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It’s always exciting when movers and shakers from two different sides of a given industry decide to get together and form strategic initiatives that clearly matches made in heaven. That’s why it was great to get the press release on Monday that announced the new initiative between telecommunication powerhouse Verizon and healthcare technology investment giant Health Communication Partners.

Advanced healthcare solutions made mobile by Verizon’s award winning wireless network = next generation solutions that can really move the needle in terms of our nation’s overall health.  We’re very excited to see what might come out of this.

Read the full release HERE.

How to decrease cost while providing quality care – this is surely one of the key discussion points in every healthcare board meeting over the past decade.  At mobileStorm, we work with healthcare providers on a nearly daily basis to make sure the that healthcare communication solutions that we are bringing to market match the demands of the marketplace as well as the demands of the real world.

Dr David Lee Scher, a pioneer of mHealth monitoring techniques, has released a new list of ways that hospitals can decrease readmission rates and it matches most of our experience as well.

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Juniper Research, the UK based analysis powerhouse, released a new report earlier this month that places the usage rate of remote monitoring solutions much higher that previous projections.

According to their studies, cardiac monitoring will be the leading use of the new category of mHealth tools followed closely by diabetes and COPD chronic management.  Driving factors behind the increase are the increasing penetration of smartphones in the worldwide population along with projected increases in computing power.

Read the full release by Juniper HERE.

The hosting gurus and go to guys for actionable IT ideas, onlinetech.com, have released a new guide to preventing HIPAA violations in 2012. The piece goes over HIPAA’s new enforcement procedures, requirements that are coming in the pipeline as well as steps that any organization can take to avoid an audit or a violation.  These include…

Mobile Device Security
Business Associate Agreements
Internal Operations

The list assumes a very hardware centric environment with little management capabilities, but overall its a good quick read with some ideas on preventing a breach.

Read the full article here.

Information Weeks Healthcare division has released a new list of up and coming tools for tightening Healthcare Security.  Great list indeed but it seems to assume that the given organization has a primarily hardware based infrastructure. I’m not saying this isn’t valuable because for this most part, this is the way things really are in the current HC environment.

In the future, however, the proliferation of single sign-on, member centric solutions will make these sort of discussions moot and these solutions archaic and outdated.  Right now they’re very very valuable as a bandaid for our security concerns.

Read the guide HERE.

With any evolving market, the products come first (and live in a sort of wild west environment) and then certifications evolve in order to give the consumer a guide to purchasing the right solution.

The mHealth space at this moment is in the process of evolving its certifications.  Basically we’re laying the tracks for the intercontinental railroad to drive on.  The wild west isn’t gone yet, but we can see it’s end.  All those with a good solution should be happy at these news.

Read more here.

The 2012 awards season is heating up, not just at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts (Oscars), but in the mHealth space as well. As hot as this space is, it should be no surprise that there are many new awards and grants opening up.

The just released guidelines for the 2012 TripleTree iAwards read like the owners manual of mobileStorm for Healthcare, so you know we will be submitting, and we welcome the competition!

The three categories for the 2012 iAwards are:

1. Operational Effectiveness – Best solution for reducing costs and improving operational efficiency
2. Clinical Application – Best solution that enriches clinical care delivery
3. Consumer Experience – Best solution to enrich the consumer or patient experience

Read the full submission guidelines here.

Current reimbursement for telehealth by the federal Medicare program is a whopping 0. However, that is all changing.  In a special report from CES this past week, Neil Versel from Information Week released an analysis of spending trends and how everything points to massive changes on the horizon.

He cites the increase attention that studies are getting that show home monitoring having the potential to reduce readmission by as much as 69%.  From there, the financial math is simple.  Check out the full report here.

Michael Lustig, CEO of Movero, INC has come up with a new set of 7 Best Practices for ensuring that a given mHealth program is as, ehem, healthy as possible.  The guide is great, but reinforces the consistent problems faced by organizations that take a hardware centric view of their mHealth strategy.  Check out our recent blog, Too Much Hardware, Not Enough Software.

Here are the best practices.  Read Michael’s full article here.
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One of the great pleasures of my young technology marketing career was getting invited to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA in 2003 and taking a guided tour of their “House of The Future.”  For those who aren’t familiar with it, the “house” is a mock two-story house in one of their buildings, complete with a landscaped entrance, living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and 2 ½ baths.

The purpose of the house is to demonstrate their vision of how people will be living in the near future, not in a Disney animatronics way, but rather in a format that enabled you to get hands-on and live the part of someone in the next decade.  As I get closer and closer to the 10-year mark, I’ve been thinking more and more about the predictions that the house had and evaluating just how much has come true.  The truth is that most of it has come true . . . just not in the way they envisioned . . . and none of it was done by Microsoft.

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