Free text in electronic health records, with the help of natural language processing (NLP) technology, can be used to create accurate clinical decision support (CDS) tools, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

See on jamia.bmj.com

Read about why a Qualcomm Life executive says mobile health doesn’t yet have an Instagram, and why it eventually will.

See on www.medcitynews.com

 Quintiles and the American Diabetes Association announced a strategic agreement in which Quintiles’ Digital Patient Unit will provide the Association’s millions of website users access to Quintiles’ medication monitoring service.

The Association’s constituents who opt in for the service will receive free safety checks of their medications to identify potential interactions and other risk factors, which are already provided to the 2.5 million registered users of Quintiles’ www.MediGuard.org. Registrants will also be eligible to participate in select direct-to-patient programs to benefit their medical conditions and advance global diabetes patient care.

The Association’s constituents may opt in to this service from the Association’s website www.Diabetes.org

Via www.quintiles.com

On March 29, 2012, Oracle announced that it has agreed to acquire ClearTrial, a leading provider of cloud-based Clinical Trial Operations and analytics products that make the planning, sourcing, and tracking of clinical projects and financial performance…

Via www.oracle.com

During one such visit a senior executive noticed that two of my colleagues, sitting next to each other, supported their system (two different implementations of the same software) across two different geographies. They happened to have the name of the systems they support, pinned to a board at their desks. The executive wanted us to take a picture of the two cubicles and email to him. We were quite surprised at the request. Before moving on to speak to other people he asked a couple of questions and realized the guys were sharing each other’s experiences and leveraging the lessons learnt from one deployment for the other geography.  It turned out that this does not happen in their organization, in fact their internal teams hardly communicate as they are part of different business units and geographies

Read full article on at inPharmatics

It is hoped that NMS will lead to the following outcomes:

• improve medicines adherence
• increase patient engagement with their condition and medicines, which will support them in making decisions about their treatment and self management
• reduce medicines wastage
• reduce hospital admissions due to adverse events associated with medicines
• increase reporting of medicine adverse reactions by pharmacists and patients
• positive patient assessments
• provide evidence base on the effectiveness of the service
• enable the development of outcome and/or quality measures for community pharmacy

But the Service since launch has seen severe criticism from pharmacists’ over several issues, especially how the pharmacist is re-imbursed for the providing the service which also involved patient counselling.

The answer perhaps can be found by applying predictive analytics to identify patients who are more likely to deviate or other likely to exhibit non-compliance in adhering to the prescription.

Express Scripts has developed a set of proprietary computer models that predict, up to a year in advance, which patients are at risk of not following through on their prescribed drug therapy. details

FICO an analytics service provider also provides medication adherence ranking based on predictive analytics details

Source: Data Sneak Peek: Groups Involved in Patient Adherence Teams

If nothing else it would atleast bring internet to the masses much faster and cheaper than Android, 3G, and LTE, WiMax all put together, for the simple reason that most of the households that are capable of benefiting from the internet has access to TV as well. atleast in India

Take a look at news coverage “ HP India Research Labs brings Internet TV for the masses with the help of a TV set top box that cost less than $150″ news by Times of India

HP Labs has recently came out with what they call as “Internet TV Set Top Box for the masses” the product is called  Vayu Internet Device or VInD. HP Labs India has created the product which was reviewed by Times of India News paper. The solution enables people to receive internet content on even the most basic TV sets and manage all screen operations using basic TV remotes.

More About HP Labs Vayu Experience Platform

The HP product offers the following solutions,

Task Genie: This is a store of  apps, Yes apple has tons of them , but how many of them are useful , and several of those apps are me too products. Before anyone shouts shoot him let me tell you I have an iPhone4 loaded with 319 apps, I don’t think any one can beat that, and yet I don’t use almost 300 of them at-least once in a month, despite the fact that except one or 2 games most  other are serious apps. Yes I agree among the 300 are several apps which are me too copy cat apps which offers same function, like contact management and duplicate remover, SMS apps, chat solutions. The point is more the apps the better is not true, its the quality that matters that’s were Android fails

Web Tuner: This allows the user to create web categories, such as say News or Tech or Nature, and within each he can have the particular websites he is most interested in

Libraries: allows users to store photos, videos, music and documents in the set-top box’s hard disk. Users can tag and share them with others who have similar set-top boxes.

Contacts and Whiteboard: Users can create and store a contacts list. They can share content or have a video-conference with others who have similar set-top boxes.

Pairing with mobile phone: The set-top box can be paired with mobile phones. So, if it is paired with the user’s phone,he  can send messages to his  TV

Sensor: VInD comes with a built-in Zigbee sensor network. VInD detects the motion and sends an alert to the paired phone.

Keyboard and mouse: Vayu, which uses aLinux  operating system, can also be used as a regular PC, with a keyboard and mouse with a browser and with the TV acting as the monitor. It can be a wired or a wireless keyboard and mouse. This is were I think ViND can bring some advantage in clinical research space, every clinical trial monitoring room has  a TV

Tech Specs#: VInD has 1 GB of built-in RAM, 8GB of flash memory and the ability to add an additional 300 GB hard-disk. It comes with built-in Zigbee sensor network, USB ports, Wi-Fi, ethernet and Bluetooth 2.1 and infrared connectivity. It connects to the TV via HDMI and regular AV channel ports. It also supports GPRS, 3G and HSDPA through the use of a USB modem. It has in-built microphone and speakers and a display

Microsoft has released the Kinect for PC. It was reported that Microsoft is keen to see kinect taking an active part in Healthcare industry. Doctors are using Kinect to help stroke patients regain movement full St0ry Here. Then later there was news that Microsoft and Asus have built a laptop with Kinect motion-sensing technology.

Of-course HP is not the first to come out with this kind of  technology,

 most of the existing expensive solutions are not  comprehensive and too focused on living room with limited or no net browsing capability.

iChip Technolgies has announced their solution called @Box which claimed to bring internet to any display device including even the office projector. @Box is smaller than palm and would be sold in standard package with a key board, track ball, power adaptor and a cable to connect to the TV and would cost less than $100

iChip Technologies which was based in India was later acquired by Techfarm Ventures US-based incubator and early stage investor in technology companies. Gordon Campbell, Chief Executive Officer of Techfarm, is also the CEO and Co-founder of Personal Web (PW) Systems, a company incorporated in the US.

Techfarm Ventures had earlier invested in PortalPlayer, which went in for an IPO in 2004, and subsequently got bought out by nVIDIA in January 2007. Techfarm has earlier incubated more than a dozen companies such as the first Ethernet chip and graphics controller

Neuros Technology produces a similar product that works on Ubuntu platform called Neuros LINK, which seems to be more closer to the HP solution

Logitech and Google has released Revue a solution based on Android

Apple is talking about Apple TV for sometime

UK based Telecom operator Vodafone has launched Webbox a product that seems to draw power from Vodafones EDGE/GSM/3G network using Opera Mini Browser

Indian Government issues a strong dose of medicine . The new norms to hold pharma MDs, CEOs responsible for offering freebies to doc.

Under new guidelines drug firms will be barred from offering freebies to doctors — free travel tickets, hotel stay, gifts and hospitality, and the like. If any drug firm is found violating these guidelines, the responsibility would lie squarely with the MD and CEO of the respective company.

Further, the drug firms concerned may be prohibited from using brand names of competitive products in their promotional activities trying to claim superiority for its products.

The new guidelines would also prohibit drug firms to get doctors to endorse their products both online and offline

Maker of homeopathic remedies Matrixx Initiatives, was sued by investors once it came to know their marketed nasal spray linked to a string of instances in which people using the treatment lost their sense of smell. The adverse events were reported back to the company by several medical professionals and patients, but never amounted to a statistically significant group. Matrixx argued it wasn’t responsible for reporting scattered and unreliable anecdotal evidence of adverse events. But the supremed court said No

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-22/drugmaker-investor-lawsuits-backed-by-u-s-supreme-court-4-.html

Compare that to the Indian Law System

Madras High Court in India allowed a stay on immediate withdrawal of drugs banned  due to Severe Side Effects. The  pediatric doses of pain reliever nimesulide and anti-cold medicine phenylpropanolamine banned in  market due to harmful side effects, Indian Drugs Manufacturers Association & Confederation of Indian Pharmaceutical Industries successfully managers to convince the legal system to set aside the safety of patients & to get a reversal of the ban for a short period. DCGI has a long way to go before effective PV can be enforced in India. The systems failed in France very recently even with the strong arm run EU PV policy in place,

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/hc-stayimmediate-withdrawalbanned-drugs/429458/

The French Regulatory system was rocked recently in its disability to handle PV issues in proper maner. A report from the Inspection Generale des Affaires de Santé (IGAS). Mediator a lipopenic  drug (a drug to lower fat levels in the blood) was discovered to have appetite suppressant qualities and was heavily over-prescribed by doctors whose patients wished to lose a little weight. Controversially, the drug stayed on the market despite a succession of warnings over its side-effects, which include heart valve disease and pulmonary hypertension. It is thought that as many as 2,000 people may have died from the severe Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR) incurred by their use of the drug. However, already in 1997 the drug was banned in the US and in Switzerland ; with France following suit 12 years later. The European Medicines Agency warned in 2002 of the risks associated with the medicine, however the warnings went unheeded.

http://www.imt.ie/opinion/2011/03/regulating-the-regulator.html)