News From Around the Web
> Over 40 million additional patients could be treated in Brazil and Mexico alone in 2017 through the use of mHealth services, according to a GSMA report, developed in collaboration with PwC. The implementation of mHealth services in Brazil and Mexico is expected to extend healthcare to 28.4 million additional patients in Brazil and 15.5 million patients in Mexico in 2017; as well as quip around 16 million citizens to improve their lifestyle and reduce the impact of chronic diseases, prolonging lives. Article
> Twitter's chief executive Dick Costolo sees a growing trend of tweets made from wearable fitness devices. "People are readily tweeting things out from wearable devices," said Costolo at the National Venture Capital Association's annual conference in San Francisco. "There's a huge opportunity in the healthcare space." As well as transmitting exercise data via tweets, Costolo sees other applications in healthcare. One example given was scales that can automatically post a user's weight to a website. Twitter engineers are also believed to be looking at ways to adapt the service for Google "smart" glasses. Article
> "Many lament the slow pace at which formal mHealth innovations are mainstreamed, blaming a dearth of robust evidence and hesitant policy makers. Still, the pace of evidence is accelerating, and a possible future is not difficult to imagine," writes Dr. Alain Labrique, founding director of the Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth Initiative, in Forbes magazine. According to Labrique, evidence emerging from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, suggests that integrated packages of community and facility-based services, across the continuum of care from pre-pregnancy through the postpartum period, can produce significant reductions in stillbirths (16 percent), neonatal (24 percent) and perinatal (20 percent) mortality as well as maternal morbidity (25 percent). Article
EMR News
> Former Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman says that although the GOP senators who called for a "reboot" of the Meaningful Use incentive program make some valid points, their conclusions are "incorrect." In a recent post published to HealthDataManagement, Tullman, who now serves as Managing Director at investment firm 7wire Ventures, says that the senators' arguments "focus on a few trees while the forest as a whole keeps growing." He calls the senators' assertion that maintenance of electronic health record systems will be too costly for providers "a weak one," saying that it's much cheaper to maintain a computer system than a paper file operation. Article
Healthcare IT News
> Failure to use patients' linked electronic health records may lead to biased estimates of heart attack incidence and outcome, a new study published in the British Medical Journal finds. In the study, 21,482 patients with acute mycocardial infarction were identified in four linked EHRs. The researchers found that the crude incidence of acute myocardial infarction was underestimated by 25-50 percent when one source was used rather than three. The study found that primary care records were the most complete source of non-fatal myocardial infarction records, hospital records missed one third, and a disease registry missed almost half. Article
And Finally… Attention Wal-Mart shoppers, spell check required. Article