Markets, framework launch, tablet thoughts
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| Beth Walsh, Editor, CMIO |
The market for healthcare-related software apps for use in mobile devices has grown and will continue to grow quickly, according to market researcher Kalorama Information, which reported that the market for mobile medical apps was worth about $150 million in 2011.
“Not only is the medical community using smartphones and their applications for basic work, but it’s reporting the use of smartphones to perform some of the work that would have previously been done on a desktop or laptop computer.”
Meanwhile, between 2011 and 2013, U.S. healthcare spending is projected to grow at least 4 percent, on average—slightly above the historically low growth rate of 3.8 percent in 2009, according to an article published June 12 in Health Affairs.
“Preliminary data suggest that growth in consumers’ use of health services remained slow in 2011, and this pattern is expected to accelerate to 7.4 percent as major coverage expansions from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act begin,” wrote Sean P. Keehan, senior economist in the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and colleagues.
Also this week, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) announced the launch of its new standards and interoperability framework, Health eDecisions. The mission of the initiative is to promote a sustainable ecosystem that drives increasing interoperability and standards adoption as well as create a collaborative, coordinated, incremental standards process that is led by the industry in solving “real world problems.”
Currently, there is a lack of widely accepted, implementable standards, ONC stated. “Even within a vendor, clients cannot always exchange content with each other,” ONC’s presentation slides from the launch read. “Healthcare systems with successful implementations of clinical decision support are unable to share their proven interventions with others in an importable format, even if they wished it.”
Another highlight this week was our continuing coverage of the annual meeting of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM). One of the most popular stories was about the advantages and disadvantages of tablets to use them in a powerful way, said Carl Miller, MD, of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, during his presentation.
Tablets are a disruptive technology in medical imaging, according to Miller, who offered a number of reasons behind the power of the tablet. “Mobile technology is creating new classes of medical imaging consumers beyond radiologists,” he said. Medical imaging consumption is moving beyond image-intense specialists such as orthopedists and emergency medicine physicians to primary care physicians and physician extenders and ultimately patients.
When Johns Hopkins purchased iPads (Apple) for its 40 radiology residents, the institution was soon overwhelmed by demand from clinicians for image access on the iPad. Miller and colleagues solved the dilemma by deploying an HTML5 web viewer to enable widespread image viewing.
We look forward to bringing you the latest news affecting CMIOs and the healthcare industry next week.
Beth Walsh
CMIO Editor
bwalsh@trimedmedia.com
Beth Walsh,
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.