At the mobile health technology conference mHealthcon held at Rutgers University on Dec. 1, one panel shared some interesting insights about their businesses and what entrepreneurs and adapters of mobile health technology could learn from them.Patients are consumers first. The users of your product may be patients, but they evaluate new product choices the same [...]

Health information technology company Updox has received a $500,000 loan from the state of Ohio to develop a mobile version of its software aimed at independent physician practices.Updox sells document management software to physicians and medical practices. The software is a web-based patient portal, e-mail and secure messaging system that features patient record [...]

Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina is investing $15 million and partnering with Allscripts (NASDAQ:MDRX) in a program intended to make electronic health records more widely available to physicians in the state.That investment will help physicians leap over the biggest hurdle for EHR technology adoption: cost. Over the next five years, the money will [...]

It was kind of funny reading this recent article from the New York Times that focuses on a relatively small health data breach from Stanford Hospital’s emergency room:A medical privacy breach involving Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., led to the public posting of data for 20,000 emergency room patients, including names [...]

Yesterday I was in Vermont, meeting with the stakeholders of Vermont Information Technology Leaders (VITL), the federally designated Regional Extension Center and Health Information Exchange for Vermont.I feel a close affinity to VITL as one of our New England collaborators (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut) but more importantly because [...]

The founder and CEO of a Minnesota clinical decision support system startup, currently beta testing its technology, believes that most other treatment support technologies are too reactive.Arnel Rillo, who leads Clinical Healthcare Corporation in St. Louis Park, is developing a tool to better support physicians treating asthma and expects the product to launch in the [...]

The Mayo Clinic announced Wednesday that the National Human Genome Research Institute has awarded it more than $3 million to conduct genome-wide association studies that can more accurately determine patients’ risks of heart attacks, blood vessel diseases and adverse reactions to heart medications.Mayo researchers will integrate advances in genetic studies of heart and blood vessel [...]

There’s been a steady rush of new studies on a topic that hits home to healthcare consumers– and should hit home to healthcare entrepreneurs.The topic is electronic health records and the data shows that consumers are clearly worried about the safety and security of those records.In February 2011, a CDW Healthcare survey of 1,000 U.S. [...]

Doug Fridsma and I were asked to brief the HIT Policy Committee about the current activities of the HIT Standards Committee, ensuring coordination as we all work to finalize Meaningful Use Stage 2.We used this presentation, which covers three major themes:*Meaningful Use Stage 2 gap analysis work*The Standards Summer Camp Activities*The Standards and [...]

Google announced Friday it will discontinue Google Health, its digital health records service, in January 2012. Launched in 2008, the service didn’t catch on like the company had hoped. Although Google Health Founder Adam Bosworth said the service failed because “it’s not social,” Dave Chase, the founder of Microsoft Health, wrote an insightful blog post about why Google Health was ultimately doomed to fail, and what its failure means to the health tech industry.