News From Around the Web
> Smart Health Hero, an electronic tool to help patients and their families make care decisions using Medicare claims data developed by San Carlos, California-based LyfeChannel, won the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's second annual Code-a-Palooza challenge. National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo announced announced the award Tuesday at Health Datapalooza in the District of Columbia. Announcement
> The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Center for Telehealth in Lebanon, New Hampshire, recently received a $150,000 grant to help brain aneurysm patients, according to the Fort Worth Business Press. The money was donated by the Austin, Texas-based Missy Project, created in 1999 to honor the memory of a 12-year-old girl who died from a brain aneurysm disease her parents did not know she had. Article
> The U.S. military is funding a $70 million program that aims to use brain implants to read, and ultimately control, the emotions of mentally ill people, according to MIT Technology Review. Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California, San Francisco won contracts to perform the research. Article
Health Insurance News
> Medicare could save billions of dollars if the program stopped randomly assigning certain members into a Part D plan, according to a new study published this month in the journal Health Affairs. Analyzing a sample of Medicare drug claims data from 2008 to 2009, the study authors determined if Medicare used "intelligent reassignment" to place low-income members into a Part D plan instead of random assignment, the program could have saved $5 billion in 2009. Article
Mobile Health News
> Tiny body-implanted electrical health devices may one day replace some medications, given a breakthrough in wireless energy transfer by a Stanford electrical engineer. Assistant Professor Ada Poon has created a wireless system to power a chip as small as a rice grain that may lead to "electroceutical" healthcare treatments, the school recently announced. Article
And Finally... But how could you stay mad at that face? Article