Mobile

Insurers looking to compete in the ever-changing healthcare marketplace will continue to focus on technology in 2013 both as a means of improving payment models and partnerships with provider groups and also as the industry looks to make the transition to consumer-focused products it will offer on health insurance exchanges.

Since its launch in 2011, Rock Health has made its mark in the healthcare field by ushering a number of innovative ideas from the drawing board to the marketplace. The digital health startup incubator has been a fixture at the past two mHealth Summits, and is part of the reason that funding for digital health companies jumped some 45 percent in the past year.

The five most recent CIOs of the Year look into the future and imagine what healthcare IT will look like in 10 years. What they see ahead, they say, is both challenging and exciting.

EHR implementation, meaningful use and compliance are the top three healthcare CIO priorities for 2013, according to a study released Feb. 4 by Level 3.

Consumers aren't the only ones using mobile apps to improve their health. Their doctors are using them, too. A recent study conducted by Epocrates indicates physicians are accessing drug information at the point of care, often through a mobile medical app, to make sure the drugs they're prescribing aren't harming their patients. That, says the San Mateo, Calif.-based developer of online reference tools, amounts to more than 27 million potentially dangerous drug interactions avoided each year.

To curb a common cause of faulty healthcare -- "use of the pen" -- hospitals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have turned to voice technology, a move welcomed by clinicians.

"The singularity is near," says Ray Kurzweil, author, inventor, futurist and entrepreneur, who announced this past December he would be joining Google as director of engineering, with unlimited resources for researching artificial intelligence.

Mobile health is one of the more transformative developments in healthcare, according to Patricia Abbott, associate professor of nursing at the University of Michigan, School of Nursing, Division of Nursing Business and Health Systems. "The real winners will be the ones who grab on in the front end, and don't wait," she says.

There's a new app that can help caregivers and clinicians monitor the heart rate and respiratory activity of a patient; it's called SecuraFone, powered by Hermosa Beach, Calif.-based SecuraTrac.

Some fear mobile healthcare could replace the need for doctors in some cases, but according to Patricia Mechael, executive director of the mHealth Alliance, mHealth will only help doctors make better decisions. It won't replace them.