A new survey of 5,000 patients and 626 physicians conducted by Nielsen Strategic Health Perspectives found that consumer access to digital health technology is still quite low, especially compared to consumers' wants.
For instance, the survey found that 36 percent of adults were interested in a 24-7 telephone line for medical advice, but only 14 percent had access to one. Similarly, 28 percent...
In a pilot that included more than 350 chronic heart failure patients, a Philadelphia hospital was able to reduce its 30-day readmissions by 10 percent -- a 40 percent improvement over baseline -- by using email and text message reminders to get patients into follow-up appointments. Dr. Thompson Boyd, physician liaison at Hahnemann Hospital and Richard Imbimbo, the hospital's CFO, spoke at HIMSS...
Irvine, California-based practice management software company Kareo has acquired San Francisco-based DoctorBase, maker of a mobile-based patient communications offering.
DoctorBase has raised at least $360,000 to date. Kareo had raised a total of $72.5 million as of January 2014.
DoctorBase developed a tool that both helps practices find new patients as well as communicate with their existing...
This afternoon -- in about two hours time -- MobiHealthNews will kick off our February webinar, Texting for Health: A proven patient engagement and communication strategy, at 2PM ET.
More than any other digital channel, text messaging is a proven way to improve patient engagement and health outcomes while remaining cost-effective for healthcare providers. From appointment reminders, to general...
Lehi, Utah-based VoIP communications service for dentists, Weave, has raised $5 million led by A Capital, with participation from Homebrew, Fuel Capital, SV Angel, Initialized Capital, and Y Combinator, according to a report in TechCrunch. Weave has focused on dentist offices in North America as its first target market.
Weave plans to use the funds to build out its product's features, expand...
This week the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare announced plans to leverage the Text4Baby SMS-based initiative to increase enrollment in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Text4Baby currently counts about 300,000 users of its free health tips via text messages for pregnant women about pregnancy and infant care. The Text4Baby program first launched two years ago and is...
Earlier this year we reported that Kaiser Permanente was planning on rolling out a national campaign for text message based appointment reminders after the company conducted a successful pilot. This week at the HIMSS event in Chicago, we caught up with Kaiser's Director of Enterprise Engineering Carlos Matos and VP of Public Relations Holly Potter to discuss the text message reminder rollout and...
John Halamka, MD, MS, the CIO of CareGroup Health System and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, has cut the cord and no longer has a landline phone. Halamka wrote a post about going all mobile over at his blog Life as a Healthcare CIO. Halamka is also Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and a practicing Emergency Physician.
This is a puff piece,...
The AIDS.gov site, which is a joint effort put together by a number of federal agencies and programs involved in AIDS prevention, research, testing and treatment, has published its fourth and final post on using text messages for HIV appointment and medication reminders (but most of the advice works for any implementation of text message reminders in healthcare settings.) Here's a quick run-down...
During the final presentations at an mHealth Workshop at TEPR this week, Barry Greene, President & CEO, Libertas.md & Med Practice Informatics outlined the return on investment for deploying a simple text message-based communications tool in a hypothetical one doctor practice. Greene showed significant costs saving and revenue boosting opportunities can be leveraged by using text messages...
