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After decades as a technological laggard, medicine has entered its data age. Mobile technologies, sensors, genome sequencing, and advances in analytic software now make it possible to capture vast amounts of information about our individual makeup and the environment around us. The sum of this information could transform medicine, turning a field aimed at treating the average patient into one that’s customized to each person while shifting more control and responsibility from doctors to patients.

The question is: can big data make health care better?

“There is a lot of data being gathered. That’s not enough,” says Ed Martin, interim director of the Information Services Unit at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. “It’s really about coming up with applications that make data actionable.”

The business opportunity in making sense of that data—potentially $300 billion to $450 billion a year, according to consultants McKinsey & Company—is driving well-established companies like Apple, Qualcomm, and IBM to invest in technologies from data-capturing smartphone apps to billion-dollar analytical systems. It’s feeding the rising enthusiasm for startups as well.

Venture capital firms like Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as well as the corporate venture funds of Google, Samsung, Merck, and others, have invested more than $3 billion in health-care information technology since the beginning of 2013—a rapid acceleration from previous years, according to data from Mercom Capital Group. 

Via nrip

Explore the rise of mobile in the clinical setting and better understand how physicians are using mobile technology and social media to improve healthcare.

Via ET Russell, Texas Medical Association

Today's mobile apps are helping diabetics aggregate blood sugar and nutritional data from multiple platforms and devices and logging data into central portals accessible anywhere, according to Steve Robinson, general manager of the Cloud Platform Services Division for IBM.

The apps and snap-on smartphone monitoring devices are letting physicians integrate biometric data from wearables into patient data and analyze patient data at fast speed, Robinson writes at InformationWeek. The benefits are just as extensive as the functionality being developed, he says

The gains include everything from simplifying records and improving doctor-patient conversations to gaining a holistic view of a diabetic's health. Doctors can "crunch and analyze patient data at rapid speeds to help identify patterns and predict future health and treatment needs," he writes.

"Mobile apps can help diabetes sufferers get ahead of their symptoms and live healthier, more carefree lives," Robinson says. 

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Diabetes tools have ranged from providing smartphone coaching that is helping diabetics living in low to modest socioeconomic communities manage their disease and improving their health, to a wearable, automated bionic pancreas for continuous glucose monitor and a software algorithm, according to a study at the New England Journal of Medicine.

In addition, mobile monitoring of diabetic employees can save more than $3,000 a year in healthcare costs, half of the average annual medical insurance cost for workers diagnosed with diabetes. 

Today's tools and cloud-based capabilities are reducing those costs while also driving innovation for disease management, Robinson says.

"Using cloud services, combined with the ease and convenience of mobile, new methods of managing this disease are being brought to patients around the world," he writes.

For more information:
- read the article

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Via Celine Sportisse, DIRECT MEDICA by Webhelp, dbtmobile

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates everything from heart monitors to horse vaccines, will soon have its hands full with consumer health apps and devices.

The vast majority of the health apps you’ll find in Apple’s or Google’s app stores are harmless, like step counters and heart beat monitors. They’re non-clinical, non-actionable, and informational or motivational in nature.

But the next wave of biometric devices and apps might go further, measuring things like real-time blood pressure, blood glucose, and oxygen levels.

Via nrip

According to a report over at 9to5Mac, Apple is developing a health app called Healthbook that will track steps taken, calories burned, and miles walked. The app will also helps users track blood pressure, hydration levels, heart rate, and other blood-related biometrics, including — possible — glucose levels. In addition to the tracking features, Healthbook will also reportedly help users remember to take their medications and may even integrate with the iPhone’s existing, built-in Reminders app.

The report cites sources who describe the app as being modeled after Apple’s Passbook app, which is an app for storing loyalty cards and coupons. Like Passbook, Healthbook would be designed with an interface that resembles a stack of cards — each card representing a different health or fitness data point.

9to5Mac points out that many features and apps are developed for an upcoming iOS launch than the number that actually makes it into the final cut. While Healthbook may be under development at Apple, it still may never find its way to market.

Rumors aside, Apple has been poaching engineering talent and senior employees from digital health companies over the course of the past year. So, it certainly has more than a passing interest in digital health. Most recently, MobiHealthNews broke the news that Apple had hired Michael O’Reilly, the former chief medical officer of Masimo Corporation, which specializes in pulse oximeters. At the very end of 2012 Masimo commercially launched an iPhone-enabled pulse oximeter called the iSpO2.

Over the weekend The New York Times reported a few new scoops on Apple’s mobile health plans and its rumored iWatch project. Apple’s meeting in December with the FDA was focused on the subject of “mobile medical apps”, which is the term the FDA uses for those apps that need to be regulated as medical devices.

“They are either trying to get the lay of the land for regulatory pathways with medical devices and apps and this was an initial meeting, or Apple has been trying to push something through the FDA for a while and they’ve had hangups,” Mark A. McAndrew, a partner with the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, who first noticed the public notice about the Apple-FDA meeting, speculated in an interview with The New York Times.... [read on ]

Via rob halkes