Interoperability among the electronic health records systems at different hospitals or clinics is still a big problem. Not only is it a technical challenge, but there are often competitive reasons not to share. Hospitals and clinics are businesses, after all, and they compete with each other.
This does patients no good of course. It means that they often have personal clinical data spread around numerous providers, and their personal health record is often incomplete or outdated.
Jim Dolce was last seen in these parts at Akamai, which bought his previous company, Verivue, in late 2012. Last March, he shipped out to San Francisco to become CEO of Lookout, a seven-year-old mobile security company.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates everything from heart monitors to horse vaccines, will soon have its hands full with consumer health apps and devices.
The vast majority of the health apps you’ll find in Apple’s or Google’s app stores are harmless, like step counters and heart beat monitors. They’re non-clinical, non-actionable, and informational or motivational in nature.
But the next wave of biometric devices and apps might go further, measuring things like real-time blood pressure, blood glucose, and oxygen levels.
Health and fitness monitoring is a popular function in many of today’s wristband wearables like the Fitbit or Jawbone UP, for example, but a new company called FreeWavz wants to bring those features and more to a different form factor: earphones. FreeWavz’s bluetooth-connected earphones offer wireless connectivity to your streaming music, as well as a step counter, plus heart rate and O2 saturation monitoring, among other things.
Israel’s military has chosen a local company to handle a vital task–getting emergency information to citizens.
After a year-long pilot program, Israel’s Homefront Command selected Israeli firm eVigilo’s SMART Internet to power its new iOref app, which will be ready for download later this summer. Using push message technology that finds users without their having to connect to a service, iOref’s iPhone, Android and Windows mobile apps will deliver alerts and notifications to everyone in Israel using the app, or to users in a specific part of the country.
Fingerprint makes the type of apps parents love — and DreamWorks Animation is a big fan of them, too.
Kids’ app developer Fingerprint has raised $10.85 million in new funding, the company announced today. Its press release declined to mention the investors by name, but DreamWorks led the round, according to the Wall Street Journal.
For many businesses, the logical next step after a website is a mobile app. But, until very recently, developing the latter was time-consuming and expensive. To solve that problem, Israel’s Como — formerly Conduit Mobile — has developed a do-it-yourself, mobile-app authoring platform, which lets anyone build their own app, without having to hire coders, programmers, or anyone else.
Currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, SCiO enables users to collect information about any food, medicine, plant, or physical object simply by scanning.
As businesses race to connect our homes and cars to the Internet, unleashing new streams of data about our everyday lives, one mobile ad company scents a new opportunity.
San Francisco-based Kiip plans to sell a new kind of ad targeted according to people’s actions at home or on the road, offering rewards or deals in exchange for certain behavior. The company claims that format will be tempting to its existing customers, which include McDonald’s and Amazon.
It has snapped up Moves, a popular exercise app and pedometer. The app will live on, according to a blog post from Moves maker ProtoGeo Oy, a Finnish company founded in 2012.
