Intel and GE joined forces to develop a health care alliance back in April of 2009. Today, they unveiled the name of this venture, Care Innovations, which they say has received final regulatory clearances and is now fully operational.

The Sacramento-based Care Innovations combines teams and assets from Intel's Digital Health Group and GE Healthcare's Home Health division to address issues faced by and because of the growing number of elderly people in the U.S.

"Our vision as we launch this exciting new company is for Care Innovations to positively affect millions of people by providing … Read more

Researchers are using nanoparticles to create a material sensitive enough to analyze a person's breath in real time and detect indicators of cancer, diabetes, and other illnesses.

Scientists at Purdue University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology said today that even though diagnostic breath-analysis tools have been around for several decades, this is the first time a material has been developed that's sensitive enough to deliver on-the-spot results.

"We are talking about creating an inexpensive, rapid way of collecting diagnostic information about a patient," Carlos Martinez, an assistant professor of materials engineering at Purdue, … Read more

The adoption of electronic medical records, or EMRs, in U.S. hospitals has improved the quality of care in only one of three areas studied, and even in that area, the gains are limited, according to new research by the nonprofit Rand published this week in the American Journal of Managed Care.

Researchers analyzed the quality of care at 2,021 hospitals between 2003 and 2007 across three conditions: pneumonia, heart attack, and heart failure. The number of hospitals using either basic or advanced EMRs grew from 24 percent in 2003 to 38 percent in 2006.

Not only did the … Read more

Many of us know someone who has experienced severe chest pain but hemmed and hawed over whether to go to the emergency room. The ultimate hope is that the pain will just pass.

The rule of thumb has been to just go--better safe than sorry. But only 20 percent of those who do go actually have heart attacks, so researchers at the Stanford Cardiac Rehabilitation Program have developed a 3- to 5-minute survey that can be administered by a health care professional that helps identify symptoms, level of heart attack risk, and whether a trip to the ER is necessary.… Read more

Researchers have found that homeless youth in Los Angeles are using social-networking sites to find sexual partners.

Sean Young from UCLA and Eric Rice from the University of Southern California interviewed 201 homeless youth, recruited at a drop-in agency in LA, about social-networking usage as well as sexual behaviors. And while the researchers are touting one finding--that the use of social networks is associated with increased knowledge of STD prevention--there is no getting around the other main finding: "the use of these networks for partner finding is also associated with an increase in sexual risk behaviors."

In other … Read more

When social scientists at the University of Southampton began to map out global maternal health trends from United Nations and World Health Organization data, they were able to visualize several trends more clearly.

Working with the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood and the University of Aberdeen, the researchers are producing online maps, a book, a short film, and more. They call it The Atlas of Birth project.

The Web site currently features 18 maps on topics ranging from literacy to genital mutilation to abortion; five case studies on women in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Senegal, and Yemen; and statistics on a … Read more

Last week, I wrote about IBM's continued march to the cloud and the company's focus on using advanced analytical software to make better decisions faster.

This week both of these efforts are coming to light in the health care arena as Big Blue is set to announce that the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) will use advanced analytics software to cut the time required to match bone marrow donors with patients by up to 50 percent.

The NMDP estimates that as many as 10,000 patients may benefit from a transplant each year in the U.S. alone, … Read more

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services today unveiled 36 graphic cigarette warning images, 9 of which will make their way to cigarette packages and advertisements in 2012, and they've given the public two months to weigh in, starting Friday.

Tobacco use is the leading cause of premature and preventable death in the United States, according to the HHS, and it is responsible for 443,000 deaths each year, with 1,200 current and former smokers dying prematurely every day due to tobacco-related diseases.

Dozens of countries around the world, including the U.S., already mandate the … Read more

Facebook's frequent home page design changes are known to get momentary griping from users who say it's ugly, difficult to use, or hides their favorite features, but this is a new one: scores of ticked-off members go so far as to claim it's detrimental to their health.

That's what happened after Facebook on Wednesday made an unannounced tweak to its home page design, shrinking the font size that appears on users' "news feeds" of their friends' activity across the site. Facebook, in a statement, said it's "constantly testing new ways to make … Read more