Dr. John D. Halamka, Chief Information Officer of both Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, has a review up on his “Life as a Healthcare CIO” blog of the Withings Wi-Fi Scale.
The device can now upload readings into Google Health, and Dr. Halamka thinks similar capabilities in other at-home medical devices can be used to evaluate alternative quality contracts that reimburse clinics based on improvement in preventive care.
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
I came across a TED video of Michael Specter’s talk about the dangers confronting us as the war against science progresses. Here’s TED’s description of the video:
Vaccine-autism claims, “frankenfood” bans, the herbal cure craze — they all point to the public’s growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress.
GE Healthcare IT has been working in the years leading up to the HITECH Act on a number of initiatives to enable meaningful use of healthcare IT — or as Senior VP and General Manager of eHealth Earl Jones puts it, building the “connected healthcare ecosystem.”
In what may be seen as either a pragmatic move or a revolutionary one, GE is developing tools that allow for communication across healthcare IT systems — not just connecting one GE Centricity installation with another — but acting as a technology-agnostic bridge for information across healthcare IT systems and across health systems.
While Jones notes that we’re in the early stages of linking isolated lilypads across the surface of a pond, GE is developing tools that not only facilitate interoperability, but also facilitate the dissemination of medical knowledge and the use of clinical decision rules developed locally or by pacesetting health systems (e.g. Mayo, Intermountain). Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at HealthBlawg*
Researchers from the Medical Device Safety Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle have published an article in the latest New England Journal of Medicine suggesting technological and regulatory actions that they hope will increase the security and privacy of implantable medical devices.
As has been reported earlier, implantable pacemakers, defibrillators, and similar devices are subject to wireless hacking that may influence their functionality. Although a lip-smacking target for devious hackers, an actual incident where a person’s implant has been interfered with is yet to be reported.
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