A California company has licensed University of Pittsburgh technology, which could become the first effective treatment for a form of diabetes called Type I. San Diego-based DiaVacs Inc. licensed technology developed in 2004 by former UPMC Children's Hospital researchers Massimo Trucco and Nick Giannoukakis. The pair moved their research laboratory along with nearly a dozen other researchers and staff members to Allegheny General Hospital in 2014, where Trucco was named director of the newly created Institute for Cellular Therapeutics. "It's very promising," DiaVacs President and CEO Alan Lewis said about the technology."It's very exciting."
Twenty-five Dallas-area veterans will be the first to try cutting-edge rehabilitation technology designed to transmit sensations of physical touch over the Internet, researchers at the University of Dallas say. The Austin American-Statesman reports that the researchers are leading the initial six-month trials, which start next month. The project seeks to provide enhanced access to physical therapy for disabled veterans who can't commute to the doctor's office. It combines recent advances in 3-D cameras, high-speed Internet connections, video game engines and the field of "haptic," or sense-of-touch, technology, which uses a variety of vibrations, tactile sensors and the application of force to the user to re-create the sensation of touch.
Teladoc Inc., which lets patients meet with doctors over the Internet, will overcome the loss of an insurer deal and prove its stock rout is overdone, chief executive Jason Gorevic said. The shares have slid more than 25 percent since Deutsche Bank said Friday that a Pennsylvania insurer didn't plan to renew a contract with Teladoc. Gorevic said that deal with Highmark Health Inc. accounted for about $1.5 million in annual revenue. The company is projected to have sales of $74.8 million this year, according to the average of analysts' estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
The potential to deliver better healthcare has been one of the driving factors behind the push for big data analytics in medicine in recent years. The fact that the potential is there doesn't mean every project succeeds. Penn Medicine's big data projects, however, have already hit several milestones, and they are being successfully used within the organization, which is composed of the University of Pennsylvania's medical school and its health system of five hospitals. Initial applications have centered on predictive analytics on individual patients at risk for two conditions: sepsis and heart failure. Now Penn Medicine is getting set to release its open source real-time application platform, Penn Signals, to other organizations, too.
If you asked a CIO managing IT for a healthcare organization in 2012 how much of his software ran in the cloud, the percentages would have been low. That's no longer the case as 2016 nears. Emboldened by agreements to adhere to federal guidelines for protecting personal healthcare information (PHI), hospitals are a turning to cloud computing to make their organizations more nimble. Healthcare CIOs, mirroring their counterparts in corporations, are taking the cloud mainstream. The difference between 2012 and 2015 is largely one of vendors' willingness to sign business associate agreements (BAA) regarding personal healthcare information, or PHI.
Say you're a rural Midwestern farmer in bed recovering from a major illness at your local hospital. It's time for nurse's check in, but there's no knock on the door. At Mercy Hospital in St. Louis, just over the foot of the bed, a camera whirls around and a monitor lights up to show a smiling face with a headset on. "Good afternoon, this is Jeff with SafeWatch. Just doing my afternoon rounds," he said in this training exercise. Watching the video nurses in action, it's a little hard to shake the Jetsons vibe, but this kind of health care is already alive and growing.