When economists, data scientists and medical professionals team up, the result is often remarkable innovation. These six examples from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Future of Health and Wellness Conference could change the way patients interact with hospitals, physicians and each other.
A recent Pew Internet study suggests that rising smartphone adoption in the United States seems to be motivating people to use mobile health. Few question the potential for mHealth to change the healthcare industry, though technical and bureaucratic barriers--not to mention reluctant patients and physicians--stand in the way.
Personal health information is worth 50 times more to thieves than credit card or Social Security numbers, so it's no surprise that healthcare organizations are prone to data breaches. Preventing them is difficult, and so is mitigating the damage they can cause. Here experts discuss how organizations can avoid breaches and a nonprofit that suffered a breach in 2011 explains how it responded.
Healthcare is moving cautiously into cloud computing, virtualization, BYOD and other IT innovations. And there's good reason for the caution. Until an organization's IT leaders take meaningful steps to change what's typically seen as a lackadaisical privacy and security culture, the risk of patient-information loss remains high and costly.
For an industry that has tried to avoid technology, healthcare is embracing the iPad. Here's a look at how it's being used today and the promise it holds for tomorrow.
Healthcare IT adoption in the United States today is largely defined by requirements to demonstrate the meaningful use of electronic heath record software by 2014.
Telemedicine mixes teleconferencing, document-sharing and mobile technology in order to improve healthcare quality, largely for those who lack access to care. Here are 10 ways that telemedicine implementations are changing the delivery of healthcare services.