IBM and Apple pretty much stole the show this season.
Their deal wasn’t technically the top story — but it was undeniably summer’s biggest surprise. And after the dust settled and the chaos cleared a bit, an mHealth News discussion with a Big Blue executive ranged from how the deal came about, to the company’s shared expectation of hospitals actually using the Mobile First for iOS platform and forthcoming apps, to the engineers’ visionary thinking about “the art of the possible.”
Also gazing into the future was a piece about how the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s far-reaching broadband work is essentially laying the pipes for telemedicine services. It’s not a bad by-product of taxpayer-funded grants to rural caregivers.
In the here and now, meanwhile, a big hit with readers was a case study of how an accountable care organization in Indiana already has a functioning home health program to cut readmissions by 5 percent, boost medication reconciliation by 40 percent and give its executives a patient retention rate to brag about: 95 percent.
Here they are:
1. 10 mobile apps for evidence-based medicine
2. 3 sensor startups collecting population health data
3. How IBM and Apple envision hospitals using their mobile platform
4. ACO reaping mHealth benefits already
5. FCC: ‘Telemedicine, it’s coming’
Though it did not make the list, Editor Eric Wicklund’s story examining the payers fueling and funding telemedicine work — to the betterment of patient care and satisfaction was a runner-up.
And lest we get too carried away with the sex appeal of mobile health technologies, Wicklund also posed a critical question: How much mHealth is too much? His look at Parkview’s Medical Center’s experience likely won’t surprise many readers nearly as much as the Apple and IBM alignment, of course, but it is does serve to temper all the excitement around mHealth with a reality check.
