Bayer Healthcare recently announced that its CONTOUR Next EZ blood glucose monitoring system has been FDA-approved for use in the U.S. With its meter and test strip sensors, the company said in a press release that the system’s level of accuracy exceeds the requirements for the measurement of glucose, providing a “stable, high signal-to-noise ratio.” This is important because it reduces errors and transfers the readings faster to medical professionals waiting for it. Bayer said that the monitor showed a high level of accuracy when used by both physicians and patients.
Maybe it’s something a few medical professionals anticipated but it may come as a shock to the rest – the Affordable Care Act (ACA), part of healthcare reform, could result in a plunge in revenue, more than half the hospital and health systems in the country recently surveyed fear. Another 12 percent is a little more hopeful, anticipating an increase in revenue, according to HighRoads, a provider of SaaS-enabled (software as a service) healthcare compliance and benefits management, and Sullivan, Cotter and Associates, Inc. (SullivanCotter), a compensation and human resource management consulting firm, which conducted the survey.
For some time now, therapists have conducted sessions online to counsel patients on everything from autism to recovery from having an affair. For a while, there was even a TV show about it. Reasons for its use include geographical distance between therapist and client, convenience, and of course, cost. But now it’s coming to prison. Correctional healthcare providers recently deployed a two-way telehealth V2VIP service, videophones and iV2VIP video softphones for low-cost, face-to-face mental health consultations over mobile devices nationally.
RazorInsights, a source of information technology solutions for rural, critical-access and community hospitals, has joined with Fogo Data Centers to offer a solution allowing many hospitals and their internal systems to subscribe to a service allowing them to share one IT application to reduce costs of maintaining individual platforms.
The solution, according to the source, includes IT hosting, colocation and dynamic cloud computing capabilities.
Jude Medical, Inc., a global medical device company, recently announced a study to find out whether patients with certain heart implants can safely undergo full-body, high resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans to better accommodate their medical needs. With MRI scans, physicians can see deep into the body’s interior without surgery by using strong magnets and pulses of radio waves to manipulate the natural magnetic properties in the body. This scanning technique allows doctors to see better images of organs and soft tissues than they can with other scanning technologies.
Patients have been discouraged from having MRIs in the past because, as the press release explains, traditional pacing systems may be adversely affected by the scan.
