For healthcare, blockchain is continually transitioning from an obscure technology to a viable tool for various administrative and data-focused use cases. But while players big and small might be curious about its potential, they’ll also need to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to pilots and partnerships dedicated to the distributed ledger technology.
According to IDC, 20 percent of healthcare organizations will be using blockchain by 2020. So should startups in the healthcare space be using it now? Well, not necessarily. While many digital health startups are putting blockchain to good use, for others it might be premature, or even extraneous.
In a category-defining piece written more than two years ago, Matthew Schuster and Dan Gebremedhin surveyed market drivers and companies innovating in Behavioral Health (BH) technology. In this article, we will revisit the macro issues identified in 2016, evaluate how the market has changed, and contemplate how promising BH tech companies can pursue opportunities that not only create impact, but also achieve elusive product market fit.
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.
When it comes to telemedicine, comprehensive reimbursement and coverage state mandates and a dearth of local psychiatrists were key factors in adoption, according to the a research letter about the trends in telemedicine published in JAMA yesterday.
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.
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 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.
The platform will now let users share health records with pharma companies, health systems and insurers for remuneration.