Boston Children's Hospital

By  Jonah Comstock 09:08 am April 2, 2015
John Brownstein's Computational Epidemiology Group at Boston Children’s Hospital has received attention in the past for its efforts to use data streams from social media, along with publicly available data from the government, to predict outbreaks of disease. Under Brownstein's directorship, the team has mined Yelp for the foods most likely to cause food poisoning, helped aggregate data about the...
By  Jonah Comstock 04:37 am December 8, 2014
Naomi Fried, Boston Children’s Hospital’s Chief Innovation Officer, is leaving the hospital to become Vice President of Medical Information, Innovation, and External Partnerships at Biogen Idec, MobiHealthNews has learned. "I have loved working at Boston Children’s, which is one of the finest organizations in the world," she wrote in an email. "I feel grateful to all of the people at Boston...
By  Aditi Pai 08:15 am December 4, 2014
Providers are using a lot of health technology, but they aren't using enough technology to interact with patients, Boston Children's Hospital CIO Naomi Fried said at a MassTLC healthcare conference in Boston this week. "There’s a continuum when you think about digital...pure digital vs. pure patient-doctor interaction," Fried said. "I think where we are on the spectrum right now is way too...
By  Jonah Comstock 06:46 am September 8, 2014
According to a new study from Boston Children's Hospital and the University of Cologne in Germany, less than a third of health apps in the iTunes and Google Play store had any privacy policy at all in place. "Our findings show that currently mHealth developers often fail to provide app privacy policies," study authors wrote. "The privacy policies that are available do not make information privacy...
By  Aditi Pai 07:07 am April 21, 2014
Researchers for UCSD's Happiness study Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would provide six data grants to researchers looking to access its vast archives for big data insights. Last week, Twitter selected six proposals out of the 1,300 entries and three teams, HealthMaps, University of Twente, and UCSD, had health-related projects. HealthMaps is a project from Boston Children's...
By  Jonah Comstock 08:09 am April 15, 2014
Blood pressure centiles, a SMART app. The SMART platform (Substitutable Medical Apps and Reusable Technology), an ONC-funded, Boston Children's Hospital-led effort to encourage the development of modular apps for EHRs, has announced an advisory committee to help support the growth of the platform. The committee includes representatives from The Advisory Board Company, AARP, BMJ, Canadian...
By  Jonah Comstock 07:59 am March 5, 2014
While increasing collaboration between payers and providers was a major theme at HIMSS in Orlando last week, one other major stakeholder has been quite a bit harder to find in conversations about big data, ACOs, and digital health. As Forbes columnist David Shaywitz wrote yesterday, pharma has been noticeably hesitant to jump into the fray. At Merck however, a dedicated innovation group called...
By  Jonah Comstock 05:02 am February 27, 2014
HealthMap is a previous project from the team now studying sleep health. Boston Children's Hospital is teaming up with Merck to turn Twitter and Facebook into a new source for sleep health data -- data about how many people in a population suffer from insomnia and what they have in common with each other. "This is sort of our foray to see how we can mine social media to get an understanding of...
By  Aditi Pai 05:00 am November 10, 2013
This week in digital health, 34 teams were announced for the Tricorder X Prize, the Center for Connected Health was awarded a grant from McKesson to develop a chemotherapy self management app, and Farzard Mostashari gave his perspective on a number of issues in healthcare and healthcare technology. A lot of stories hit the web this week, but there are still more stories. Here are some other...
By  Neil Versel 12:15 pm October 16, 2013
Fresh off its partial takeover by a venture capital firm, Duet Health, a Columbus, Ohio-based provider of mobile communications services for patient education, is looking to raise its profile. The first step for Duet Health, which got a majority investment of an undisclosed amount from Baird Capital Partners over the summer – not widely publicized until this month – is to develop a marketing...