If you have diabetes or foot ulcers, a new smartphone app will help you manage your disease by tracking and storing blood sugar levels and weight, and, through the use of the smartphone’s camera, capturing and analyzing images of foot ulcers, according to a story by Joseph Goedert at healthdatamanagement.com. Worcester Polytechnic Institute is in the process of developing this smartphone app, along with diabetes and wound care specialists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School Goedert writes.
Will you or won’t you be forced to buy health insurance under the new healthcare reform act?
March 26 is the date. That’s when the Supreme Court will begin to consider this burning-hot issue in an election year: whether challenges to the law can be made to the section of the Affordable Care Act , “the individual mandate” that requires that all Americans buy or have health insurance before 2014, when the mandate goes into effect, according to a story by Joseph Goedert at healthdatamanagement.com. According to the Affordable Care Act, as it now stands, all Americans must buy health insurance by 2014 or be fined. And plenty of people want to know if that’s constitutional.
For most patients with kidney tumors, the protocol was, remove the whole kidney.
But now, thanks to the Porter Robotics Institute (PRI) surgeons can now remove just a portion of the kidney, for some patients, for the same positive outcome, according to a press release at newswise.com. Porter Adventist Hospital houses PRI, which, according to the press release, “is among a handful of centers in the country with advanced fluorescence imaging technology, called Firefly”.
As if we didn’t already know it, security breaches among healthcare organizations are spreading like wildfire, according to a story by George V. Hulme at csoonline.com.
After surveying 72 healthcare organizations, the Ponemon Institute and ID experts found that, on average, the cost of data breaches to these organizations rose $183,526 to $2,243,700 from 2010, and extrapolating the study to the entire healthcare industry, Ponemon estimates that data breaches could be costing the U.S. healthcare industry between $4.2 billion and $8.1 billion a year, or an average of $6.5 billion, according to Hulme’s story.
Though their use has been plagued by controversy in the U.S., British scientists have made the first human embryonic stem cells of a high enough grade to use in patients to speed treatments for heart disease, blindness and severe injuries like paralysis, where they can be used to regrow spinal cord tissue so patients might walk again, according to a story by Kate Kelland at Reuters as reported at Yahoo News.
These cells, grown by a team from King’s College of London, have been deposited in a public stem cell bank, the UK Stem Cell Bank (UKSCB), for development in human trials by drug companies and researchers by 2014, according to Kelland’s story. The UKSCB will test and validate them before offering them to researchers, she added.
Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
