News From Around the Web
> Last week's mHealth Summit saw venture funding worthy of note, including a new business with a suite of patient engagement tools, HealthLoop, which announced $10 million of Series A funding. HealthLoop "seeks to integrate data into the patient-doctor relationship. It allows physicians to prioritize which patients they will reach out to on a given day, and has a suite of patient-education materials (including 3D models) that physicians can customize with treatment plans." Article
> Researchers at Cornell University have developed an app that uses a smartphone camera and paper testing strip to measure cholesterol from a drop of blood, sweat or saliva, according to an announcement. The app, called Smartphone Cholesterol Application for Rapid Diagnostics (SmartCARD), uses the kind of test strips that are routine parts of both home and lab-testing procedures, but is able to analyze and quantify the results accurately without bulky, expensive specialty equipment. Article
> Danbury, Conn.-based IMS Health announced the availability of AppScript, an mHealth app prescribing solution designed to help healthcare providers and health plans create proprietary formularies based on an objective assessment of healthcare app functionality and value. The AppScript Software-as-a-Service solution classifies and evaluates more than 40,000 mobile healthcare apps currently available for download on iOS and Android platforms. Article
Healthcare News
> With medical errors among the leading causes of death in the country, hospitals are looking to identify problems and address them through performance feedback. But new research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that might not be enough to motivate improvement. Laurent G. Glance, M.D., from the department of anesthesiology, University of Rochester School of Medicine, New York, and colleagues, performed an evaluation of the impact of performance reports on risk-adjusted mortality for trauma patients, having the National Trauma Data Bank provide benchmarking reports to hospitals. There was no improvement in mortality rates from pre- to post-benchmark reporting, the study states. Article
EMR News
> Funding legislation agreed to by the House and Senate last week mandates that the U.S. Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense present a plan for building either an interoperable or single electronic health record by the end of January. The bill--the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014--calls on the two agencies to create a "detailed programs plan for the oversight and execution of the interoperable" EHRs by Jan. 31, 2014. What's more, it requires that by Oct. 1, 2014, all healthcare information in both the DoD's AHLTA system and the VA's VistA system "be computable in real time and comply with the existing national data standards and have a process in place to ensure data is standardized as national standards continue to evolve." Article
And Finally… Fore! to five years' probation. Article