success is making waves in Washington as well” continues Politico.

Mississippi is also helping to move telehealth at a federal level. Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.) and Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) introduced a bipartisan bill in July last year to expand telehealth services under Medicare. The bill called Medicare [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/mississippi-logo1.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Telehealth Parity Act 2014 starts to move face to face and telehealth consultations to be on an equal footing.

(more…)

Smartphone health data, privacy concerns rear head at MWC

March 5, 2015 | by

As Editor Charles is chronicling at the world’s largest mobile event, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has a great deal of focus on healthcare–and that includes healthcare data security. Both telehealth monitoring and telemedicine virtual consults are increasingly phone-based. That data transmitting via and in virtual storage a/k/a The Cloud, including personal health records (PHRs), is overly assumed to be secure, but security protocols vary. “We are at the mercy of who the app providers are and how well they secure the information, and they are at the mercy sometimes of the cloud providers.” according to Kevin Curran of the IEEE. This article also points out that there’s real consumer concern that insurance companies will access their personal identified data via various databases, (more…)

66% of ‘tech-savvy seniors’ dissatisfied with current health tech

March 5, 2015 | by

Yes, those same people who–gee whiz–designed computers, did their own programs in MS-DOS and went from Palm Pilots to BlackBerries to iPhones, are already over or hitting 65 (3.9 million in US in 2015)–and they aren’t happy with what’s being served up to them in healthcare tech. The Accenture study across 10 countries and over 10,000 adults points out the demand–67 percent–and the dissatisfaction–66 percent. They want independent self-care tools, wearables to monitor themselves, online communities like PatientsLikeMe, patient navigators and health record tools. Moreover, the more comfortable they are with and value technology, the more likely they are already using technology for tracking weight and cholesterol levels. Couple this with the ‘Drawn and Quartered’ Parks Associates research [TTA 11 Aug 14] and moving past the mHealth hype earlier this week, the study points out a strong market for apps, online tools and other digital health–but designed not for a peer group of most designers, nor to be ‘cool’. Helloooo designers! Wake up! Laurie Orlov does point out on AgeInPlaceTech that there’s not much new here, but that we shouldn’t move on. Accenture release, Modern Healthcare, Fred Pennic in HIT Consultant, Stephanie Baum in MedCityNews

American Telemedicine Association (ATA) 2015

February 23, 2015 | by

2-5 May 2015, Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, California 

ATA’s annual meeting for 2015 connects like-minded telemedicine, telehealth, mHealth professionals and entrepreneurs from around the globe. With over 6,000 attendees, 13 educational tracks and the largest telemedicine trade show in the world, the ATA meeting is a premier forum to learn and network, featuring:

For more information and to register, see our special link here. Telehealth & Telecare Aware is pleased to be again an official media partner of this year’s ATA. 

AstraZeneca awards over $200k for heart failure telehealth

February 19, 2015 | by

AstraZeneca Healthcare Foundation, the charitable arm of the UK based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, has awarded $205,564 to HSHS St. John’s Hospital in Illinois to support their Tele-Heart Pathway programme. [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HSHS.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]The programme provides interventions to heart failure patients in their homes to support health management. With telemedicine and telehealth technology doctors monitor symptoms and help avoid complications at home after surgery, according to the hospital.

 “We have seen a rapid evolution in the last few years of new devices and new ways of communicating with our patients,” said Mark Stampehl, MD and Medical Director of the heart failure programme at Prairie Heart Institute (PHI) at St. John’s Hospital, in an article entitled Telemedicine elevates care for heart patients published in the fall 2014 issue of the hospital’s quarterly magazine Healthy You. “Today, we are using tools to remotely monitor a patient’s condition and increase communication with other physicians to give patients access to specialty care from home.” (more…)

Florida to try telehealth legislation – again

February 12, 2015 | by

After repeatedly failing to pass a law to formalise payments for telehealth, Florida State [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Florida-House-of-Representattives.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]legislature is to try again this year, according to Florida state senator Aaron Bean. Moderating the Telemedicine and Telehealth session at the Florida Health Care Affordability Summit on Monday, 8 February, Sen. Bean has suggested that the latest bill, highly focused on telehealth, will be only 3 pages long. Attempts to legislate in in the previous session of the Florida House of Representatives resulted in failed bills in both chambers due to the inclusion of many controversial items.

(more…)

State of telehealth in Australia – a GP’s view

February 10, 2015 | by

As we have noted in the past, Australia has provided incentives for GPs to implement videoconference telehealth [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/AFP2.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]consultations in remote rural areas. Simple though it may be from a conceptual point of view, providing the ability for people in isolated communities to have access to specialists can make an enormous difference to the healthcare they receive.

Dr Ewen McPhee, a GP from rural Queensland, writing in the Australian Family Physician’s December issue (“Telehealth: the general practice perspective”) briefly looks at the state of videoconference telehealth in Australia 3 years after the current incentives were implemented. “Three years later, the implementation of telehealth videoconferencing has been inconsistent and patchy, yet to be normalised as part of primary care practice” says McPhee.

Living in cities like London or New York it can sometimes be hard to imagine (more…)

News highlights for Friday

February 6, 2015 | by

AnthemHealth didn’t encrypt, Blueprint Health collects, HealthSpot funds again, Sense4Baby goes to Europe, Apple Health pilots in hospitals and buddi gets bigger still.

Another hack attack claimed major US health insurer AnthemHealth, the former WellPoint. It’s estimated that 80 million of its customers, former customers and employees had data breached: names, addresses, dates of birth, emails, employment information, income, medical IDs and SSIs. The Wall Street Journal reports that Anthem didn’t encrypt data for analytics reasons. It’s unconfirmed where the hackers originated but Bloomberg’s latest report tags the usual Chinese state-sponsored suspects. Unusually, it was reported within days of discovery; Anthem has called in Mandiant (FireEye) to beef up its cybersecurity. Other reports: WSJ, Modern Healthcare….The Blueprint Health accelerator has a new initiative, the Collective. It is designed to pair up major healthcare providers and payers with startups and early stage companies. So far signed up are Aetna, AstraZeneca, HP, Montefiore, North Shore LIJ, New York-Presbyterian, Samsung, EmblemHealth, Philips and Razorfish Healthware. More information here….The HealthSpot Station telehealth/telemedicine kiosk is readying a $11.6 million funding round from four investors soon, based on (more…)