‘Facebooking’ your doctor’s appointment
Agostina Giorgio of the Polytechnic University of Bari in Italy has published a very interesting paper about telehealth. The paper is “Social networks, apps and smartphones for telemedicine”. Giorgio sees telehealth as a nearly all inclusive solution for a large number of people. He has created an app called Care-App which allows private and secure communication between […]
Telehealth Performance – How Good Is It?
Telehealth is here to stay, but it will go through an evolution like all new technology shifts. A new study evaluated performance of teledermatology. The results were mixed. There were incorrect diagnoses and missed diagnoses. Treatment recommendations were not always consistent with guidelines. Prescriptions frequently lacked disclosure about possible adverse effects. The study was limited because […]
CareKit to Expand mHealth
In Health Attitude, I wrote about mHealth and said, “People who track their health are healthier.” Apple agrees and sees a market opportunity to sell $billions of iPhones as a result. To help facilitate the growth, Apple has developed CareKit. CareKit is an open source framework allowing entrepreneurs and software developers to build upon four starter […]
Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death
The Institute of Medicine published a study in 1999 called “To Err is Human”. The study estimated deaths because of medical errors as high as 98,000 a year. The report called the results an epidemic. Needless to say, the entire healthcare industry was shocked and many plans were developed for increased attention to patient safety […]
World’s First Internally Motorized Minimally Invasive Surgical Robot
There are many advantages to robotic surgery. There are five incisions required but they are small. Blood loss is minimized, infection rates are reduced, and time in the hospital is shorter than with open surgery. I speak first hand, as I had a robot-assisted radical prostatectomy in July 2014. I went to the hospital early […]
