Momentum in the health IT space writ large has been building for some time, with some of the biggest names in tech, ranging from Google to Cisco, IBM to AT&T, chasing what is undeniably a growth industry. After all, technologies to securely store and transmit patient records promise to reduce costs and improve outcomes, while telemedicine technologies can enable specialists to administer care to patients in remote areas.
Within the broad-ranging health IT space, a growing number of businesses are looking to mobile devices and applications to provide a host of monitoring and care services. And the government has taken notice.
The Department of Health and Human Services and its National Institutes of Health research agency are looking to mobile health applications as a transformative phase in the evolution of health IT. Enterprise Mobile Today takes a look.
WASHINGTON — Senior government officials on Monday touted the Obama administration’s commitment to expanding federally backed programs to encourage mobile applications that aid the delivery of health care and monitoring services.
Speaking here at the mHealth Summit, a conference focused on mobile technology and health care, Todd Park, CTO at the Department of Health and Human Services, described an ambitious online initiative expected to launch in December that will open access to the agency’s trove of health information through a new website. The open health data campaign, centered around the forthcoming HealthData.gov site, aims to provide a fertile repository of information about childhood obesity, smoking cessation rates and all manner of other data sets that developers and others could use to build novel health IT applications.
