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.

MobiHealthNews

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.

MobiHealthNews

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.

MobiHealthNews

ResMed acquires EHR company MatrixCare

This morning ResMed, maker of connected respiratory devices, announced that it is set to acquire MatrixCare, a Minnesota-based EHR company, for $750 million.

MatrixCare’s EHR is targeted towards long-term post acute care services, such as skilled nursing facilities, life plan communities and senior living homes.

The deal is expected to help ResMed expand its software-as-a-service offerings, specifically in the long-term care setting.

The deal is set to close by the end of the company’s second fiscal quarter in 2019. After the acquisition, MatrixCare is expected to remain a standalone business inside of ResMed’s portfolio.

MobiHealthNews