Telemedicine May Be Boon for Treating Sleep Disorders | Medpage Today

Telemedicine May Be Boon for Treating Sleep Disorders | Medpage Today

iHealth-Nokia exits smartphone market....

Nokia will no longer build smartphones.  Nokia announced it would be entering the digital health market

FierceWireless covers the story;

Just a few months after closing its merger with Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia announced it will spend roughly $191 million to purchase Withings, a French startup founded in 2008 that makes activity trackers, weighing scales, thermometers, blood pressure monitors, home and baby monitors and other health-related gadgets and services. Nokia said it would add the company to its Nokia Technologies division, which also houses the company's patent-licensing business as well as its new virtual reality camera-making effort.

Nokia isn't the only company to play in the digital health market. AT&T operates a Foundry program for connected health at the Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute in Houston, and Verizon has structured its enterprise business around a dozen or so top industries, including healthcare. And Qualcomm continues to push its "Qualcomm Life" digital health effort.

Nokia sees mobile health gadgets as a growing market. Withings is known for it's smartwatch offering. 

Healthcare IT News December 2015 - Powered by PageTurnPro.com

 The Top HIT News for 2015

2015 brought forth a combination of developments in telehealth, telemedicine, predictive modelling, precision medicine and more.

Much of this depends upon the explosion of algorithms developed by mathematicians and computer scientists. It may be a powerful tool, when and if properly vetted by clinicians.  The proof will come, not quickly in one or two years, rather perhaps a decade long process which will filter what works and what does not.

Like everything we physicians have been taught we must maintain the patient as the focus of our work, not the tools and technologies that are developing.  Often in this era of rapid technologic advances patients can be forgotten in the era of rapid advances, venture capital and the promise of profitability for health technology. In some cases this has occured in the area of electronic health records, and meaningful use, now replaced by MACRA,.

The MACRA makes three important changes to how Medicare pays those who give care to Medicare beneficiaries. These changes create a Quality Payment Program (QPP):

• Ending the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula for determining Medicare payments for health care providers’ services.
• Making a new framework for rewarding health care providers for giving better care not more just more care.
• Combining our existing quality reporting programs into one new system.

These proposed changes, which we’ve named the Quality Payment Program, replace a patchwork system of Medicare reporting programs with a flexible system that allows you to choose from two paths that link quality to payments: the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and Advanced Alternative Payment Models.

CMS now has posted the timeline for implementing MACRA

The New Medium on Social Media

Here at the Digital Health Space we are always searching for new communication applications. Along came Blab.im.  Blab has been 'on the internet' for about six months. I discovered it when it had just been born, or perhaps conceived. I have seen many lawyers, a wealth of social media experts, and health care social media type, including David Harlow, and Janet Kennedy,

I was interviewed by Joe Lavelle from IntrepidNow Joe Lavelle has a wide variety of topic, for health care, HCPodcasters Weekly Blab . Some recent subjects have been