Bridging the Fitness Apps and Device Trackers with the Medical Community

Next week I’m going to the International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. Obviously, being a consumer show, the health applications are very much consumer focused. They have a whole section of the show dedicated to digital health and it’s been growing each year (up 60% this year I’m told).

I’m on the press list and I’ve been really interested in the wave of fitness devices that have passed through my inbox. They come in all shapes and sizes and record everything from steps to heart rate to blood pressure to every in between. Basically, I see a whole plethora of applications and devices that are measuring various aspects of our health. The wave is here. Who’s going to win this race isn’t all that clear to me, but the fact that we’re going to have devices measuring our health is clear.

What’s also not clear is how these measurements are going to bridge over to the medical community. Sure, there are targeted pilot programs where some of these devices are used by doctors or hospitals. However, most of these consumer monitoring and device companies aren’t thinking about the medical implications. In fact, many of them are staying far away from it as they avoid any sort of FDA oversight.

While I understand the desire to not have to make the bridge to the medical community, I don’t think most of these devices and apps will make it without making the bridge. If I’ve already recorded all of my blood pressure data on my iPad using a blood pressure cuff at home, I’m going to want an easy way that I can provide that data to my doctor.

Maybe this is an opportunity for an innovative company to provide that bridge. I’m sure most of these mobile health developers would be happy to tap into a public “utility” that would connect their data to the medical community. The problem is that it’s not sexy to be a utility.

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December 30, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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I recently acquired a pair of Google Glass. It’s been quite an interesting experience wearing them around. I haven’t worn them many places. In fact, I took them to the mHealth Summit in DC and barely took them out. As I considered it, I found it really pretentious to have on a pair of Google Glass. Even when I did wear them, I’d usually flip them up on my head so people knew I wasn’t using them.

I imagine over time this will change as more and more people wear some sort of eyeware that contains computing power like Google Glass. However, of all places, you’d think that wearing them at mHealth Summit people would generally know what they were and not be so phased when you had them on. It was interesting to see the looks people gave you.

I will say that wearing Google Glass is a good attention getter. Random people will come up to you and ask to wear them or try them. This can be a great thing at a conference where breaking the ice can be hard. However, you just have to be sure to bridge the conversation to something more than Google Glass. For some reason, women seemed particularly interested in them.

I have CES (Consumer Electronics Show) coming up in a few weeks. I think I’ll wear Google Glass around some just to see what people do. At a show like CES I’m afraid I’ll end up meeting a lot of people that I don’t necessarily want to meet (do I really care to hear about your iPhone case company?).

I’m still torn on Google Glass. I think the technology is a really amazing experience. It’s just hard for me to see it as an every day type of accessory like your phone. Maybe I’ll hop on eBay and sell mine off.

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December 26, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Eyeware Computing  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
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Happtique Halts Mobile Health App Certification

We’ve written a number of articles over the years about Happtique. Much like I railed against the meaningless CCHIT certification, I felt that Happtique was the same as CCHIT but for mobile health. I was partially comforted by the criteria that came out because they were so general and broad. They were still meaningless, but I felt they could have been much worse. Either way, I don’t think a certification has any value when it comes to mHealth. They don’t know how or can’t measure the right things.

As the tweet above mentions, Happtique as halted their app certification after a developer revealed a number of major security holes in 2 of the Happtique certified apps.

The blog posts on the developer site are well worth the read. The thing that stood out to me was how the security issues were very simple security practices. It wasn’t like the developer used some complex hack to find the security holes. The passwords were stored in plain text. I mean really? They didn’t use any encryption in transit. Amazing!

Of course all this reminds me of all the HIPAA breaches we hear about where a laptop wasn’t encrypted. There are at least a few things in healthcare that should be considered no brainer decisions. Encryption is one of them.

Hopefully a number of good things will come out of this situation. First, people won’t trust a mobile health certification. Second, mobile health developers will see that they need to take security and privacy more seriously.

I created a little poll for you to share your thoughts on mobile health app certifications. Plus, feel free to pontificate in the comments.

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December 20, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Mobile Health Security
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Scanadu Closes $10.5 Million for Medical Tricorder

As most of you know, I’m a big fan and deep supporter of Vegas Startup companies. In fact, I’m an adviser to a healthcare focused secure healthcare messaging startup called docBeat. As such, I’m extremely interested in any healthcare related startup company becomes part of the Vegas family.

The latest entrant is a company called Scanadu that was just funded by the Vegas Tech Fund and others in a $10.5 Series A round of financing. This comes after raising $1,664,574 on Indiegogo. Here’s a description of what they’re trying to accomplish with Scanadu:

While Scanadu is equipping the Scout with off-the-shelf sensors, each needs a 501(k) clearance from the FDA, as do any groups of sensors working in conjunction with each other. That’s the whole point of the Scout: it combines existing trackers into one handy device.

“This is a device that comes out of nothing,” Scanadu CEO Walter De Brouwer said. “There was nothing that you could build on. You put all sorts of sensors together in a small package and make it do stuff that it hasn’t done before.”

The goal is to have the commercial device available to consumers by the winter of 2014 or Q1 of 2015. Before that, the Scout will ship to the 8,000 people who preordered through the Indiegogo campaign in March. Scanadu will be doing usability testing on volunteers from that cohort in order to glean how exactly consumers will use the Scout: how many times a day they check it and what metrics they are most interested in tracking, for instance.

I think it’s ambitious of them to go after the FDA clearance, but it probably necessary. There’s a lot of money and time involved in getting FDA clearance. However, once you do it, your competition has to deal with those barriers in the future.

I hope Scanadu uses the money they’re getting to bring on someone who’s very good at getting through the FDA clearance process. It’s a beast and it’s a real advantage to work with someone who’s done it before.

On a broader level, Scanadu is just one of MANY devices that are coming out like this. It’s an exciting time for these types of devices. In the next couple years there are going to be a wave of these devices that help us better track our health. This is just the start.

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December 16, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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As I mentioned, this week I was able to attend the mHealth Summit in DC. While the weather outside was terrible (reminds me to be grateful I live in Las Vegas), the show had a lot of really interesting people. I took some of my favorite tweets from the event and thought I’d share them with you in case you couldn’t attend.


Didn’t see too many practicing doctors at the event. See my previous post about the mHealth Digital Divide.


The word disruption sells a lot of books, but doesn’t sell a lot of health IT software.


A little health humor for those doctors who are reading this. He’s right. Not much viral spreading in healthcare IT.


This is an issue. I call them perverse incentives.


Of course, we’re still waiting for this change to happen.


It’s a little bombastic to say hospitals will be obsolete. They won’t and it won’t even be close. Even if you want to see a doc at home, there will still be procedures that need to be done somewhere (ie. at hospitals).


I guess we leave it to a song writer to play with words. I want Dr. Eisenberg as my doctor.


That will change. People reacted the same way when I was wearing Google Glass.

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December 12, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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The mHealth Digital Divide

At the mHealth Summit, Steve Case offered an interesting insight about mHealth doing amazing things with mobile, but hospitals still being worried about updating Windows XP.”

This is one of my key takeaways at the mHealth Summit. There’s a large digital divide between what’s happening in the mobile health world and the reality of most healthcare organizations (Doctors and Hospitals). It would be great if those organizations would partner with these companies trying to innovate in the mobile health space, but unfortunately most are too busy focusing on all the government regulations (ie. ICD-10, meaningful use and ACOs).

What I don’t see is a bridge being built to bridge this divide. Maybe the fact that HIMSS now owns the mHealth Summit event will help. Hopefully the HIMSS audience will finally embrace what’s happening and join in on the conversation. Although, I’m betting that will happen a lot slower than we’d all like.

Anyone who’s tried to sell into healthcare (particularly hospitals) knows what a challenge that can be. Many of the companies developing these mobile health apps don’t come from healthcare. I love the outside influence and knowledge coming into healthcare, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to sell into healthcare. Like most enterprises, the sales process can be brutal.

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December 10, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Phones
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mHealth Summit 2013

Tomorrow morning, barring snow in Las Vegas, I’ll be boarding a plane to DC to attend the mHealth Summit. This will be the third year I’ve attended the mHealth Summit. It’s the second year HIMSS has owned it and so I think this will be a breakout year for the event. Take a look at the numbers to see what I mean:

  • Over 5,000 attendees
  • Nearly 300 exhibitors
  • 450 speakers

If I’m being really honest about the event (which is basically how I am always), the keynote speakers and sessions don’t get me that excited. The one exception is Muhammad Yunus. I’m not sure what he has to do with healthcare at all, but his micro credit innovation is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard. I love when small, simple things that anyone could have done could have such a profound impact on society. Maybe there’s some good parallel’s we can learn from this in mHealth.

Regardless of who’s speaking, I’m certain that I’ll have a lot of great conversation with the 5,000+ attendees and my schedule is literally booked with meetings with vendors.

As with most conferences, I don’t have a specific agenda or story that I want to write at the conference. My goal is to try and discover what the story is at the conference. Is there a new trend? Is there something exciting happening that I’ve never heard about? Do we need to be concerned about something that’s going to happen?

We’ll see what I find. The great part for you is that whatever I find I’ll share with you on this blog. Let’s hope I find something interesting. I’ll be sad if I find a lack of innovation and improvement over past years.

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December 6, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Phones
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Fitness Wearables Not Used By Those Who Can Benefit

I was reading a popular tech blog called PandoDaily and they had an interesting article that talks about those who can really benefit from Fitness Wearables aren’t using them.

When I think about the top Fitness wearables the conclusion from the study makes sense. If I’m an inactive, overweight person, then do I want to pay for a wearable device that will tell me how inactive and overweight I am? It’s definitely a challenging adoption problem. We have a whole weight loss industry that proves that solving it is not a simple task.

I think a similar thing is found with almost all mobile health apps as well. Those who could really benefit from those mobile health apps aren’t using them. I don’t have any data on this, but I bet if we dug into it we’d find it to be the case. Plus, if you look at mHealth adoption over all, we know that a lot of the apps aren’t getting used much at all.

From now on whenever I look at a mobile health app and they tell me about adoption, I’m going to ask myself if the people who can benefit most from that technology are using it.

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December 5, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
Tags:Fitness Wearables  mHealth Adoption  Mobile Health Adoption  

Digital Health at CES

For those not familiar with CES (Consumer Electronics show, which they prefer I call International CES), it’s the mecca of consumer electronics in Las Vegas each January. It’s only held in Las Vegas, because it’s the only city big enough to hold such a HUGE show.

I’m sure that many of you are thinking you’ve been to big conferences before. I’m pretty sure that there is no other conference in the world as big as CES. It’s amazing to see the millions of dollars vendors have spent on their booth (millions for just one booth for those keeping track at home). It’s literally a circus and who doesn’t enjoy the circus?

I’ve been going to CES for about the past 8 or so years. When I first started attending, I attended as a techguy interested in the tech side of things. However, over the years, the Digital Health section of CES has really grown and matured. In fact, I just got a message that the Digital Health Exhibit space has grown 40 percent over last year. Last year it felt like it grew 50% as well. Needless to say, there is a lot of attention being placed on the Digital Health space at CES and around the world.

I won’t get to see much of the CES technology until January, but I’m excited to see what’s new. A lot of companies bring out their best stuff at CES, but it’s also possible that I’ll just get to see the same players with bigger booths. I’ll be sure to report on the experience.

If you’re going to be at CES in Las Vegas, I’d love to meet and chat.

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December 2, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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