Skip to main content

Nine Hospitals Leading the Way In Mobile Health

A special edition from Brian Dolan and MobiHealthNews features 9 "Mobile Health Hospitals."  These organizations have "...worked with startups and others in the mobile health industry to hone services, devices and applications not yet in the market."

Organizations and their mobile health initiatives include:
  • Stanford Hospital & Clinics (CA) - combining Haiku - Epic Systems' mobile phone-based EHR system - with Apple's iPhone to create an "iPhone EMR."
  • Mt. Sinai (NY) - texting liver transplant patients to encourage adherence to treatment regimens and improve outcomes.
  • Meridian Health (NJ)- are consumers comfortable buying connected health devices at a big box electronics store?  Research is underway with Best Buy to find out.
  • Sarasota Memorial (FL) - developing a mobile communication platform for nurses using Voalte's iPhone-based capabilities.
  • Partners Healthcare (MA) - rolling out a nationwide blood pressure tracking service with proven clinical results and positive ROI.
  • St. Francis Hospital (NY)  - piloting a wireless pacemaker that connects to a server at least once per day to upload data or alerts.
  • St. Mary's Hospital (London, UK) - conducting clinical trials of a peel-and-stick vital sign monitoring system.
  • Mayo Clinic (MN) - monitoring vital signs at home, using videoconferencing to support patient-provider connectivity, all with the goals of reducing hospital admissions and ER visits.
  • Princeton Baptist Medical Center (AL) - testing wireless hand hygiene monitoring using RFID to monitor hand hygiene prior to and after entering a patient room.
According to Dolan, 
    "The nine mobile health hospitals detailed (above) have lent a hand to wireless health startups across the spectrum of devices and services, including text message reminders, wireless peel-and-stick vital sign monitoring, wireless implantable devices and much, much more. These are nine care providers worth recognizing as their support for and publicity of mobile health helps many more than the startups and vendor partners they worked with directly. Their willingness to share their interest in mobile health raises all boats."

    Comments

    Anonymous said…
    Great list giving a nod to innovative healthcare institutions. What strikes me about the list how many of these technologies could impact both hospital/worker operations and patient after-care--both of which contribute greatly to rising costs. I am all for the acquiring the latest and greatest diagnostic/treatment tools, but these do not always promise to drive down the overwhelming cost of healthcare services delivery.

    I am especially impressed with the RFID hand washing system because I have wondered for years about the unscientific practice of monitoring hand hygiene. We all know bad data only makes for bad decisions down the road. I worked in a hospital where a worker literally walks around with a clipboard tabulating by hand the amount of times workers wash or do not wash. Kudos to Princeton Baptist Medical Center for finally getting an accurate, consistent measurement!
    Unknown said…
    It is very encouraging to see these healthcare organizations be proactive with mHealth initiatives. They a setting a great example for providing remote healthcare on a large scale in the near future. At Globaltel Media we've adapted text message technology to aid patients in everything from appointment scheduling/reminders to rehabilitation support via mobile video. The physicians we've been working with overwhelmingly agree that appointment reminders and rescheduling have been top requests from their patients, but other capabilities like remote diagnostics have also been in high request. It will be interesting to see how mHealth will adjust as devices become more sophisticated, but all signs point to a much more mobile-focused approach to healthcare.

    Popular posts from this blog

    Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

    Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor

    Being Disrupted Ain't Fun. Deal With It.

    Articles about disrupting healthcare, particularly those analogizing, say, Tesla's example with healthcare's current state, are frequently met with a chorus of (paraphrasing here) "Irrelevant! Cars are easy, healthcare is hard." You know, patients and doctors as examples of "information asymmetry" and all that. Well, let me ask you this: assuming you drive a car with a traditional internal combustion engine, how much do you know about the metallurgy in your car's engine block? I'll bet the answer is: virtually nothing. In fact it's probably less than you know about your own body's GI tract. Yet somehow, every day, us (allegedly) ignorant people buy and drive cars without help from a cadre of experts. Most of us do so and live happily ever after (at least until the warranty expires. Warranties...another thing healthcare could learn from Tesla.) Now, us free range dummies - impatient with information asymmetry - are storming healthcare

    My Take On Anthem-Cigna, Big Dumb Companies and the Executives Who Run Them

    After last Friday's Appeals Court decision, Anthem's hostile takeover of, er, merger with Cigna has but a faint pulse. Good. Unplug the respirator. Cigna's figured it out but Anthem is like that late-late horror show where the corpse refuses to die. Meanwhile, 150 McKinsey consultants are on standby for post-merger "integration" support. I guess "no deal, no paycheck..." is powerfully motivating to keep the patient alive a while longer. In court, Anthem argued that assembling a $54 billion behemoth is a necessary precondition to sparking all manner of wondrous innovations and delivering $2.4 billion in efficiencies. The basic argument appears to be "We need to double in size to grow a brain. And just imagine all those savings translating directly into lower premiums for employers and consumers."  Stop. Read that paragraph again. Ignore the dubious "lower premiums" argument and focus on the deal's savings. $2.4 billion saved