healthcare

Less mHealth and more HealthIT. When Lenovo displays a full size cutaway blade server at the entrance to its booth, you can surmise that the mHealth Summit is more IT than personal/mobile. HIMSS, the media company for health IT events, seems to have lost interest in selling booth space for their mHealth Exhibit Hall. Most visitors I talked with were disappointed at the reduced scale of the event, which is now combined with the Cybersecurity Summit, PopHealth Summit, Global mHealth Forum. Perhaps this was an optimization strategy? Free up the month of December? At any rate here are five new technologies from this event that could potentially benefit boomers and seniors, content is from the companies:

The Internet of "Healthy" Things.  The Internet of Things (IoT) has provided material for many markets, so the acronym begs for reuse and recycle. Consider the Internet of Caring Things, (gadgets that note worrisome changes in wellbeing). Then there’s the Internet of Everyday Things (think vacuuming and thermostats), the Internet of Transportation Things (that's cars and truck stuff), the Internet of Medical Things (old term: Health IT), etc. The 2015 Connected Health Symposium was sponsored by Boston’s sprawling care delivery system, Partners Healthcare. So last week's IoT boomlet was sub-titled: The Internet of Healthy Things, and included improving patient digital experience through 'better understanding of their emotions' through the use of facial, voice, and other indicators.

Louisville, Kentucky is the aging-industry capital of the United States. The city is a very big player in long-term care, host to a variety of "headquarters in nursing home, rehabilitation, assisted living and home health administration." Last week the city (and a variety of its long-term care industry sponsors) ran an industry summit that included two days of sessions and a bevy of live pitches. It is striking to contemplate the simultaneous growing blur and yet near-complete disconnect between health-related innovations involving doctors and the world of aging care. There has long been a need for disruptive innovation in the long-term care industry -- which, like the health care industry overall, struggles with lower reimbursements, which in turn have resulted in further industry consolidation.

Getting into the hearing loop arena.  Again a chance to note -- the dramatic enhancement of sound for hearing aid wearers in a looped setting -- that is, a room enhanced with a telecoil loop transmitter -- in a public environment.  The cost, according to the writer, ranges from a few thousand dollars to $130,000 for the entire airport.The result?

Had your identity stolen lately? Oh well, you probably did. A few months ago, California’s Anthem Blue Cross admitted that someone had stolen 80 million health records, complete with name, address, SS # and more. A certain amount of self-congratulation can be found in its letter to the 80+ million: "The information accessed may have included names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, health care ID numbers, home addresses, email addresses, employment information, including income data. We have no reason to believe credit card or banking information was compromised." What a relief. But with the ‘minimal’ data stolen, the thieves got busy and filed for tax refunds from the IRS, which helpfully encourages direct deposit of the refund. TurboTax halted its electronic filing process recently due to likely fraudulent filing. And the IRS, which admits to weak fraud detection tools, will issue refunds as a result of this travesty.