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Health Portals Capture App Data to Drive Wellness Engagement
Health care providers and insurance companies want to get their customers healthier, and have customers record their wellness data to track their progress, with some health app developers eager to help out. Speakers on Friday, 26 July at the mHealth + Telehealth World Congress in Boston gave examples of recent health and wellness initiatives making…
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Telemedicine Facing Financial, Regulatory Headwinds
Health care organizations with telemedicine programs run into challenges implementing their services, particularly in getting acceptance from payers, and meeting legal or regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions. These issues arose in two sessions today at the mHealth + TeleHealth World Congress in Boston. A key financial issue is reimbursement by insurance companies for telemedicine services.…
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Walgreens App Improving Customer Loyalty, Health Outcomes
Abhi Dhar, chief technology officer for electronic commerce at the Walgreens drug store chain, says the company’s mobile app helps build stronger connections with its customers, which is paying off in more customer loyalty and more medication adherence. Dhar described the Walgreens mobile app today at the mHealth + Telehealth World Congress meeting in Boston.…
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Kaiser-Permanente Putting Big Data Behind Personalized Care
Philip Fasano, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Kaiser-Permanente, the California health care network and insurance provider, says the organization is making big data part of its plan to provide more personalized care to its 9 million members. Fasano made his remarks today at the mHealth + Telehealth World Congress meeting in Boston.…
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Special Health Technology Event Coverage on Science Business
Beginning Wednesday, Science Business will begin reporting from the mHealth + Telehealth World 2013 conference in Boston. The event is actually two meetings: the fifth mHealth World Congress dealing with mobile solutions and the second Telehealth World Congress focusing in telemedicine. Our coverage of the event will run through Friday 26 July. We’ll be traveling…
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Renewable Biochemical Spin-Offs Land Small Business Grants
Two start-up companies, founded to commercialize research on renewable biochemicals at Iowa State University at Ames, received small business research grants from National Science Foundation to develop their technologies for the marketplace. The companies — OmegaChea Biorenewables in Ames and Glucan Biorenewables in St. Louis — are spin-off enterprises from Iowa State’s Center for Biorenewable Chemicals. OmegaChea Biorenewables,…
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Thin Illuminating Touch-Sensitive Electronic Film Developed
Engineers and materials scientists at University of California in Berkeley created an interactive electronic film with a network of pressure sensors built into flexible plastic. The findings from the lab of Berkeley engineering professor Ali Javey, with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, appear online in yesterday’s advance issue of the journal Nature Materials (paid…
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TB Diagnostics Developer Gains $1.5M in Early Financing
TB Biosciences, a biotechnology company in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania developing genomics-based diagnostics for tuberculosis, received $1.5 million in its first fund-raising round after initial start-up. The financing was led by Bethlehem venture capital company Originate Ventures, joined by Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania and the NYU Innovation Venture Fund. Tuberculosis, or TB, is a…
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Safety Concerns Halt Celgene Leukemia Drug Trial
The biopharmaceutical company Celgene in Summitt, New Jersey is stopping a late-stage clinical trial of its cancer drug lenalidomide to treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia due to the higher death rate of patients taking the drug. Lenalidomide is a small-molecule compound that regulates the immune system and marketed by Celgene under the brand name Revlimid. The…
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Venture Funding Down in 2Q, Health Companies Score in Exits
Venture capital (VC) funding of start-up companies in the U.S. continued its decline in the second quarter of 2013, but biotechnology start-ups figured prominently in gaining liquidity during that quarter. The data, compiled by the investment industry research service Dow Jones VentureSource, shows U.S. companies raised $7.2 billion in 801 deals during the second quarter, registering declines…