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…)

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

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…)

Something for (almost) everyone – a digital health gallymaufry

The Association of British Healthcare Industries (ABHI) is looking for companies to share the British Pavilion at the CMEF trade show from 15th – 18th May 2015 in Shanghai, China. It is apparently the the leading Healthcare trade show in China and is now the largest Medical Equipment exhibition in the Asia Pacific region attracting over 60,000 visitors. Details here.

Still need to see some more predictions for 2015? – try these 12 for telecoms, which does include the odd interesting nod towards subjects we cover, including interconnection of wearables and connected homes.

Prompted by our mention of V-Connect in our review of our 2014 predictions, MD Adam Hoare has pointed out that his company also won the Medilink ‘partnership with the NHS’ award for their renal project with The Lister Hospital in Stevenage. Congratulations!

Accenture has produced an interesting (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…)