FDA To Regulate Mobile Healthcare Apps?

In the near future, the Food and Drug Administration could be in charge of monitoring your iOS devices, at least where healthcare is concerned. The FDA recently released a proposal that would allow it to regulate all smartphone and tablet applications relating to health and medical needs.

There are approximately 200 million medical apps in use, with the FDA predicting that 600 million will be available in the next few years. By 2015, the FDA expects that 500 million smartphone users across the world will be using some kind of healthcare app.

See the entire article at PDA Gadget.

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MTC's TrainerQuest Again a Top 20 New England Training Provider

MTC's TrainerQuest unit listed as one of the New England's busiest training providers...

http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2011/07/04/weekly3-New-Englands-19-busiest-IT-training-providers.html...

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Healthcare IT spending to hit $40B in 2011

 Healthcare IT spending is expected to reach $40 billion by the end of this year, according to a studyfrom market research firm RNCOS.

Much of that growth will come from spending on electronic health record (EHR) systems, mobile health applications and efforts to comply with new government standards.

Boosted by increased spending on healthcare software -- which is needed for the rollout of EHR systems -- the U.S. healthcare IT market is expected to grow at a rate of about 24 percent per year from 2012 to 2014, the study said. Spending on healthcare software rose 20.5 percent in the past year, from $6.8 billion in 2010 to a projected $8.2 billion this year, according to RNCOS.

Recent mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare IT market also point to growing private-sector interest in software, which will see sales grow at rate of more than 30 percent annually from 2012 to 2014, the report said.

The study attributed some of the increase in spending to the Heal...

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SMArt Challenges Developers to Build Web Apps for Healthcare

Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have launched a collaborative contest for developers to build health-related web applications, for a $5,000 prize. From their website:

Build a SMART App that provides value to patients, providers, or researchers using patient-level data delivered through the SMART API. Your app will be an HTML5 Web app that runs in the SMART Reference EMR, where it can access patient demographics, medications, laboratory tests, and diagnoses using Web standards. You could, for example, build a medication manager, a health risk detector, a laboratory visualization tool, or an app that integrates external data sources (e.g., PubMed, CDC statistics, environmental data, financial data) with patient records in realtime.

For more information go to the SmartPlatforms.org website at http://www.smartplatforms.org/challenge/....

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Boston in the mix for U.S. high-tech employment rankings

Boston ranks fourth among the largest high-tech employment in 2009 for U.S. cities, with its 219,800 high-tech workers, according to a TechAmerica Foundation report on the national high-tech industry.

The report, “Cybercities 2010: The Definitive Analysis of the High-Tech Industry in the Nation’s Top 60 Cities,” tracked employment, salaries, establishments, payroll, concentration of employees and wage differential in the high-tech industry in 60 cities.

Joining Boston in the top cities for high-tech employment were New York, Washington DC and San Jose/Silicon Valley, which all ranked higher than Boston. Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia and Houston rounded out the top 10.

Boston also nabbed a third-place ranking for top Cybercities for high-tech wages, averaging $102,200 and preceded only by West Coast rivals San Jose/Silicon Valley at $132,100 and San Francisco at $123,500. Boston’s wages average about 70 percent more than private sector wage, according to the report.

The Hub faired better than many other Cybercities in the report, in areas with the most high-tech jobs lost between 2008 and 2009; Boston lost 2,700 jobs in that time period, putting the city i...

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