A collaboration between Alere Health and mobile medical software developer AirStrip Technologies should go a long way towards extending the reach of AirStrip OB software. Beginning Sept. 1, the new marketing agreement calls for Alere, through its Women & Children's Health division, to begin offering AirStrip OB to its healthcare provider client base in the U.S. Read »

With 50 percent of consumers saying they want a personal monitoring device prompting them to make improvements in their health, could a marriage between mobile devices and personal health records completely change the way health care is delivered in the United States? It can and it will, according to a brief issued by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. Read »

A new report put out by global management consulting firm Accenture predicts that healthcare organizations gearing up to make large investments in e-health solutions will have to clear hurdles in five interrelated disciplines of information governance: data privacy, confidentiality, security, quality and integrity. Read »

Back in the early days of the HIMSS Medical Banking Project's Cooperative Open-source Medical Banking Architecture & Technology (COMBAT) Initiative, the late John Hardin and I began exchanging emails with Tim O'Reilly, a bastion of the open source movement, arguing the case for the intersection of open source, open standards and medical banking technologies. Today, healthcare is a major theme of his open source connection, OSCON 2010, which runs July 19-23, 2010. Andy Oram has an excellent track summary over at his O'Reilly radar blog which I will not recreate here. Read »

With roughly 6,000 mobile apps targeting health care consumers, according to a recent Los Angeles Times report, you might think people have had their fill of software that offers advice and information on health topics ranging from how to find a doctor, to emergency first aid protocols, to exercise instructions. But they haven’t—at least not according to the mobile app developers, who keep coming up with inventive ways to package new consumer health offerings. Read »

A call for collaboration by international groups to reduce maternal and newborn mortality by employing mobile technologies includes a joint statement with five primary action areas: Read »

Recently, Keith Kleiner of singularityhub.com posted on the Xprize promotional video for an AI physician on every smart phone. Artificial intelligence at the point of care will benefit from the kinds of IT advancements featured at the June 2010 Semantic Technology Conference. Semantics and linked data have already helped to revolutionize healthcare and life sciences research, enabling the querying of complex biomedical data sets and their visualization, the construction of knowledge sharing databases and repositories, and networking between researchers. Read »

The Federal agency tasked in bringing telecommunications to rural America is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Rural Utilities Service (RUS). Its June 7, 2010 Round One Awards Report, Connecting Rural America, summarized the state of the projects (68 funded thus far) of the Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP), part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Read »

Recently Rwanda's President Paul Kagame made good on a promise and over 2,200 health workers received free phones in hopes of improving health services delivery. Read »

Much of the buzz coming out of the Open Mobile Summit in London yesterday stemmed from comments made by the European president of chip manufacturer Qualcomm, who's convinced that all portable devices will be connected to the internet in the future, marking a new chapter in the growth of mobile internet. Read »