Global Healthcare

Singapore

William Haseltine, chairman and president of ACCESS Health International and author of Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Health Care System, attributes Singapore’s ability to control health care costs to balancing a highly regulated market and managing a successful social wellness program.[read more]

Mobile Health Around the Globe

Apple is showing off its marketing chops, and tugging at our heartstrings, in a new video posted to its YouTube channel. Called “Making a difference. One app at a time,” the 10-minute video depicts some of the ways the company’s devices and various iOS apps are solving problems across the world, starting with rural access to healthcare.[read more]

Orphan drugs today

A recent report from EvaluatePharma predicts worldwide orphan drug sales to total $127 billion by 2018 with a compound annual growth rate of +7.4% per year between 2012 and 2018. The authors forecast that orphan drugs will be 15.9% of worldwide prescription sales by 2018 (excluding generics).[read more]

DataDyne boasts that their mobile data system, Magpi, is the fastest, easiest least expensive way to collect data on mobile devices. Magpi is an award-winning mobile Data System that is used by 20,000 people worldwide, including World Bank, the CDC, the Red Cross and others. Since Magpi is designed to require no training or programming and is based in the cloud, it cuts down on costs and is readily available for use by anyone.[read more]

The Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical Global Health Education currently has a project in Kabul, Afghanistan, that helps screen sex workers for HIV using their eMocha (electronic Mobile Open-Source Comprehensive Health Application) technology.[read more]

Health toys?

Currently medical devices are very expensive for a variety of reasons: research and development, patent licenses, marketing cost, government regulations and more. Now, what may be a new and disruptive technology in healthcare is being studied and developed at the MIT Little Devices Laboratory.[read more]

We’ve read the stories: From bedridden patients sending text messages to their health workers, to young people receiving HIV prevention messages via SMS, the mobile phone seems to have morphed from communications device to essential life-saver. But is the evidence there yet that mHealth is an effective and suitable health delivery intervention in the developing world?[read more]

This is a great video from a keynote by Professor Alain Labrique for the MOOC Mobile Health without Borders from Stanford. Professor Labrique is the Director of Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth Initiative, and world expert and pioneer on mHealth. The video is an overview of mobile health innovations around the globe.[read more]

H7N9 & public health (Photo: AFP)

Over the last few months, H7N9 has been making headlines around the world. As of May 9, there have been 130 identified cases. There are four things we should learn from responses to H7N9, which have so far led to effective control of the disease.[read more]

healthcarecosts/shutterstock

Most international health system cost comparisons use purchasing power parity. But the baskets of goods and services that they are based on vary. The Manhattan Institute has a chart from Chris Conover that compares the results for U.S. health care spending with the rest of the OECD using the GDP purchasing power parity used by the OECD with a different basket of goods that he terms health purchasing power parity.[read more]

We needn’t read another market forecast or research report to know: Cloud computing is poised to help revolutionize nearly every aspect of modern healthcare. Likewise, we don’t have to dip into our RSS feeds to realize significant challenges to broad adoption of cloud within the sector remain — not least of which are regulatory hurdles and security concerns. But while its widespread application has yet to be seen, it’s important to consider how cloud is already making a difference at a much smaller, more personal scale — by improving the lives of patients in need.[read more]

Lawrence Sherman on ePatients and eCME

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Lawrence Sherman since we first met on the digital health conference circuit. I want to thank him for taking the time to answer a few questions for you, about online Continuing Medical Education, ePatients, and more.[read more]