Brian T. Horowitz

Apple’s iPhone has become a tool for tracking doctor training at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. The hospital has designed a custom app in FileMaker to record how well residents conduct bedside ultrasound exams. Called Internal Medicine Bedside Ultrasound (IMBUS), the tracking app is part of a training program on how to use the latest […]

Emergency room personnel at an academic medical facility spent a lot of time on Facebook when the ER became busy, according to a University of Florida study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Facebook use accounted for a substantive percentage of staff time during the 15-day observation period and increased with higher patient […]

Electronic health record vendor Practice Fusion has launched an online tool in its Patient Fusion personal health portal to enable patients to track their medical spending. Announced May 22, the spending tool aggregates users’ account information similarly to that of Intuit’s Mint.com. Now in beta, it uses graphics to track patients’ spending and provides automatic […]

Health Level Seven International, a standards body for health care data, is developing a new framework that will ease sharing of patients’ electronic health records. The standard, Fast Health Interoperable Resources (FHIR), consists of modular components called “resources” that allow health IT systems to read extensions using a common framework. They’re used by “back-office” software, […]

Google CEO Larry Page has announced that he suffers from vocal paralysis and has donated millions of dollars to the Voice Health Institute in Boston to fund research on human voice loss. The amount of funding is in the “tens of millions,” according to Dr. Steven M. Zeitels, a professor of Laryngeal Surgery at Harvard […]

Mobile personal emergency response systems (MPERS) help monitor elderly patients, but younger users will also benefit from the technology, according to Tim Smokoff, the CEO of Numera, which makes the Libris device. The Libris incorporates two-way voice, automated fall detection and location tracking as well as telehealth capabilities. Users can send measurements from biometric devices […]

Government and consumer demand for more modern physician practices could help spur the adoption of health IT such as electronic health records, according to a new paper from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. Health care reform such as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) and the Affordable Care Act […]

Software company SpecialNeedsWare has developed an iPad app that allows children with autism to work on their communication skills using the Apple tablet. Launched in February, the app AutisMate provides a customized library of images, sounds, signs and symbols to ease behavioral processing for autistic kids. Video modeling aids children in developing social, communication, functional […]

U.S. physicians have shown a significant increase in accessing digital health data at double the rate of their global counterparts, according to a new report by IT consulting company Accenture. Doctors in the United States increased their “routine” use of health IT—such as e-prescribing and entering data in electronic health records (EHRs)—by 32 percent, compared […]

Independence Blue Cross (IBC), a Philadelphia-based health insurer, plans to use predictive analytics to find ways to better retain customers in its health plans. The insurer is using InsightsOne’s big-data platform based on open-source Hadoop to conduct real-time petabyte-scale predictive analytics, the companies announced on May 9. IBC has been looking to boost the growth […]