Brian T. Horowitz

With all of the unstructured data in medical journals, doctors’ notes, radiology images and faxes, IT vendors have been developing technology to help the health care industry make sense of all the loose data. In 2012, vendors will continue to develop cloud databases and supercomputers such as IBM Watson to store and process large volumes […]

The next assignment for IBM’s Watson supercomputer is to evaluate treatments for cancer. Health insurer WellPoint, which is looking into real-life applications for Watson, has announced that a leading cancer institution in Los Angeles, Cedars-Sinai’s Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute, will provide expertise to the company on developing applications based on IBM’s Watson data-analytics machine. […]

A Florida doctor has invented a way to monitor patient pacemakers and defibrillators remotely from an Apple iPad in real time. Dr. E. Martin Kloosterman, director of the electrophysiology laboratory and chief of the cardiology department at Boca Raton Regional Hospital in Florida, developed the Remote-K-viewer to allow doctors to see direct readings from pacemakers […]

CDW Healthcare has inked a deal with the California Health Information Partnership and Services Organization (CalHIPSO) to provide the hardware and software doctors need to adopt electronic health records (EHRs) for their practices. CalHIPSO is one of 62 federally designated Regional Extension Centers (RECs). Under the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health […]

Adara Networks, a vendor that has provided IT services to the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, is targeting the health care space with its end-to-end virtualization offerings. The company manufactures enterprise service buses, which allow compatibility among software applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and lead to interoperability for electronic health records (EHRs). A […]

Microsoft says it has added compliance to the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and European Union data privacy regulations in its Office 365 cloud office-productivity platform. Under the HIPAA provisions in the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, companies must report data breaches within 30 days, and […]

Independa, a provider of remote-monitoring technology for the elderly, has introduced Artemis, a system of sensors that connect wirelessly to a cloud platform to monitor elderly patients’ health and activities. The company’s goal is for wireless technology to allow seniors to live as independently as possible in their homes or in assisted living. Independa demonstrated […]

IBM has introduced a new cloud analytics application to allow researchers to speed up their searches of massive amounts of patents and scientific journals to find information on pharmaceutical chemicals.Search algorithms in the IBM Strategic IP Insight Platform (SIPP), announced on Dec. 8, make extraction of drawings, figures and articles from scientific publications faster than […]

Microsoft and GE have announced they will form a joint venture in health care IT to build an interoperable platform that enables the management of patient populations and chronic diseases. The new company will inherit several existing health care products and their teams. Microsoft will contribute its experience in developing health IT platforms, while GE […]

Verizon Wireless will develop a new suite of digital health care products focused on treating and preventing chronic conditions such as diabetes and chronic heart failure, the company announced at the 2011 mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C. It also unveiled projects with the insurer WellPoint and telehealth provider Zipnosis to focus on virtual care. The […]

The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) in Ottawa, Ontario, has announced it will use Aruba Networks’ WiFi Mobile Virtual Enterprise (MOVE) to connect 3,000 Apple devices at the medical facility, including iPads, iPhones and iPod Touch units. TOH is the largest acute care hospital in Canada with 1,163 beds, 11,967 staff members, 1,159 attending physicians and 3,886 […]

Qualcomm has announced it will form a new subsidiary, called Qualcomm Life, to manage the development of the company’s mobile health platforms. The new company, formerly known as Qualcomm Wireless Health, will focus on connecting mobile devices through machine-to-machine (M2M) technology. M2M connects remote-monitoring devices through wireless connections. Qualcomm announced the new subsidiary at the […]