Mobile

The mHealth Alliance plans to transition its base of operations in 2014 from the United Nations Foundation in Washington, DC to South Africa. In the coming months, the Alliance will finalize a full transition plan for 2014, including a proposal to co-locate with the Johannesburg-based Praekelt Foundation.

The Mount Sinai Health System in New York City will create the Mount Sinai Institute of Technology with $5 million in funding from the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The goal is to radically transform biomedicine through technology-based solutions.

In a joint letter to the House Ways & Means and Senate Finance Committees, several industry groups have implored legislators to incentivize integration between electronic health records and remote patient monitoring, to spur better use of patient-generated data in payment reform efforts.

IEEE Standards Association and Continua Health Alliance have signed a strategic agreement to help accelerate and broaden the adoption of globally relevant standards-based technologies for the healthcare arena. The idea is to enable widespread market implementation of end-to-end, plug-and-play personal medical devices.

The Electronic Health Record Association, which represents 40 EHR developer companies whose products are in use at a majority of hospitals and physician practices today, tells the FDA that EHR systems should remain unregulated by the agency.

The health IT hazard that tops the ECRI Institute's top hazards list for 2014 is a recurring one, having been singled out by many safety organizations as something to beware.

David Levin, MD, CMIO at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, discusses the challenges with meaningful use, data exchanges and the lack of "human factor" in health IT.

Calling himself a digital omnivore, Iverson Bell, MD, offered words of wisdom for doctors trying to figure out how to adapt to the proliferation of mobile devices in their lives and practices.

Mobile devices have found their way into virtually every corner of the world, even in the most remote and least technologically developed countries. And this reality, says Joan Cornet, mHealth director at Mobile World Capital in Barcelona, has a "huge impact" on the potential of mobile health going forward.

With mHealth becoming the norm instead of the exception, a panel at Partners HealthCare's 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium concluded that EHR vendors will have to find a way to modify their products to focus on data that the patient and his or her care team want, or they'll become obsolete.