The American and Australian scientists at STAR have received a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation to develop the cough-analyzing software for developing countries where access to health care is more limited than in first world nations. Despite the poor economic conditions of these under-developed countries, there are a plethora of mobile phones which are being used for everything from early warning systems to mobile payments to health alerts. An mobile app that diagnoses disease would fit right in.

The way the diagnostic software works is by comparing the sounds of the mobile user's cough to a database of coughs associated with all the different types of respiratory diseases. There would also be multiple coughs per disease stored in the database to take into account variations by age, gender, weight, and other factors.

While to our untrained ears, many coughs sound just alike, a tuned-in doctor - or in this case, a mobile app - can listen to the entire structure of a cough from the initial intake of air to the final 100-150 milliseconds of a cough that contains the distinctive "wet" or "dry" and "productive" or "unproductive" sounds that help to classify the cough's seriousness, explains an article on Discovery News. Even the loudness of a cough is taken into account - healthy people have coughs that are 2% louder than a sick person's.

At the moment, the software exists as a computer application but the scientists plan to have it re-written, when complete, as an application for mobile phones.

There's no word on when the mobile application will be released, but the scientists will need to collect around 1000 cough samples before the database is ready. If they're able to then design a successful analytical tool for mobile phones, the impacts to people's health would be far-reaching - and not just in developing countries, but everywhere in the world.

Today, Google has announced a new feature of Maps that will allow users to find flu vaccines near them. In partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the American Lung Associaltion, and Flu.gov, Google Maps is now helping users search for seasonal flu vaccination locations, H1N1 flu shots, or both together.

Now, Google has gathered information about locations of flu vaccine shots from 20 states in the U.S. Google is also collecting information from chain pharmacies and other vaccine providers in all 50 states. Currently, users can find vaccine shots available from retail chains such as Walgreen's, CVS, Kmart, and WinnDixie.

The application gives vaccine location hours, when available, and even lets users know when vaccine supplies have run out at a particular location. All in all, it's a useful tool for quickly and simply finding the nearest place to get a flu shot.

For more information on how Flu Trends works, check out this video from Google.org:

The software, an Internet-based healthcare transaction interface, allows doctors to upload and save medical data, to share test results with patients, and to analyze information with their colleagues. Patients in this system can manage their healthcare, schedule appointments, request prescription refills, research medications, access articles, and communicate with doctors - all securely, quickly, and cost-effectively. Our question: Why aren't systems like these in place everywhere right now?

More than just a task manager, the interface allows physicians to access a messaging system that includes audio and video chats, kind of like Skype. Using this part of the service, physicians could conduct online consultations with their patients via webcam. It's unclear whether the system would also allow homebound patients to send vital statistics such as weight and blood pressure to physicians automatically through the use of monitored devices, another trending topic in "telehealth". Online consultations - and getting insurance companies to pay for them - have also been a subject of great concern to the American Medial Association, which has been lobbying for more modern billing practices for online consults since 2004.

Doctations has also expressed the goal of making physicians' offices entirely paperless by moving source data (such as reports, faxes, and mail) and business processes online. The company has partnered with Sure Scripts and Quest Diagnostics to send prescription requests and order lab results. The company has also partnered with science and health publisher Elsevier to give patients access to important research materials and decision support alerts.

These are just a few noteworthy features we found while browsing around the Doctations website. The service appears to be full-featured for all aspects of a medical practice, from staffing and billing to patient-focused task management. The service is available on a subscription basis for healthcare providers.

Check out this CNBC interview with Doctations founder and neurosurgeon Dr. Louis Cornacchia:

Although many users would love the opportunity to have quicker, simpler, less expensive healthcare as well as greater access to their physicians, others still probably have concerns about the security of putting their most personal information online. On which side of the fence do you find yourself? And for our readers who are also medical doctors, would it make sense to implement such software in your own practice? What are the objections?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments. We're going to switch on the webcam and see if we can get a doctor to look at this troubling mole.

In the past ReadWriteWeb covered RFID and its rocky road to consumer adoption. Nevertheless, the enterprise market continues to find new uses for RFID. In fact, this is not the first time where RFID tags have appeared in hospitals. Companies like Wavemark have been working with health institutions to track cardiology machines and other inventory. In this particular case, because the indexing process does not require speed or long distance accuracy, Implanet makes use of IBM's RFID technologies.

NetBase employs the same principals across a variety of enterprise tools, but healthBase is its first foray into consumer-facing products. While the company is used to powering corporate, federal and market research, healthBase allows NetBase to show off its content intelligence tool in a way that gives us insight into our selves and our bodies.

Because NetBase is not reliant on manual annotation or custom taxonomies, the system is also very scalable. It took roughly 2 days to produce all of the data in healthBase - a feat that would never be possible by a combination human and machine system.

"It's important for us to address real issues with semantic technologies outside of a lab," Says Tellefsen. To try healthBase visit healthbase.netbase.com

Practice Fusion currently has "over 18,000 users," which would appear to be a big increase on the 1,300 medical professionals they had one year ago. The product originally launched in November of 2007, so it's nearly two years old now.

Is Cloud Computing Suitable for Healthcare?

A post on the Practice Fusion blog today asks the question: is "cloud computing" right for health IT? We reported earlier this week that cloud computing is infiltrating virtually every corner of technology right now, but it still has dangers. We noted the recent hacking of Google Docs to steal internal Twitter documents, as one recent high profile example (high profile because the stolen documents were subsequently emailed to some news outlets, some of whom published the 'hot' docs).

However despite these risks Practice Fusion claims that the cost benefits of cloud computing in healthcare are significant, particularly in its EMR niche:

"Cost and poor usability have been cited as the biggest obstacles to adoption of health IT - especially Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems - and has resulted in problematically-low EHR adoption rates. Eliminating this cost, and the IT maintenance burdens that are often beyond the reach of small medical practices, clearly removes these significant roadblocks to EHR adoption."

Security and safety is of course the big potentially negative issue with cloud computing. But Practice Fusion points to several use cases where it says that cloud computing has advantages over desktop apps: disaster-recovery, hacks (because "SaaS providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford"), and privacy. All of those points come down to the premise that a cloud computing / SaaS specialist, such as Practice Fusion, has more expertise, more resources, and is generally better able to deliver those safety and security requirements.

That all sounds great in theory, however every case like the Twitter stolen documents one serves to undermine that argument. And there are just too many such cases right now.

Nevertheless, we're sure that over time cloud computing will become ever more secure. It's clear that Practice Fusion is a young company that is growing well. With Salesforce.com on its side too now, the future looks secure for them.

For now, the Wikipedia discussion page states,"Prior discussion has determined that Rorschach inkblots images shall be displayed in this article, and removal of pictures without consensus at Talk:Rorschach test/images [the discussion page] will be reverted."

Times reporter Noam Cohen writes about those against the posted images saying, "For them [the psychologists], the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year's SAT."

The fact that both of these tests are based on normative results adds another dimension to the Wikipedia debate - whether or not the inkblot test is a valid metric in the first place. In the late nineties, based on reviewing the demographics of students with the lowest averages in the country, critics called the SAT racist, urban-centric and classist. With the test determining college placement, scholarship eligibility and in some cases, job placement, it remains an important one. For this reason, it was redrafted in 2005 to be more tolerant of diversity and more reflective of classroom curriculum.

With the Rorschach inkblots having been established since the 1920's, what are the chances that each of us aren't already showing signs of major psychosis? If there's a doctor in the house, by all means, let us know if and how the psychological indicators of the test have changed over time.

There's no doubt that a number of those awaiting SATs and psychometric testing might choose to game the system. While higher SAT scores improve college eligibility, average Rorschach inkblot results might alleviate the fear of being estranged from friends and family. Unless the person being psychologically profiled wants to shirk criminal responsibility or can see themselves as a danger to themselves or others, it makes sense to want to establish "normality".

But why is Wikipedia more responsible to protect Rorschach testing than scientific journals or medical websites? Admittedly, I am not an expert in medicine, psychology or the forensic sciences and I have no idea how these Wikipedia images will affect the patient community. However, as a tech blogger, I understand this issue to be Wikipedia's dedication to free and educational content - even when that education is widely debated. It will be interesting to see if those against the inkblot posting will be able to determine a consensus to have them removed.

With the N73 as the kernel, the team added a battery-powered LED lamp and a series of filters. The result is an extremely inexpensive portable microscope with the potential to detect malaria, sickle-cell anemia and tuberculosis from fluid smears.

Microscopy-based detection of malaria is possible by taking a pinprick from a patient, smearing their blood onto a treated glass slide, and examining it under a microscope. Malaria parasites are detectable when they react to the treatment on the glass (Giemsa stain). According to a New Scientist article published this morning, the modified phone or "CellScope" makes it possible for field doctors to test for the disease as well as send their images to labs via a wireless network.

If cell images are coupled with patient details and locations, the CellScope can help reduce disease-based death rates by guiding grassroots health workers in deploying resources, treating those affected and stopping the spread of disease across townships.

For more mobile phone based health solutions, check out NetSquared's list of projects.

According to the Wikipedia blog, the 2009 swine flu pandemic page "got about 16,000 page hits on April 23, and this number increased to a dizzying 2.86 million page hits only a week later." The article began as a mere stub and has since expanded to a 21 page article with multiple iterations and discussions.

The NIH is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' primary agency for conducting and supporting medical research. Contributions from the group will likely help dispel myth from fact and increase awareness for early detection and preventative health.

In the past, a number of media stories from the American Medical News, Reuters Health and Seattle's KOMO TV News have criticized Wikipedia for its lack of credibility. There have also been a number of breakaway efforts to recreate the Wikipedia experience amongst subject experts including Toxipedia, Medpedia and Citizendium. Nevertheless, with Wikipedia's monthly unique traffic of 300 million visitors, it simply makes more sense for medical experts to travel to an information epicenter rather than asking millions to modify their behavior.

While no responsible medical professional would ever suggest Wikipedia as the sole information source for self-diagnosis and treatment, the NIH's recognition of Wikipedia's value might spur on other agencies to consider the site in health outreach strategies.

DiabetesMine founder Amy Tenderich noted that they had "many iPhone-based entries, but what these two students have designed goes beyond a single logging, data calculation or learning application." She listed the following reasons this concept stood out (edited version):

• The LifeCase & LifeApp solution is a glimpse of the future; they've taken the integration of diabetes devices to its fullest conclusion.
• The phone acts as a glucose meter, controller for your pump, and data logging application all in one, with built-in capability to share the data across platforms. The case even houses a lancet and test strip storage for a complete, all-in-one solution.
• The system could easily be expanded to include continuous glucose monitoring (CGM).
• This system is not limited to the iPhone models, but could be implemented on any smartphone.
• The technology to make this system happen is all here and functional. It just needs some visionaries to push for implementation.

In regards to the last note, this is only a prototype currently. However, we agree with Amy that this is the future of diabetes mobile phone apps - and points the way to how mobile phones and the Internet will improve other health care appliances in the near future.

The app also enables users to email their readings, along with a message, to other people such as your parents or nurse. Plus it has charts and lists - not unlike another iPhone app which this author uses to manage diabetes, called Diamedic.

The new LifeScan iPhone app isn't the only initiative to use Web technology to improve the lives of people with diabetes. DiabetesMine, a website run by Amy Tenderich, is running a competition for an iPod-like device or web app for diabetes management. According to Tenderich, "21m Americans live with diabetes, yet the devices we rely on generally don't hold a candle to the sleek design of consumer electronics (think iPod)." The 2009 DiabetesMine Design Challenge is offering a prize of $10,000. It's sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), with support from global innovation firm IDEO, and by health blog Medgadget.com.

The Internet in Everyday Objects

We're increasingly seeing the Internet-enabled objects that up till now have been offline experiences. Earlier today we described how a UK company, partnering with Penguin, built 6 web-based book applications - including one that used Google Maps for a 'flyover' experience of storytelling, a Twitter book, and one where real time user keystrokes were tracked as part of the story. The creator of those, Dan Hon, told us that he was excited to see Bluetooth connectivity enabling a vastly improved interface for glucose monitors. He said that developments like this could be the stepping stones toward a future of ubiquitous computing - we're inclined to agree.

The next step of LifeScan's Internet-connected glucose monitor might be to have all that iPhone functionality in the glucose monitor itself, doing away with the need for the iPhone. Right now the cost of that would be prohibitive, but we can imagine a time in the near future when touch screen UIs and Internet connectivity in everyday devices will be commonplace and inexpensive.

A reminder that Blue Spruce is a fully browser-based application development platform, currently in development, which is being built on open Web standards. The main feature of Blue Spruce is that it allows for a combination of different Web components - data mashups, high-definition video, audio and graphics - to run simultaneously on the same browser page. It's important to note that the Radiology Theatre app only requires a standard Web browser (as long as it's Safari or IE!) - so there's nothing to download for the end user, in this case doctors.

The radiology theatre is the latest in a series of prototypes for Blue Spruce. The current prototypes are focused on 3 main areas: finance, health and "heavy industry" (which it previously defined as utilities, rail, steel, etc).

This is how IBM described how the new online radiology theatre will work:

"A group of doctors can log into a secure Web site at the same time to review and analyze a patient's recent battery of tests. For instance, a radiologist could use her mouse to circle an area on the CT scan of a lung that needs a closer look. Then using the mouse she could zoom into that scan to enlarge the view for all to see. An expert on lung cancer could use his mouse to show how the spot had changed from the last scan. And then, a pathologist could talk about patient treatments based on spots of that size depending on age and prior health history, paging through clinical data accessible on the site.

The theatre allows all these experts to discuss, tag and share information simultaneously, rather than paging through stacks of papers, calling physicians to discuss scan results and then charting the results. This collaborative consultation brings together the personal data, the experts and the clinical data in one physical, visual theatre."

Perhaps the biggest potential benefit of the online radiology theatre is that it will enable experts from all over the world to consult on cases. The ability for multiple users to "cobrowse" (as IBM has termed it) means they can interact in the browser in real-time and see each other's changes.

Of course, since this is medical data, there are significant privacy implications involved in using the Internet to collaborate. But we're pleased to see that IBM's Blue Spruce is being put to such a worthy use and we look forward to seeing other applications this year and beyond.

The new alliance wants to guide governments, NGOs, and mobile firms on how mobile technology can be used to help save lives.

Already, mobile technology is providing and augmenting healthcare initiatives throughout the world. In a recent study released by the UN and Vodafone titled, "mHealth for Development: The Opportunity of Mobile Technology for Healthcare in the Developing World," over 50 of these types of initiatives throughout 26 countries were discussed. The biggest adopters of mobile technology were India with 11 projects and South Africa and Uganda with 6 each.

• Sending mobile phone owners updates on diseases via SMS.
• Letting health workers in Uganda log data on mobile devices from the field.
• In South Africa, the SIMpill is a sensor-equipped pill bottle with a SIM card that informs doctors whether patients are taking their tuberculosis medicine.
• In Uganda, a multiple-choice quiz about HIV/AIDS was sent to 15,000 subscribers inviting them to answer questions and seek tests. Those who completed the quiz were given free airtime minutes. At the end of the quiz, a final SMS encouraged participants to go for voluntary testing. The number of people who did so increased from 1000 to 1400 over a 6-week period.
• In the Amazonas state of Brazil, health workers filled in surveys on their phones about the incidences of mosquito-borne dengue fever.
• In Mexico, a medical hotline called MedicallHome lets patients send medical questions via SMS.

The Power of Mobile Technology

But beyond just the altruistic aspects of mobile healthcare, the UN report also demonstrated to mobile operators how programs such as these could provide value to the industry. That, said UN/Vodafone Foundation Partnership head Claire Thwaites, was a crucial step since the industry, like many others today, stands at the edge of a downturn.

Because mobile technology is relatively cheap and easy to spread, it can connect the rural areas that desperately need healthcare with the large populations of doctors who live in the urban centers. For example, "in India," said Dan Warren, director of technology for the GSM Association, the umbrella organization that hosts the MWC, "there are 1m people that die each year purely because they can't get access to basic healthcare. The converse angle to that is that 80% of doctors live in cities, not serving the broader rural communities where 800 million people live."

Some Drawbacks

Using mobile technology is not a panacea for the world's health issues, though. Says Forrester analyst Elizabeth Boehm, one of the biggest issues with mobile healthcare is that "the people who are most in need of healthcare are usually more aged, so they don't use the mobile or they're not comfortable with it." This limits the use of mobile phones in public health information campaigns.

However, as the technology continues to spread throughout the world, it's easy to see how, over the course of time, phones could become a "doctor in your pocket" for the less fortunate citizens of our world.

Trying to spread the word about the dangers of Salmonella-infected peanut butter forced the HHS, FDA, and CDC to get creative. Leveraging social media to spread the word, proved to be the point on which the agencies could quickly combine forces. According to Nextgov, the various health agencies gathered to brainstorm ideas, propose various forms of social media outreach, and collaborate on launching the campaign.

"We tried to use every available form of media," said Dick Stapleton, deputy director of the Web communications and the new media division at HHS.

The avenues employed by the agencies included blogs, texting, mobile versions of agency Web sites, online video from the FDA and CDC on YouTube, podcasts, XML files and RSS feeds including "CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response," social network outreach on sites like MySpace, a variety of Twitter entities like @FDArecalls and @CDCemergency, virtual worlds, and widgets. The various channels carried both breaking news as well as education information on Salmonella.

Previously, inter-agency collaboration was all but non-existent, as Stapleton explained to GovHealthIT:

"Traditionally, [HHS] is a very siloed organization, with the CDC, FDA and other agencies doing their own thing and the public left to go to individual agency pages to find out about what is going on," he said. "We have a lot of potential resources, but they are scattered."

Social media not only enabled the agencies to accelerate outreach, it made the health organizations more social, themselves, by introducing a means of collaborating among the formerly disjointed departments.

And while it's hard to pinpoint how many potential illnesses or deaths were prevented, it's safe to say that far more people were aware of the dangers of Salmonella-tainted peanut butter thanks to the social media efforts of these agencies.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Hopefully, this is just the first step - rapidly disseminating information - of many for incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into these agencies.

With continued adoption, one can easily imagine the possible advances in protecting the populous from disease before it happens - like employing technology similar to Google's flu trends combined with social graph information. And that's only one example.

Here's hoping the health agencies continue to break new ground - and continue to collaborate - for all of our sakes. That's when social media will truly become a way of life.

If you think that "data portability" and standards for an open web hold a lot of promise to fuel innovation in social networking, just imagine what a secure, standards-based, data landscape could enable in health care.

The Continua Alliance, made up of companies like Nokia, Intel and Panasonic, along with IBM and Google, highlighted a handful of factors in the announcement. The technology will be useful in a wide variety of case types ("including chronic disease management, health and wellness, and elderly care"), in the US and around the world. By leveraging online services, the platform will enable healthcare providers to leverage scale in ways that otherwise isolated medical monitoring can not. And by putting the software into widespread use, the group hopes to make significant headway in supporting open standards and "interoperable healthcare products and solutions." That's on top of all the standard consumer benefits of online health records. (See coverage at Medgadget for more details and a link to the press release.) The companies don't yet have any name for the platform but say it's tested and ready to deploy.

The group also said that supporting the development of Google Health was one of its goals, but we hope that the technology will support the development of an entire ecosystem of complimentary, competing and interoperable health data services.

That kind of language is both similar to what advocates of social networking "data portability" use and represents the kind of steps we'd love to see more of from big vendors in all kinds of technology sectors.

Open, standardized data, backed up by certified security measures and serving as the foundation of a new era of innovation is a fantastic vision. If you think that big players in social networking have a financial interest in data lock-in, though, just imagine the resistance that "data portability" could face in the multi-trillion dollar medical industry.

The companies collaborating on this platform believe that consumer demand for informed care, combined with the vendor participation already gathered, will force the rest of the industry to open, down to every medical practitioner challenged by patients to use portable data in treatment. That seems like a sound strategy to us.