FCC nominee has ties to mHealth Alliance; Epocrates remains dominant medical app on physicians' mobile devices;

News From Around the Web

> A venture capitalist and former telecom executive with ties to the mHealth Alliance has been nominated by President Obama to lead the Federal Communications Commission. Thomas Wheeler, managing director of Core Capital Partners in Washington D.C., will succeed outgoing FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on the five-member FCC board. Wheeler is an emeritus member of the mHealth Alliance Partnership Board. He still requires confirmation by the Senate to take the post, a process that could take months. In the interim, Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn will serve as acting chairman upon Genachowski's departure in the coming weeks, becoming the first woman to head the agency, mHIMMs reports. Article

> According to a recently released study of physicians' technology adoption and behavior by Manhattan Research, Watertown, Mass.-based Epocrates is the most popular medical application on both smartphone (70 percent) and tablet (50 percent) devices among U.S. physician app users. In addition, the study found that 34 percent of physicians using Epocrates on a smartphone launch the app three or more times a day--a 20 percent growth rate since 2012. Another important finding of the study was that drug references remain a primary digital resource accessed by physicians during and between patient consultations. Article

> At this week's ATA 2013 conference in Austin, Tex., Montreal-based Tactio Health Group announced the launch of TactioDiabetes, a diabetes-management tool to help patients track several aspects of their lifestyle. TactioDiabetes will be available on the iTunes App Store by May 30 and will run on TactioHealth and allow professional users of the platform to integrate their Diabetes Care plans to the TactioDiabetes Health Coaching as well as integrate the patient tracking data from eHealth medical devices into their medical records via TactioHealth EHR interface. According to the company, TactioHealth has been rated the #1 paid medical app in more than 10 countries and can be downloaded on iPhones, iPods or iPads from the AppStore. Article

EMR News

> The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is shoring up health information exchange efforts with the long-awaited release of the "Governance Framework for Trusted Electronic Health Information Exchange." The agency says the framework will provide a "common foundation" for all types of HIE governance models. The three-page document "reflects what matters most to ONC when it comes to national Heath Information Exchange governance and the principles in which [the office] believes," Farzad Mostashari, head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, wrote in a recent post to the Health IT Buzz blog. Article

Health IT News

> New research from the University of Illinois at Chicago illustrates yet another reason to get a jump on ICD-10 implementation: Mapping the 50,000 new medical diagnosis codes and 70,000 new procedure codes from ICD-9 is far from clear-cut. The researchers produced two mapping files based on data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services--from ICD-9 to ICD-10 and the reverse. They found the two mappings are not necessarily reciprocal, according to the study published at the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Article

And Finally… Don't get too crazy about Facebook. Article