Just as popular consumer Web apps eventually find their way into the enterprise (Yammer anyone?), the health sector is increasingly taking its cue from the world of Web apps. The Seattle product design firm Artefact, whose future camera concept caught the attention of our readers in April, recently designed a prototype patient care app for the Seattle Children's Patient Information System.
I visited the Artefact office in Seattle last month and was shown the prototype at work on an iPad. The app, as yet unnamed, is designed to help doctors, administrators and patients manage patient care in a hospital. The colorful and eminently usable design is - I can only hope - a pointer to the hospital and doctor apps of the near future.
Google's quest to organize the world's information will no longer include one of society's most important and sensitive sources of data: our health records. The company announced this afternoon that Google Health will be closed forever and deleted in 18 months, along with a thematically similar and also formerly ambitious project, Google Power Meter.
Google says it's shutting down the projects because they got very little traction but health industry tech innovators say that Google Health may have been ahead of its time, did a poor job reaching out to a now growing ecosystem of developers and ought to be put on slow life support or open sourced instead of being shut down. When it comes to patient-centric cloud-based electronic health records, the opportunity remains large, the need severe but the challenges are substantial.
There have probably been times when just a cursory glance at your Facebook feed or Twitter stream reminds you that it's flu season and plenty of your friends' status updates referred to some sort of sneezy, snuffly, achy, barfy condition. Thanks to mobile technology, that's something you can still do while sick in bed: post to your various social networks.
For the healthy among us, these sorts of status updates serve as a good reminder of who we should steer clear of. But at a larger scale, this social data can give other warnings about where diseases clusters are occurring. And unlike the sorts of statistics released by the Center for Disease Control, this social data can be tracked in real-time.
That's the aim of a new startup called Sickweather. The company, which is still in private beta, wants to track the signs of sickness via social networks and generate maps so that people can determine who and where to avoid.
Wireless company Qualcomm has joined forces with the X-Prize Foundation to sponsor an X-Prize to create the first functional tricorder.
The tricorder, for the non-geek reader of ReadWriteWeb (is there such at thing?) is the handheld computer used by medical professionals and science officers to do non-invasive scanning on the Star Trek television shows. The prize will focus on the medical applications of this fictional device.
Today, Healthline released the first three-dimensional, interactive, online search tool for the entire human body, BodyMaps.
Health BodyMaps is an exhaustive set of searchable body maps - think Gray's Anatomy meets CT scan. It comes with a library of medical and treatment knowledge, but the central focus of the tool are the colored, interactive maps of everything from the pancreas to the digestive system to the body as a whole.
Mobile applications are not all just about games and news. There are tangible real world benefits that can be derived from apps. There are apps for banking and budgets, calendars and scheduling and keeping yourself healthy.
WebMD, one of the leading Internet health sites, has released a mobile application for Android. The app has been available on the iPhone since Oct., 2008 and the iPad since March, 2010 so it is about time that an Android version has finally come to the table. The app has a variety of features to keep users informed (and their health data safe) wherever they may be.
Social media in the diabetes sphere is exploding, and patients are actually using online venues as one of their first lines of defense after diagnosis - and even years after their initial diagnosis. Logging online hours is becoming as important as getting in to see your endocrinologist these days.
When I was diagnosed with diabetes, I spent two weeks in the hospital learning how to give injections to defenseless oranges. After those two weeks were up, my parents and I were given prescriptions for insulin, test strips, a glucose meter, and a book about meal planning. And we were then thrust into the world of managing type 1 diabetes all on our own.
Swiss drug company Novartis will start testing pills with broadcasting censors in them in about 18 months, if regulatory approval comes through as expected.
The test program will feature organ transplant patients. The medicines they will take to avoid organ rejection will be outfitted with chips that will gather and broadcast information on dosage and timing.
Breastcancer.org has released a free mobile app to help patients research and understand their breast cancer pathology reports. The tool is meant to help educate breast cancer patients so that, along with their doctors, they can determine the right course of treatment.
The app allows patients to enter their diagnosis information, with the goal of providing patients with a mobile version of their pathology report so that when they visit other doctors they will have accurate information.
The iPad meets many of the needs doctors say that have for a lightweight mobile computer and many are very interested in the device. An infographic below, from Mobile Health News, articulates various things doctors are taking into consideration.
ComputerWorld's Matt Hamblen wrote about medical, legal and other professional use of the iPad today as well. Hamblen writes that doctors like the device's unobtrusive size and unintimidating profile in patient care, but wish that it had Bluetooth support. Easy access to electronic health records is the device's most compelling quality, something Mike Kirkwood wrote about in depth here on ReadWriteWeb before the iPad launched. (The Healthcare System: An Apple Tablet's Biggest Opportunity)
