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Bill Gates At mHealth: How Mobile Health Can Improve Healthcare

bill gates.jpg[We reported last week from the mHealth Summit in Washington, DC — a conference covering the integration of mobile technologies with medical research, information, diagnosis, treatment, and care.]

One of the highlights of last week’s mHealth Summit was the keynote interview of Bill Gates. While inseparable from his history as founder and leader of Microsoft from 1975 to 2008, his current passion is global health.

Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has now given 3.8 billion (with a “b”) of targeted philanthropy into global health since 1994, he and his wife Melinda are helping bring about profound change to the lives of millions around the world. In a meeting dedicated to exploring the power of mobile devices to shape health in developed and developing countries, Bill Gates eloquently refocussed our attention towards the real urgency of saving the millions of our fellow humans who die needlessly for want of vaccinations or the simplest treatments. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

mHealth Summit Opens With The Director Of The NIH Explaining The Importance Of Mobile Health

201011082322.jpgThe explosion of smart phones, originally led by the iPhone 2007, has catalyzed the explosion of mobile medical apps which our readers are surely familiar with. But, along with the proliferation of medical reference apps and interfaces to electronic health records (EHRs), there is a much broader world of mobile medical devices and simpler phone interfaces collectively termed “mHealth,” which is an area of intense interest for governments, industry and care providers.

This year, this interest has been punctuated by nearly half a dozen different mobile health meetings — many that iMedicalApps has attended and participated in. Perhaps, the largest one of all — the mHealth Summit — is now in session in the Washington Convention Center, sponsored in part by the Foundation at National Institutes of Health (FNIH) — an event we are currently attending. This type of sponsorship is an indication of the importance mobile health (or “mHealth”) is now reaching. To further accentuate this, the keynote speaker to launch the event was Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH himself. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

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