What if you’re traveling in a country where you don’t speak the language, and fall ill?
Don’t worry because you’re in luck, as a new app launched in Ireland for Android and iPhone users by Mesh Trading of Belfast now allows travelers in foreign countries to send immediate text messages to emergency officials in their language. Called appropriately enough, Distress Signal, the app currently works in the U.K., Ireland, China, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the Philippines and Iceland will made available in the U.S. and Europe as soon as each country updates its emergency SMS service.
You may not know the word, but what it means is that the 50 percent of patients now not monitored (or properly cared for) in hospitals could soon be – and possibly, live longer – with the allocation of a dedicated wireless spectrum for medical devices. Medical Area Body Networks, or MBANs, are wireless patient monitoring systems and according to Bethanie Hestermann, if you’re having a heart attack in a hospital and you’re not being monitored, you have a six percent chance of survival. Pretty scary, huh? But if you were being monitored and your heart stopped, you’d have a 48 percent chance of making it.
Would you buy a house without doing any research on the neighborhood, price or number of rooms it had? That’s what nearly one in five healthcare organizations are doing. They’re pursuing a mobile health initiative without having a specific reason for doing so, new research has reported. Granted, mHealth is turning out to be a winner for reducing costs and helping patients manage chronic diseases and stay out of the hospital.
But roughly 19 percent of the 106 healthcare providers, insurers and other healthcare-related organizations responding to a survey earlier this year answered "no driver" when asked the question: "What is the top driver for your organization's mHealth initiative?"
Medical device makers are incensed at the requirement that they may now have to pay a 2.3 percent tax on every item they produce. In June, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the tax, but the Senate has not yet moved on, and the tax is set to start January 1.
The tax is slated to raise $29 billion over 10 years, which would pay a fraction of the new costs of providing medical insurance to more than 30 million Americans who don’t have it. The defense the manufacturers put forth was that it would stifle innovation and cut jobs. But speech therapy devices maker Glottal Enterprises’ CEO Martin Rothenberg said
that “using the 2.3 percent medical device tax to justify layoffs is ‘nonsense’ and little more than a political strategy to attack the Affordable Care Act.
Maybe it’s all in the name. But states that are somewhat leery of the new healthcare law but are being forced to set up health insurance exchanges (HIXs) anyway are trying to brand, or come up with a new word for, well, exchange, because it sounds, well, just too much like the government sticking its head in. “What we're trying to figure out is what's a name that's going to stick, that's going to grab hold, that all Californians are going to say 'Boy, that's where I go to find healthcare,' " Peter Lee, who directs California's Health Benefit Exchange, said.
