What do you get when an online information and technology company that markets to employers, benefits brokers and healthcare organizations joins forces with a Pennsylvania-based health insurer? A new, health-related iPhone app, of course. The latest to join the fray is called Health@Hand. Read »

Set to become available through AT&T next Thursday (8/12), Research In Motion unveiled the 9800 Torch yesterday in Manhattan. The slick, slider smartphone boasts a touch screen and a QWERTY keyboard, will retail for $199, and promises to be the first device to run the Blackberry 6 OS. Read »

Back in the early days of the HIMSS Medical Banking Project's Cooperative Open-source Medical Banking Architecture & Technology (COMBAT) Initiative, the late John Hardin and I began exchanging emails with Tim O'Reilly, a bastion of the open source movement, arguing the case for the intersection of open source, open standards and medical banking technologies. Today, healthcare is a major theme of his open source connection, OSCON 2010, which runs July 19-23, 2010. Andy Oram has an excellent track summary over at his O'Reilly radar blog which I will not recreate here. Read »

The healthcare industry's need for technology that streamlines patient identification, medication administration, documentation, and inventory and asset management are spawning opportunities for barcode scanning apps on smartphones. One company heeding the call is Newark, Calif.-based Socket Mobile, a provider of mobile productivity solutions that just expanded compatibility of its Socket Bluetooth Cordless Hand Scanner (CHS) Series 7 with BlackBerry smartphones, including the Bold, Curve, Pearl, Storm and Tour. Read »

Apple may have cashed-in big-time this past weekend following the launch of the iPhone 4, but Samsung has plans of its own for a smartphone rollout that could help the Suwon, South Korea-based electronics company grab market share from both Apple and Blackberry maker Research In Motion. Competition among smartphone makers, of course, can only be a good thing for the healthcare professionals who rely so heavily on these devices. Read »

Healthcare IT professionals who went gun-shy after early efforts to roll out tablet PCs in hospital settings failed are starting to come around again. No longer unwieldy, heavy devices with short battery lives, tablets are once again being weighed as a perfect bridge device for healthcare, joining the convenience of smartphones with the display area of a laptop--and it looks like the device leading the charge is none other than Apple's iPad. Read »

Healthrageous, a Boston area personalized health technology company, plans to funnel $6 million of newly acquired VC funding into the commercialization of a health technology platform that provides interactive self-management tools aimed at helping individuals shed unhealthy habits, improve adherence to medical advice and embrace healthy lifestyles. Read »

Nyack Hospital in New York is evaluating the use of a telemonitoring system called eMedoline, which leverages RFID smart labels to monitor medication adherence in discharged heart failure patients. Read »

As I wrote back in March, it's a good time to be researching the mobile health IT space. But it's a particularly good time to be actively addressing chronic disease management with mobile point of care technologies, since most of the predictions made by early entrants to the field appear to be panning out. Read »

With all the talk about the HP-Palm deal, and the announcement of further progress on IronRuby by Microsoft showcasing technology user TomTom, I thought it was interesting that Dell Wireless product marketing manager, Alan Sicher, made the point that location based services are not all about phones. While their laptop technology is apparently not intended as a Personal Navigation Device as is, it occurred to me that there may be some value (and danger) in marrying it with a heads up display a la Microvision for first responders and those volunteers who support them. Read »