healthcare

A prototype high-tech cuff that detects and treats bleeding from combat injuries got a step closer to the battlefield Monday when Siemens Healthcare announced an exclusive contract with the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency to develop the device.

The Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation cuff, or DBAC, is designed to limit blood loss from penetrating wounds to limbs--as in the case of a gunshot injury--thus reducing the risk of limb loss or death.

Once the cuff is applied, ultrasound technology within the device automatically would identify the location and severity of the bleeding. This in turn would trigger therapeutic ultrasound elements … Read more

Khosla Ventures, the venture capital firm launched in 2004 by Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, has led a $3 million Series A round for ZocDoc, a service for locating and booking doctors' appointments online.

ZocDoc is sort of like a cross between Yelp and Lifebooker--but with its focus on physicals, not facials. Members can search for nearby doctors, filter by insurance plan matches, find out what other members have had to say about them, and book the appointments through the site. Currently, it only serves the New York boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, but has plans to expand nationwide--that's … Read more

In a clear indicator that open source is having an impact well beyond software, Harvard Medical School's CIO, Dr. John Halamka, recently went on the record at the Red Hat Summit arguing that open source points the way to better healthcare. In this, however, he wasn't talking about software per se, but rather about the community approach to tackling what appears to be a gargantuan problem:

Online medical records.

This seems like an easy task, right? Scan them in and save the documents online. Google Health is doing it, right? How hard can it be?

Very hard, it … Read more

Personal data for more than 6,000 UCSF patients was exposed online for more than three months last year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The news is troubling on multiple levels. First off, it poses the risk that sensitive health information could be used against those patients by employers, health insurers, and others. It also could have allowed fraudsters to use the data to commit medical identity theft and get medical treatment and drugs without paying.

Also, while it's unclear exactly how the data breach happened, it's fairly clear that it arose after the hospital shared the … Read more

About a decade ago, wireless heart monitors hooked to patients at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas went on the fritz, causing much scrambling among the building's engineering team.

The culprit, as it turned out, was interference from a nearby broadcast television station, which was testing its digital signal on the same channel where some of the medical devices operated, as detailed in the journal Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology a few years ago. The Federal Communications Commission ultimately cordoned off spectrum just for that purpose, although migrating there was largely voluntary.

Now, hospital administrators and medical device manufacturers fear … Read more

It's been a busy week in the tech world, but the newsroom highlight of the week had more to do with what was not said. Our own Elinor Mills was dispatched on short notice from San Francisco to Orlando, Fla., to interview Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He was in the land of Mickey Mouse East to tout Google Health initiatives, which hold promise for advancing the cause of improved health care.

Elinor came ready to discuss Google Health with Schmidt, as well as other topics, such as what's up with the paid click ad business, the economy, YouTube, … Read more

Update at 12:19 PM PT: This story was updated to reflect the World Privacy Forum's position on PHRs in general.

Google is set to announce on Thursday that it will be using the Cleveland Clinic hospital in Cleveland, Ohio as the pilot site for its new personal health records initiative.

Between 1,500 and 10,000 patients at the Cleveland, Ohio, facility will participate in the project's test run, volunteering to have their medical records transferred to their Google accounts. The hospital already keeps electronic records for over 100,000 patients in an internal system called MyChart, … Read more

McKesson is graduating from Unix to Linux - specifically, Red Hat Enterprise Linux - as a way to reinvest hardware and software savings into patient-facing innovations. McKesson is moving all of its applications over to Linux. It's surprising that more companies haven't done this.

"We standardize completely on Red Hat... Standardizing on one distribution increases reliability and safety, and customers don't really want to support six different distributions in-house," said [Michael Simpson, SVP and general manager, McKesson] in an interview. The McKesson/Red Hat partnership is a significant one in the growing field of health care. Handling patient medical records and supplying provider IT systems is a significant contributor to healthcare costs. Generating examples of how to lower those costs can be a feather in the cap of a major supplier to the healthcare industry....… Read more

First AOL, next a revolution.

AOL co-founder Steve Case announced Wednesday his online health and wellness company, Revolution Health Group, has acquired HealthTalk, pushing his company into the ranks of the second-largest health information site on the Net.

The deal is designed to bolster Revolution's offerings beyond the health and wellness category and into the area of supplying content on chronic conditions. The acquisition marks yet more activity in the online health care arena, which has seen not only mergers but also the birth of medical and health-related search engines, according to American Medical News. There's also been … Read more