This morning Aetna and Apple announced a new wellness program that will leverage health data, a custom app and the Apple Watch. Called Attain by Aetna, the voluntary program will deliver personalized health goals, recommendations and rewards based on members’ daily activity.
Category Archives: Healthcare IT
Healthcare Information Technology
Do You Really Want Your Insurer Buying You An Apple Watch?
According to a CNBC report, Apple is currently in talks with private Medicare plan providers to come up with ways to subsidize their watches and get them onto the wrists of senior citizens. Apple already has partnerships with Aetna and United Healthcare to provide such subsidies.
Statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., on the agency’s new actions under the Pre-Cert Pilot Program to promote a more efficient framework for the review of safe and effective digital health innovations
Digital technologies create new opportunities to transform health care and empower patients to make better informed decisions about their health. Digital tools are rapidly evolving, and to keep pace with this promising innovation, the FDA must modernize its approach to regulation.
Change Healthcare acquires blockchain API startup PokitDok’s IP, staff
Change Healthcare — a provider of health IT software that ranges from network data analytics to revenue improvement — announced this morning the acquisition of several key assets from blockchain-focused API startup PokitDok, including its software, IP and employees. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
How and why startups are using blockchain to tackle healthcare hurdles
It’s hard to have a conversation about technology innovations in 2018 without stumbling into the realm of blockchain. Since it first appeared on most people’s radars — thanks to the ever-turbulent bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — financial organizations, major retailers and even governments have investigated whether or not the trendy technology has something to offer.
Google exec says health orgs should key in on data management and advanced insights
Google Cloud will be focusing on, among other things, data management and advanced data insights at HIMSS19 — two areas it sees as important trends for CIOs and other IT executives to stay focused on in the year ahead.
As the amount and types of healthcare data grow, it is becoming increasingly complex to manage, and ironically more complex to use for insight generation, said Dr. Gregory Moore, vice president of healthcare at Google Cloud.
How the US government shutdown could hamstring digital health
As America rises to greet the new year, its leaders remain in a funding dispute over border security that has so far resulted in 13 days of a partial government shutdown. While the deadlock is certainly having a prolonged impact on more than 420,000 government employees who are working without pay, and the 380,000-plus who have been furloughed, each passing day threatens greater challenges for the numerous industries that rely on federal services.
Inside Health Villages, Finland’s multimodal digital push to bring healthcare to the home
With just five and a half million people spread out over more than 100 million square miles of land — and a nationalized system pledged to provide high-quality free medical care to them all — the nation of Finland is about as perfect a testbed for connected health innovation as you can imagine. Add in a surplus of developers left over from Nokia’s mobile phone heyday, and you have a country with the means, motive and opportunity to jump into digital health with both feet.
Report: VA turns to Apple to develop patient-facing mobile EHR
When Apple launched Apple Health Records, a feature that lets users upload their health records from participating health systems onto their phone, in the spring, it sparked conversations about consumers’ access to health records and the entrance of major tech companies into the healthcare space.
Now the Department of Veterans Affairs is in talks with the Silicon Valley tech giant about the creation of a portable EHR specifically for veterans, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to the WSJ, who reviewed emails and spoke with unnamed sources about the initiative, what’s currently on the table is a new Apple software that would let the VA patients enrolled in the system transfer their records to their iPhone — a functionality that would likely be achieved via a version of Apple’s Health Records app.
Amazon’s newest machine learning product makes sense of unstructured medical text
Amazon Web Services has unveiled a new machine learning tool that looks to help healthcare industry developers process bodies of unstructured medical text.
Called Amazon Comprehend Medical, the HIPAA-eligible service is able to pull out medically-relevant information such as patient diagnoses, symptoms, medical test details, treatments and dosages, while simultaneously highlighting any protected health information.