Less than a year after COO and chief information security officer Grant Elliott left Voxiva to found his own company, Washington, DC-based Ostendio, it has launched its first product, MyVirtualComplianceManager (myVCM), in open beta. The product is a software-as-a-service offering currently aimed at helping health IT companies better achieve and prove HIPAA compliance. Elliott said it came...
Lead Researcher Dr. Paul Porter dons Google Glass in a video from RI Hospital's website.
Rhode Island Hospital has begun a feasability study using Google Glass to provide dermatology consultations to patients in the emergency room. For six months, emergency room patients who require a dermatology consult and consent to the study will be examined by ER physicians wearing a stripped-down version...
Australian researchers Jennifer Lindley and Dr Juanita Fernando, faculty members at Melbourne's Monash University Medicine Nursing and Health Science department, recently penned an editorial for the free, online medical journal European Journal of ePractice that outlines some concerns around medical apps intended for use by healthcare professionals.
The academics concerns are broken down into...
Sharon Klein and Dayna Nicholson
Even though the FDA guidance on mobile medical apps is now finalized, it only represents a portion of the regulation mobile medical app developers need to concern themselves with, according to Pepper Hamilton lawyers Mark Kadzielski, Sharon Klein, and Dayna Nicholson, who presented a webinar on the topic last week. Particularly in the areas of privacy and...
AcneApp, one of the mobile medical apps the FTC removed in 2011.
Correction: A previous version of this article said the ONC, not the OCR, released the HIPAA omnibus rule.
This year has been a big year for health app regulation: FDA released its final guidance on regulation of mobile medical apps earlier this year, and the Office of Civil Rights released its final HIPAA omnibus rule in January...
Janet Stiven
Healthcare providers are turning to cloud-based data storage because of the promise of significant savings. But companies aren't saving as much as they expect, because of the additional costs associated with security, according to Joseph Pennell, an associate at Mayer Brown. Pennell and Janet Stiven, a Dykema Gossett PLLC Member, spoke about cloud security at the mHealth Summit in...
A new report from Juniper Research predicts that by 2018, 35 percent of consumer owned tablets and smartphones will be used for business. The bring-your-own-device trend, which is particularly prevalent in healthcare, will lead to more than a billion employee-owned devices in the workplace.
According to the report, although BYOD is convenient for employees and can improve employee satisfaction...
South Carolina's Beaufort Memorial Hospital expects to save millions of dollars this year and potentially prevent some deaths as well by investing in secure texting technology, attendees of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) Fall CIO Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz., heard last week.
According to the hospital's VP and CIO Ed Ricks, texting between clinicians could speed...
by Grant Elliott, Founder & CEO, Ostendio
By simply following the media hype around the recent September 23rd implementation deadline, you could be forgiven for thinking that the final omnibus rule is bad news for mobile health application developers. To recap, the final omnibus rule came into effect on March 23, 2013 but "business associates" were given six months from that date to become...
Humetrix's iBlueButton app won the ONC's Blue Button Mashup Challenge in January.
With new, tougher HIPAA privacy regulations set to take effect in less than a week, the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which enforces the rules, is trying to educate consumers and healthcare entities alike about a longstanding but much-ignored policy.
"There is a clear right [in the HIPAA privacy rule] not...
