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Giving Patients Ownership of Their Clinical Data
DEC 10, 2015 12:19pm ET
The healthcare industry is among the most aggressive when it comes to issues related to data collection, access, and privacy, but one clinical data expert believes that the future of health data management lies in turning data ownership over to patients.
Robert Rowley, MD, the chief medical information officer and founder at Flow Health in San Francisco, who previously started physician software vendor Practice Fusion, spoke with Information Management about the growing complexity with capturing and sharing a complete patient data profile, and how these challenges are impacting quality of care.
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Critical Problems Remain for Future of Health Apps
DEC 11, 2015 7:37am ET
Although many individuals use health apps on their mobile phones, a substantial proportion of the U.S. population does not. And many who try health apps eventually stop using them, according to results of a national survey of health app use among U.S. mobile phone owners.
In the survey of more than 1,600 mobile phone users funded by the Verizon Foundation, a little more than half of respondents indicated that they had downloaded a health app—fitness and nutrition were the most popular types—with most using them at least daily. However, of those who used such apps, about half stopped using them due to time-consuming data entry and loss of interest.
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KLAS: 3 traits keep Cerner at top globally
Posted on Dec 11, 2015
By Bernie Monegain, Editor-at-Large
Cerner appears to garner more recognition and interest with healthcare providers outside the U.S. than any other health IT vendor, according to a new report by research firm KLAS.
For its report, "Global HIT Trends: Which Vendors are Providers Betting On?" KLAS interviewed providers around the world to better understand their EMR purchasing plans.
KLAS found Cerner is more seriously considered than any other EMR vendor across all regions interviewed. KLAS credits this to three Cerner attributes:
1. A large global footprint,
2. Strong functionality
3. Flexibility in contracting and implementation.
2. Strong functionality
3. Flexibility in contracting and implementation.
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PwC lays out its top 10 healthcare issues for 2016
Posted on Dec 11, 2015
By Bernie Monegain, Editor-at-Large
It's that time of year when healthcare pundits take stock of the waning year and predict what's in store the year ahead. PwC's Health Research Institute is out with its 10 anticipated healthcare trends for 2016.
"It will be a year of firsts for healthcare consumers, organizations and new entrants as innovative tools and services enter the new health economy," accoding to PwC.
Its "Top health industry issues" report highlights the trends likely to have the most impact on the industry, with a look back at key events from the past decade.
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AHRQ Calls for More Validation of Telehealth
A draft report cites thousands of instances in which telehealth, telemedicine, eHealth and mHealth are mentioned, but not enough evidence that they're effective. It also calls for more study of value-based care models.
Although there have been hundreds of reviews and hundreds of thousands of mentions since 2006, telehealth is still very much a cutting-edge technology – and not validated enough in most cases that legislators can draft adequate policies or standards.
That’s the conclusion of a 52-page draft report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is advocating for more research and an exploration of new organizational and payment models. The report is open for public comment until Jan. 6, 2016.
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ONC 2016 Goal to Connect HIEs Nationwide Met with Skepticism
DEC 10, 2015 3:21am ET
National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, M.D., has laid out her office’s 2016 goals which include connecting health information exchanges across the “entire country within a year,” as part of the agency’s big push towards interoperability on a national level.
In a Dec. 8 speech before the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., DeSalvo observed that some communities such as Maryland are “already connected across state lines” and that ONC’s ultimate objective is to achieve nationwide HIE in 2016. However, three prominent interoperability experts dismiss the realistic chance of this goal being met.
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HIE and interoperability trends to watch in 2016
Posted on Dec 10, 2015
By Jessica Davis, Associate Editor
As the healthcare industry moves toward a more patient-centered mission, security measures and interoperability will progress at a steady rate, according to DirectTrust, a healthcare industry alliance created by Direct exchange network participants.
The group recently released its predictions on the six trends for interoperable electronic exchange of health information for the upcoming year.
"In the world of electronic health information exchange, we're on track for another year of momentous forward movement in increased adoption by providers and greater interoperability between Federal and state agencies with private-sector providers," said David Kibbe, MD, DirectTrust president and CEO, in a press statement.
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Online symptom monitoring benefits cancer patients
By Andrew M. Seaman
(Reuters Health) - Asking cancer patients to periodically report their symptoms online may improve their quality of life and possibly even their survival, according to a new study.
Researchers found that patients who used a website to report their symptoms had better quality of life, were less likely to go to the emergency room, stayed on treatment longer and survived longer than people who were just monitored by their doctors.
"We asked people about the most common and impactful symptoms that we would see across advanced cancers," said lead author Dr. Ethan Basch. "This would be pain, vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, energy loss, weight loss and sleep disturbances. Things that are highly common, subjective and frequently missed."
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Do you have a backup plan for EHR failure?
December 09, 2015
Though electronic health records (EHR) bring a whole new level of convenience and user-friendly operations to your healthcare facility, there is probably always that lingering fear in the back of your mind: "What happens when our EHR fails?" After reports of total EHR outages, it is a valid fear for any hospital or medical office that uses these systems in order to store their patients' information.
The loss of such information, especially when you have a great number of patients, could be catastrophic.
Instead of worrying over the loss of information, you should be asking yourself: "How can we prepare for this?" If you put the right motions into place, worrying over such a failure is a thought that won't cross your mind. Here are a few steps you can take in order to create a backup plan, to prepare for EHR failure and lessen the risk of losing all your patients' information.
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Survey: 43 percent of smartphone users interested in AI-powered medical advisor
December 09, 2015
06:44 pm
Some 43 percent of consumers said using artificial intelligence to create a personal medical advisor would be a good idea, according to Ericsson's annual Hot Consumer Trends Survey of 6,649 iOS and Android urban smartphone users in cities around the world. The company's annual survey asks consumers for their take on futuristic scenarios. For example, last year one of the survey categories was "mind sharing" and this year another, focused on invasive connected devices, is internables.
Ericsson asked consumers to choose which artificial intelligence use cases they think would be useful from a list. Four options, including search engine, travel guide, personal assistant, and teacher, ranked higher than medical advisor. The only two that were less popular than medical advisor were financial advisor and an AI that provides companionship.
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ONC Wants Connected HIEs Nationwide in a Year
DEC 9, 2015 7:35am ET
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has established the ambitious goal of connecting the nation’s health information exchanges—both public and private—by the end of 2016 to make a big push toward nationwide interoperability.
“We have built—through the hard work of the private sector, states, and support from the HITECH Act—an infrastructure in this country where essentially every state has a health information highway,” said National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, M.D. “Our goal is to see that we can connect those highways—including the health information exchanges but also the private sector exchanges—in the entire country within a year.”
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6 Ways Secure Messaging Will Change in 2016
DEC 9, 2015 7:45am ET
David Kibbe, M.D., CEO at secure messaging vendor DirectTrust, admits his trend forecasts for health information exchange in 2016 are optimistic, but if they come anywhere close to fruition it will be a powerful year of change.
To start, Kibbe sees patients participating more in electronic exchange of health data. “There is very little consumer involvement in HIE now, but I think we’re at a turning point.” He believes patients and other health consumers will become more active participants in electronic exchange of data as patient portals give them greater access to their clinical records and providers continue to accept patient engagement as necessary to attain better health outcomes.
Kibbe, who needs some cleanup work on a hip at Mayo Clinic, sees the change in physician acceptance of HIE in his own rural North Carolina and non-technical internist, who called and asked him for the Direct messaging address of Mayo so he could send medical records.
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Special report: Cyber security
Clear and present danger
The Chancellor is warning of cyber terrorism. US healthcare organisations are under siege from hackers. Should the NHS be alarmed? Will the new careCERT help? And what should IT directors be doing? Daloni Carlisle reports.
Last month, Chancellor George Osborne announced that the UK is to double its spending on cyber security to £1.9 billion by 2020 in a bid both to protect national infrastructure from hostile forces and, as he put it, to take the fight to those who would harm us.
Islamic State was already using the internet for propaganda, to radicalise people and for planning purposes, he told an audience at the GCHQ eavesdropping agency.
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Small medicine/big data: how do we get there?
Eben Harrell
Dec 09, 2015
It’s a central tenant of management science: size provides a competitive advantage. As companies get bigger, they realize efficiencies of scale and increased market power; they use both to reach the coveted position of stable incumbent. But are the protective effects of size eroding? Is the era of scale over? And, if so, what does that mean for health care organizations?
In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, Nicco Mele, author of the The End of Big highlights an interesting paradox. Incumbents in most industries in the U.S. are chasing size at all costs. From computing to health care insurance to beer, we are living in an era of mega-mergers. As a recent Wall St. Journal analysis showed, in nearly a third of industries, most U.S. companies compete in markets that would be considered highly concentrated under current federal antitrust standards, up from about a quarter in 1996.
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http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/interoperability-government-officials-make-plans-2016/2015-12-09
Interoperability: Government officials make plans for 2016
December 9, 2015 | By Katie Dvorak
When it comes to secure health information exchange, all eyes are on 2016. At an event Tuesday hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Committee, government officials spoke of their interoperability plans for the coming year.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is focusing on "near-term challenges," National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo said during the event.
Those include making data readily available and usable for patients, making electronic health record systems less clunky and more standardized, and ensuring the market is more transparent.
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DirectTrust predicts the end of Meaningful Use
December 8, 2015 | By Katie Dvorak
Next year will be another one of "momentous forward movement" when it comes to interoperability in the healthcare sector, DirectTrust predicts.
The industry alliance of Direct exchange network users Tuesday released a report on 2016 healthcare trends in the interoperable exchange of information.
"In the world of electronic health information exchange, we're on track for ... increased adoption by providers and greater interoperability between federal and state agencies with private-sector providers. We'll also see, finally, patient and consumer participation in the use of electronic health information exchange," David Kibbe, M.D., president and CEO of DirectTrust, said in an announcement.
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Five Telemedicine Trends for 2016
DEC 8, 2015 7:52am ET
Not so long ago, telemedicine vendors had proprietary standards to connect point-to-point devices via the Internet to conduct a telehealth session. Now, there are open connectivity standards that eliminate additional steps to launch a session, making use of telemedicine simpler.
There remain significant differences among vendors in the architecture of telemedicine systems, says Steve McGraw, CEO at telemedicine vendor Reach Health, but proprietary standards for network connections are going away fast. “We worry about writing code now,” he adds. “Standards lets us write software that replicates the physician session rather than worrying about connectivity.”
That’s one of five major telemedicine technology trends that McGraw sees becoming more prominent in 2016.
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Assessing the Privacy, Security Vulnerabilities of APIs
DEC 8, 2015 7:33am ET
Before patients can leverage application programming interfaces to access their healthcare data, as called for in the final Stage 3 electronic health record Meaningful Use rule, there are privacy and security issues that must be addressed.
Those are among the challenges that a new Health IT Policy Committee task force is attempting to tackle. The API task force, co-chaired by Harvard Medical School research faculty member Josh Mandel, M.D., and Cerner’s Director of Health Policy Meg Marshall, held its first two meetings last week to lay out the group’s agenda and work plan.
Ultimately, the goal is to provide the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT with recommendations to help consumers leverage API technology to access patient data, while ensuring the appropriate level of privacy and security protection.
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Medical Residents Embrace Texting, Putting Patient Info at Risk
DEC 8, 2015 7:41am ET
Despite security concerns, the vast majority of medical residents prefer short message service (SMS) text messaging compared with other forms of in-hospital communication, according to a recent survey conducted at the University of Chicago as well as Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Ill.
In the survey, about 130 internal medicine residents were given several possible communication options: telephone, email, hospital paging, and SMS text messaging. Survey results, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, show that SMS text messaging was the preferred mode of in-hospital communication by 71.7 percent of respondents due to its efficiency and by 79.8 percent because of its ease of use.
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Google names experimental life sciences lab: Verily
Posted on Dec 08, 2015
By Tom Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Healthcare IT News
Google's Alphabet unit christened its so-called moonshot health lab with the name Verily.
Before Google established Alphabet, the lab originated within Google X, taking on smart contact lenses as one of its first projects.
Now that it's Verily, Google revealed the four key pieces: hardware, software, clinical and science.
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The pros and cons of using medical scribes
December 7, 2015 | By Alok Saboo
By Aine Cryts
Medical scribes are growing in popularity. In fact, by 2020, the number of medical scribes in the United States--currently at 15,000--are projected to soar to 100,000.
A new Kaiser Health News report examines the potential benefits--and pitfalls--of having third parties record details about office visits in patients' EHRs.
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Emerging role of chief health information officer: It's all about the data
December 8, 2015 | By Gienna Shaw
It might be time to add another seat to the already-crowded C-suite table: The Chief Health Information Officer.
At the University of Mississippi Medical School, CHIO John Showalter, M.D., is all about the data. While a chief medical information officer focuses on community health and physician engagement, he aims to make "healthcare function on an operational level and [ease] the technology burden on physicians and nurses as they deliver care," he said in an interview with Healthcare IT News.
He focuses on data integration and analytics, with an eye toward using insights to improve care and care delivery. The position is parallel with the CIO, but has an independent academic bent, reporting to the vice chancellor of research, according to the article.
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Survey: Healthcare Organizations Lack Confidence in Secure Data Sharing
December 7, 2015
by Heather Landi
According to a new survey, the demand for access to health data is outpacing the ability of organizations to ensure patient privacy. A survey conducted by Privacy Analytics, a de-identification technology vendor, found that more than two out of three healthcare organizations lack complete confidence in their ability to share data without putting patients’ privacy at risk.
The survey, conducted in collaboration with the Electronic Health Information Laboratory, a group that conducts theoretical and applied research on the de-identification of health information, also indicated that despite organizations’ lack of confidence, data sharing activities continue to grow.
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Unlocking the Value in Unstructured Data
Scott Mace, for HealthLeaders Media , December 8, 2015
Advances in natural language-processing and the ability to read large volumes of data are creating new insights for clinicians.
Until now, the electronic health record has been largely about structuring data to drive initiatives such as value-based care and population health. But now technology is unlocking unstructured information from clinical narratives, making it useful and actionable.
"It's still a work in progress, but a necessary piece of technology that we need to learn to leverage to fully get information out of our EMRs," says Steve Morgan MD, senior vice president and chief medical information officer for Carilion Clinic, an integrated delivery network headquartered in Roanoke, Virginia.
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Tips for Selecting Two-Factor Authentication Technology
DEC 7, 2015 7:38am ET
Providers considering two-factor authorization, which requires users to provide at least one more proof of identity beyond user name and password to access information systems, face a big issue early on by deciding which members of the organization will use the new technology.
In some cases, it may make sense for all personnel who access multiple systems to move to two-factor authentication. But that could be financially prohibitive for hospitals that may decide on a limited deployment to select groups of employees, or to physicians and nurses who spend the day moving from workstation to workstation.
Providers also have multiple options for the additional identity measure, such as a biometric scan, token, scanning an ID badge with a reader on the computer, or a smartphone app that sends a PIN to the computer and the user then enters a password, says Dean Wiech, managing director at Tools4ever, a vendor of two-factor authentication software. Further, Microsoft Windows 10 has a camera that supports facial recognition software.
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2015 in review: John Halamka's take
Posted on Dec 02, 2015
By John Halamka, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
It's now December and as each year ends, I always look back on the challenges and achievements of the past 12 months. Here's my sense of 2015.
ICD-10
Billions were spent, countless other projects were delayed, and the transition occurred on October 1 without a major incident. We're monitoring daily cash at all our hospitals and there has not been significant impact on denials, payments, or discharged but not final billed accounts. Did we get our money's worth? I have argued and will continue to assert that ICD-10 benefited no one. The diagnoses used are more variable so there is less precision in their use. Clinical documentation (in general in the industry) does not have the specificity needed to justify the more granular ICD-10 codes. The notion that quality measures can now be computed more accurately from ICD-10 coded administrative data is just not true. The right path is to plan for a future in which fee for service is replaced by bundled payments so that ICD vocabularies do not need to be used at all for billing. Natural language processing will be able to turn unstructured text into SNOMED-CT coded observations to support analytics. I know that ICD-9 is obsolete and did not include many modern concepts. However, we should have saved our billions and waited until natural language processing and SNOMED-CT was ready (or a convergence of SNOMED-CT and ICD ideas such as will be implemented in ICD-11). The end result of years of work 2012-2015 is that many IT stakeholders think IT was distracted by projects that added little value. The good news is that now that ICD-10 has passed, we can return control of IT priority setting to customers.
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6 things healthcare CIOs need to know about migrating to Windows 10
Posted on Dec 07, 2015
By Vinil Menon, CitiusTech Inc. and Viren Chakraborty, Healthcare consultant
With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft is radically changing the way they think about the operating system. Instead of discrete OS releases every couple of years, Microsoft is encouraging the world to move toward continuous OS updates.
Unshackled from the traditional model, Microsoft will be able to push out relevant updates to ensure the latest in OS is always available to all consumers. This doesn't just include new features, but is going all the way to instant patches and fixes for vulnerabilities, and even drive adoption. Microsoft calls this new model the 'Operating System as a Service'.
Windows 10 introduces a variety of new features. While some features like Windows Media Center, Windows 7 desktop gadgets and USB floppy drivers have been dropped, there is a considerable amount of innovative new features in the Windows 10 release that will be useful to healthcare users.
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Drones wing their way into healthcare's future
December 7, 2015 | By Katie Dvorak
Will drones become an everyday tool used to help the elderly care for themselves? Naira Hovakimyan, a roboticist at the University of Illinois, thinks so.
In fact, Hovakimyan was recently granted $1.5 million by the National Science Foundation to create drones that could perform small household chores, according to a report from the New York Times.
Such devices could bring medicine to patients, help people do things around the house that their health would make difficult and more, according to Hovakimyan.
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HIMSS Value Score to measure financial side of health IT
Posted on Dec 03, 2015
By Jessica Davis, Associate Editor
HIMSS on Thursday launched its Value Score program, the first international IT quality measurement for healthcare providers that factors in technological, clinical and financial outcomes.
Value Score is designed to help providers to improve care efficiency and advance clinical and financial performance through healthcare technology, building off of HIMSS' Value Suite and HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model programs.
As the healthcare market shifts towards value-based payment, providers continue to look for effective ways to align electronic healthcare records with the change.
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Workplace Wellness Programs Promising, but Health Data Privacy Concerns Remain
Monday, December 7, 2015
Corporate wellness programs have fast become a staple of employer health benefits. More than eight in 10 large employers offer a wellness program aimed at helping employees stop smoking, lose weight or make other lifestyle or behavioral changes, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Under the Affordable Care Act, employers have further embraced wellness. The law allows employers to offer financial incentives, making it now common to tie rewards and penalties to the achievement of certain goals, such as weight loss or managing cholesterol.
Despite spotty evidence that these programs can help lower health care costs as intended, wellness vendors have proliferated in recent years. There's no sign of that trend slowing. According to research firm IBISWorld, wellness industry revenue is expected to grow by 8.4% annually, becoming a $12.1 billion business by 2020.
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Your New Medical Team: Algorithms and Physicians
Can machines outperform doctors? Not yet. But in some areas of medicine, they can make the care doctors deliver better.
Humans repeatedly fail where computers — or humans behaving a little bit more like computers — can help. Even doctors, some of the smartest and best-trained professionals, can be forgetful, fallible and prone to distraction. These statistics might be disquieting for anyone scheduled for surgery: One in about 100,000 operations is on the wrong body part. In one in 10,000, a foreign object — like a surgical tool — is accidentally left inside the body.
Something as simple as a checklist — a very low tech-type of automation — can reduce such errors. For example, in a wide range of settings, surgical complications and mortality fell after implementation of a basic checklist including verification of patient identity and body part for surgery, confirmation of sterility of the surgical environment and equipment, and post-surgical accounting for all medical tools.
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December 6th, 2015
Do Electronic Health Records Make You a Better (or Worse) Clinician?
Earlier this week, JAMA Internal Medicine published a study entitled, “Level of Computer Use in Clinical Encounters Associated with Patient Satisfaction”.
A more descriptive title would have been “More Computer Use in Clinical Encounters Associated with Reduced Patient Satisfaction”, as here’s the take home point:
High computer use by clinicians in safety-net clinics was associated with lower patient satisfaction and observable communication differences … Concurrent computer use may inhibit authentic engagement, and multitasking clinicians may miss openings for deeper connection with their patients.
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Best Practices for Computer Use in the Exam Room
DEC 7, 2015 7:45am ET
Doctors focused on entering data into electronic health records during visits are putting physician-patient relationships at risk as well as potentially the safety of patients.
So argues Regenstrief Institute investigator and Indiana University School of Medicine professor Richard Frankel, Ph.D., a medical sociologist who has studied exam room computer use and conducted extensive interviews with physicians. The problem is that some doctors spend more than 80 percent of the visit time interacting with the computer screen instead of their patients, according to Frankel.
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SAP's bold new goal: making precision medicine a reality
It just rolled out a brand-new platform tailored for healthcare
After more than 40 years of focusing primarily on software for large businesses, SAP is taking a bold step in a new direction: precision medicine.
Targeting healthcare organizations, life sciences companies and research institutions, the German software giant on Tuesday rolled out SAP Foundation for Health, a brand-new platform based on its Hana in-memory engine that's aimed at helping such organizations uncover insights from patient data in real time.
"Our strategy is very simple but very ambitious," said Dinesh Vandayar, vice president of personalized medicine for SAP. "Our vision is to create a health network enabling personalized medicine."
SAP also unveiled SAP Medical Research Insights, the first accompanying application, with a focus on clinical researchers and life sciences companies.
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Google is working on a wearable that could test diabetics' blood sugar levels
Device would use pressurized gas to pierce the skin and capture a tiny amount of blood, according to patent application
Google has filed a patent application for a wearable device that can test diabetics' blood sugar levels without the use of a needle.
The application, filed with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on Dec. 3, is for a wrist-worn device that uses pressurized gas to pierce the user's skin and draw in a "micro-emergence" of blood to be tested.
The device might not be for diabetics alone. The patent application notes that blood could be tested for various qualities, including hormone levels, proteins and enzymes, which could factor into various medical conditions.
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Enjoy!
David.
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