Mobile

LAS VEGAS – UnitedHealthcare and Qualcomm are collaborating on a new mobile health program dubbed UnitedHealthcare Motion that aims to boost wellness by linking financial incentives with the use of wearable devices. The goal is to help UnitedHealthcare plan participants enrolled in high-deductible health plans improve their health and save money by encouraging daily walking, while testing and building new connected health technologies for consumers. The new wellness program provides plan participants with wearable devices at no additional charge and enables them to earn up to $1,460 per year by meeting certain goals for the number of daily steps. UnitedHealthcare Motion was showcased for the first time at this year’s 2016 Annual HIMSS Conference and Exhibition. The collaboration between the two companies will seek to develop connected health systems to employees and consumers across the United States. The collaboration will focus on new UnitedHealthcare programs and services that incorporate the latest generation of wearables, medical devices and home diagnostic tests that use Qualcomm Life’s 2net Platform for medical-grade connectivity. [Also: See photos from Day 3 of HIMSS16] UnitedHealthcare Motion is now available to employers and their employees in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Washington, D.C. Additional markets will be added later this year. The wellness program and related fitness trackers are being offered initially to companies with 101 to 300 employees with a fully insured health plan. Employees and their covered spouses receive custom-designed wearable devices that track the number of steps users take each day. Unlike other wearable devices that simply track the total number of steps, the UnitedHealthcare Motion devices tabulate the total number, frequency and intensity of the steps taken, providing a more accurate and comprehensive summary of the user’s daily activity, the companies said. The data then is sent to the UnitedHealthcare Motion app, which securely links to Qualcomm Life’s 2net Mobile connectivity platform. Employees can earn Health Reimbursement Account credits that can total up to $1,460 per year, while employers can obtain premium savings based on program participants’ combined results. “We’re excited to collaborate with UnitedHealthcare to power its connected care solutions, starting with the UnitedHealthcare Motion program,” said James Mault, MD, vice president and chief medical officer at Qualcomm Life. “UnitedHealthcare’s leadership in innovation and broad reach across the United States, combined with Qualcomm Life’s medical-grade connectivity solutions, enables personalized, connected care to health care consumers nationwide.” Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

LAS VEGAS – TCI Software Inc., CliniLinc Inc. and ONYX Healthcare USA Inc. announced on Thursday at HIMSS16 a strategic alliance through which TCI’s Rounds software will be pre-loaded into CliniLinc’s software suite and integrated on ONYX’s new 8-inch slim medical tablet. The vendors are highlighting the new alliance at the ONYX Healthcare HIMSS16 exhibit hall booth (#7805). The combined tablet and software technology, dubbed Mobile Telecare Assistant, will begin shipping in April. Coded ONYX-MD81, it is a pocket-sized, Windows 10-ready tablet equipped with a high-definition, multi-touch, 8-inch display with lightweight design to help improve workflow efficiency, ONYX said. [Also: See photos from Day 3 of HIMSS16] "ONYX-MD81 is designed to eliminate for nurses and physicians the burden of carrying a heavy-duty laptop or pushing a mobile workstation-on-wheels with overweight batteries during patient rounding shifts," says John Chuang, president of ONYX Healthcare. The ONYX-MD81 integrated with the CliniLinc software suite enables mobile health and computerized physician order entry processes, the vendors said. The CliniLinc suite is an interdisciplinary clinical system that provides one-touch access on a single screen to multiple disparate EHRs, PACS, ECGs and more, and gives sharing and extended control to consulting physicians or case managers during telemedicine consultations, CliniLinc said. The addition of TCI’s Rounds to the CliniLinc suite also enables the ONYX-MD81 tablet to conduct real-time uploads of patient interview/discharge data to a hospital’s database, potentially saving hospitals costs associated with manual data entry time and reducing errors from manual patient record entry, the vendors said. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

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LAS VEGAS – Doc Halo has introduced Pronto, an enterprise-wide scheduling and messaging system that is part of the vendor’s Halo Mobile Health Platform for clinical communication. The system is designed to replace paper schedules and pagers. The vendor made the announcement at HIMSS16 in its exhibit hall booth (#661), where it is demonstrating the new technology for conference attendees. [Also: See photos from Day 2 of HIMSS16] Using the new Pronto module, caregivers can access enterprise-wide schedules with up-to-the-minute accuracy, find on-call providers anywhere in a health system and message them immediately, activate critical-care teams within seconds, and create custom clinical teams for care coordination, Doc Halo said. Clinicians access Pronto teams and schedules from their smartphones. Administrators can input and update schedules through a web console. Healthcare providers often serve several functions at once, making it nearly impossible to automate healthcare scheduling using a tool designed for another industry, Doc Halo said. “This technology will coordinate care by connecting healthcare providers in ways never before possible,” said Jose Barreau, MD, the CEO of Doc Halo. “Pronto saves time in a setting where time is critical.” Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

LAS VEGAS -- A new survey from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in partnership with the Personal Connected Health Alliance claims 52 percent of hospitals currently use three or more connected health technologies while 47 percent are looking to expand the connected health technologies they use, citing tech that enables such services as telehealth, concierge, patient-generated health data and secure text messaging. The organizations announced the survey results Wednesday at the HIMSS16 Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas. The 2016 HIMSS Connected Health Survey, which polled 227 IT, informatics and clinical professionals in U.S. hospitals and health systems, evaluated the use of seven technologies that represent a broad range of clinically-oriented systems currently available in the marketplace. [Also: See photos from Day 2 of HIMSS16] The technologies examined in the survey include: apps for patient education and/or engagement; mobile-optimized patient portals; patient-generated health data, collected from consumer devices used for remote monitoring; remote patient monitoring using clinical-grade medical devices; text messaging, and telehealth. Use of connected health solutions appears to be a widely accepted standard practice among hospitals in the United States, the survey found. Not only did 81 percent say their organization uses at least one of the mobile health technologies included in this research, but 67 percent reported deploying multiple systems across their organization. In addition, the adoption of mobile-optimized patient portals is most widespread among survey respondents, with 58 percent indicating this type of technology is in use in their hospital or health system. Further, 69 percent of respondents using a mobile-optimized patient portal indicated the technology extensively supports the hospital’s secure data exchange strategy. Remote monitoring tools were found to play a key role in the areas of provider satisfaction, facilitating treatment/care plans and population health management initiatives, the survey said. Mobile and wireless devices, often referred to as “connected health tools,” hold the promise of positively impacting the future delivery of patient care – these tools are projected to become increasingly important as healthcare organizations explore ways to provide quality care at a lower cost, while at the same time increasing satisfaction for both providers and patients, HIMSS said. These projections are especially true in the United States, where the healthcare system continues to realign itself toward optimized experiential and clinical outcomes delivered in a cost-conscious manner, HIMSS added. The potential impact of connected health tools for providers largely is in the area of “care coordination,” where the goal of coordinated care is to ensure patients get the right care at the right time while avoiding unnecessary duplication of services and preventing medical errors, HIMSS said. As caregivers increasingly attempt to extend their care coordination efforts beyond traditional care settings such as hospitals and physician practices, the use of connected health tools will take on greater significance, HIMSS added. Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

LAS VEGAS – IBM on Wednesday introduced the SleepHealth app designed for iPhone and Apple Watch and the SleepHealth Mobile Study to help identify connections between sleep habits and health outcomes. The SleepHealth study uses the open source ResearchKit designed by Apple to make it easier for participants to complete tasks and submit surveys from the app. SleepHealth is the first ResearchKit study to run on Watson Health Cloud. IBM announced the initiative at HIMSS16. It was close to a year ago when the computing giant launched Watson Health Cloud at HIMSS15. The SleepHealth app "One of our goals at IBM Watson Health is to eliminate silos that hinder collaboration between researchers, patients and clinicians, and create new opportunities for these communities to share and learn from one another," said Kyu Rhee, MD, chief health officer for Watson Health. As he sees it, sleep is an under-appreciated factor when it comes to staying well. “Now that data is in a digital format that can be leveraged and screened and analyzed, this is where tools in this era of cognitive technology, like Watson, can actually make sense of the data,” Kyu said. Watson, he said, can read 8 million pages a second.” “To have Watson at your side, is a powerful tool that can deliver what I would consider augmented intelligence,” Kyu added. [Also: See photos from Day 2 of HIMSS16] The SleepHealth app taps into Apple Watch's heart rate monitor to detect when a subject falls asleep before gathering movement data with the onboard accelerometer and gyroscope, according to a report on Apple insider. For users running iOS 9.3 the app will make use of Apple's Night Shift feature, which shifts an iPhone or iPad's display color temperature toward the warm end of the spectrum to help ease physiological side effects of being exposed to cool blue light. Chronic insomnia affects more than 10 percent of Americans, and 25 million suffer from obstructive sleep apnea, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The SleepHealth study will explore the connections between sleep quality and daytime activities, alertness, productivity, general health and medical conditions. Data contributed by participants will be stored on the Watson Health Cloud, making it possible for researchers to conduct extensive analysis to uncover patterns and connections in the data, Once it has completed several years of data collection, the research team expects to develop personalized and public health interventions for a variety of sleep-related health issues. Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

The funding will go toward patient- and provider-facing apps, as well as a ‘store’ where consumers can download them. 

LAS VEGAS – Medisafe, which offers a medication management mobile health app with more than 2.6 million users, launched Tuesday at HIMSS16 Medisafe Providers, a new system that enables physicians, care teams and pharmacists to track their patients’ medication adherence between visits. Using Medisafe Providers, caregivers also can view adherence alongside patient biometric measurements – including blood pressure, blood glucose, weight and others – that Medisafe app users can self-report or bring into the mobile app through various connected devices. Medisafe Providers extends the Medisafe app platform beyond its consumer focus by enabling healthcare professionals to see how their treatment plans are working and to make any needed changes as soon as they identify a problem, helping patients to avoid unnecessary visits and hospitalizations, the company said. [Also: See photos from Day 1 of HIMSS16] The Medisafe app is designed to make it easier for patients to follow the most complicated medication schedules; enable care collaboration between a patient, their family and caregivers; and deliver content and services personalized to specific conditions and situations. “Medisafe Providers reinforces Medisafe’s patient-centric vision by better connecting our users to those guiding their care,” said Omri Shor, CEO and co-founder of Medisafe. “Since the beginning, our users have valued sharing their adherence reports with their doctors and told stories of learning about Medisafe from people on their care teams.” Medisafe will be demonstrating Medisafe Providers at HIMSS16 in the HX360 Pavilion booth A-06. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

LAS VEGAS -- Healthcare teams are striving to work as teams but in many cases, they lack the technology to communicate as a team. That was the message delivered by Neha Patel, MD, director of mobile strategy and applications, and director of quality for Penn Medicine in a HIMSS16 educational session Driving Value from Technology. Patel told her audience at HIMSS16 that a few years ago she was compelled to look at her system as whole, focusing on activity that wasn’t helping quality. In her search for areas to improve, she ended up honing in on communications. Specifically, she discovered providers were struggling to communicate easily and automatically with each other because they lacked the technology. [Also: Aledade CEO Mostashari: 'We have to create lasting clinical change'] Ineffective communication can lead to errors, she said, and there are dollars and losses that can be ascribed to that ineffective communication as well as operational inefficiencies. For example, patients weren’t leaving when they were supposed to, or as quickly as they could, because each team member wasn’t coordinating their care. “Most importantly, it leads to a culture of low expectations within your healthcare system where people get used to functioning at certain level where they’re not on the same page,” said Patel. In an effort to address this issue, she decided to see what secured messaging would look like among physicians, nurses and house staff in their three general medical units and one surgical unit. “What we figured out is when you give providers a tool that they actually can use to provide better care for the patients they’re gonna use it. You won’t have to force them” said Patel. And use it they did. Patel said after one year staff were sending messages, including group messages. So it was enabling staff to really communicate as a care team. Many were reading messages quickly. 54 percent were reading their message in one minute attending and nurses showed only a slightly lower percentage. Patel said her team also asked how much time they had saved using the messaging technology. Attendings and residents said they saved they saved hours a day, and nurse gave similar feedback. She also said significant improvement in length of stay was byproduct as well, as many of the messages had to do with discharges and coordinating care Patel said with technology like this, you’ll want to decide where it will be best used and integrated into operations, like EHR, mobile apps with clinical data, directory/scheduling. You also need to think about policies pertaining to users bringing in their own devices. Most of all, you have to figure out how to measure success. “That’s how you’re going to get funding for some of these resources. You really have to be able to track what your solution was meant to do,” said Patel. Twitter: @BethJSanborn This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.