News From Around the Web
> Healthrageous, a Boston-based digital health management company, and Boehringer Ingelheim, a German-based pharmaceutical company, have launched a study together with United BioSource Corporation to evaluate a digital technology enabled self-management solution to potentially improve the health status of people with Type 2 diabetes. The goal is to "leverage technology in a way that makes the personalized journey of self-managing diabetes easier for patients to self-manage their disease," according to the announcement. Article
> Despite the dominance of Android in other countries, iOS mHealth apps in Japan still get higher download numbers and generate more money than their Android counterparts, according to a new benchmarking study of the Japanese market. The benchmarking includes 147 apps from the Health & Fitness and the Medical category ranked top 10 in the first quarter of 2013. Article
> Dr. Kendall Ho, an emergency room physician at Vancouver General Hospital and director of the University of British Columbia's eHealth strategy office, is turning to mobile apps as a way of helping patients help themselves. In a newly launched project Health-e-Apps--with the tag line "improve your health in a mobile minute"--the eHealth strategy office is reviewing health and wellness apps and encouraging smartphone and tablet users to try them out. "We are looking at introducing these apps on a regular basis so that we have a video, a short video, one-and-a-half to two minutes or so, just to quickly introduce that app and how it can be used," said Ho. Article
EMR News
> Electronic health records can help fight vaccine-preventable diseases by automating immunization data, according to research recently published in the journal Applied Clinical Informatics. Researchers from the Columbia University School of Nursing found that this data also could provide quicker and more cohesive community data to public health agencies. Automated reporting also reduced lag time, which has always been associated with immunization reporting. The study analyzed 1.7 million records submitted by 217 primary care practices to the New York City-wide Immunizations Registry between January 2007 and June 2011, before and after EHR reporting was possible. It examined differences in records submitted by day, lag time and eligibility of getting the vaccine. Article
Healthcare IT News
> A new study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research chronicles the evolution of using social media/Internet queries for disease surveillance, finding that "while their accuracy, speed, and cost compare favorably with existing surveillance systems, the primary challenge is to refine the data signal by reducing surrounding noise." The study calls for further developments in digital disease surveillance, which will have the potential to improve "sensitivity and specificity." The study found that 32 primary research articles and 19 reviews and case studies were identified as relevant for assessing disease surveillance on social media and through web queries. Article
And Finally… Crime-fighting fowls. Article