Nearly one year ago, we reported on Kaiser Permanente's successful pilot program with text message (SMS) solutions provider mobileStorm for appointment reminders. At the time KP announced that the pilot reduced costs and helped patients enough that it planned to roll the service out nationally by year-end. On December 11 Kaiser Permanente officially rolled out its SMS appointment reminder service...
Frontline:SMS, one of the more well-known mobile phone-based global health start-ups announced via Twitter this morning that it had scooped up additional funding for 2010. The team looks to be building out its developer capacity in the new year. Here's the Twitter announcement:
"The FrontlineSMS team secures additional 2010 funding to strengthen its developer capacity. More news next month! \o/"...
PricewaterhouseCoopers has published a report over the weekend that examines ways by which the healthcare industry might "squeeze" more cost savings our of the system. As you might imagine connected health solutions are a consistent theme throughout much of the report. Here's how it breaks down:
Telecommunications service providers: PwC notes that big telecom companies including Verizon, AT&T...
Earlier this month at the Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit, Vodafone Group CEO Vittoro Colao announced that the carrier was working with pharmaceutical company Novartis on a program called SMS For Life in Tanzania. Vodafone, Novartis and their partner IBM announced the program officially today.
As Colao noted, the program covers some 135 villages (more than 1 million people) in Tanzania after...
"The question is not whether governments should use mobile health," Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao declared, "it is how" they should use it. Colao's keynote presentation kicked off Informa's Mobile Healthcare Summit here in London.
Vodafone group counts more than 315 million people as its wireless customers, which includes Vodafone subsidiaries all around the world. Vodafone also owns a...
AllOne Health announced that its pilot with the U.S. Army, called mCare, has facilitated more than 5,000 messages to the 100 "wounded warriors" participating in the program. The participants are U.S. veterans with traumatic brain injuries who typically need constant follow-ups and continuing medical care. The Army and AllOne plan to expand the number of participants to 10,000 wounded warriors....
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has an online database called ClinicalTrials.gov that includes a registry of federally and privately supported clinical trials underway or completed. The database currently boasts more than 81,000 clinical trials from some 170 countries. As you might expect a couple dozen of those trials are testing wireless health solutions -- mostly mobile phone...
“If we can save one patient from needing another transplant, we’ve saved a life and at least a half-million dollars. The investment is relatively little and the benefit enormous.” Dr. Tamir Miloh, assistant professor of pediatrics and surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. The investment? Text message reminders for teenage liver transplant patients.
Miloh and his team at Mt. Sinai worked on...
Text alerts to encourage blood donations: The Red Cross announced that it will begin offering real-time alerts to critical blood inventories and tips for successful blood donations through text messages. Users opt-in to the program and can then choose to give blood when and where it is needed. The text will even include a click to call feature that allows the user to book an appointment right...
Wireless industry association CTIA's President and CEO Steve Largent kicked off the organization's bi-annual event this morning in San Diego with a number of key metrics that quantify the industry's growth in the past year:
The total number of wireless subscribers in the U.S. is now more than 276 million, Largent said. In the first half of 2009, some 740.3 billion text messages were transmitted...
