Ringful Health

Consumer Reports and Ringful Health empower patients with new Hospital Ratings app for iPhone, iPod & iPad

Atanasoff — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 20:51:36 +0000

This week Consumer Reports in collaboration with Ringful Health released a new app that empowers patients to view hospital quality ratings and compare hospitals in order to choose the best one for their treatment.

iMedicalApps posted the following review of the app: “Overall, this is a great application that takes complicated data and condenses it down to an easy to use format for patients. Patient’s don’t have to go through a magazine, or make haphazard searches on the internet, rather, they can find a great deal of content all within this app — easy to use, and presented in a simple fashion.”

You can read the full review here: http://www.imedicalapps.com/2011/08/consumer-reports-empowers-patients-hospital-ratings-app-iphone-ipad/

At Ringful Health we are happy to have the opportunity to work with a household brand such as Consumer Reports to advance our mission of engaging patients to take responsibility for their own health and wellness.

Stay tuned for more great products in the near future.

MSAA and Ringful Health Launch Mobile Phone App for the Multiple Sclerosis Community

Atanasoff — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 20:51:05 +0000

My MS Manager is the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America’s new mobile phone application, provided free of charge to individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) or their care partner to use on their iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Developed in conjunction with Ringful Health, My MS Manager is available now for download in the Apple iTunes Store .

This first-of-its-kind app for MS offers individuals a convenient and effective tool to manage the ever-changing course of the disease. “I am proud that MSAA is able to offer this innovative application to the MS community. My MS Manager provides a one-stop shop for an individual to not only monitor their MS, but also has the capability to include overall health information”, states MSAA President and CEO Douglas G. Franklin. “It is exciting for MSAA to be utilizing this new technology allowing us to help more people in more places.”

My MS Manager allows an individual to input and store:

• Comprehensive medical records

• Contact information of your healthcare team

• Descriptions of MS flare-ups, tracking their duration, frequency, and intensity

• Information about side effects and effective treatment strategies

• Important details essential to staying one step ahead of your MS

Michael Yuan, CEO of Ringful Health , is excited to be a part of this initiative to help the MS community. “We are happy to support MSAA’s efforts to educate and empower MS patients with tools that help them take more responsibility for their health and maintain continuous communication with physicians anytime and anywhere.”

For more information on My MS Manager , or any of the programs and services MSAA provides, please contact Amanda Bednar, public relations manager at (800) 532-7667, extension 122 or via email at abednar@msassociation.org . You may also visit www.msassociation.org/mobile to learn more about My MS Manager .

About MSAA
The Multiple Sclerosis Association of America is a national nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to enriching the quality of life for everyone affected by multiple sclerosis. MSAA offers programs and services including a toll-free bilingual Helpline (800-532-7667); informative publications including a magazine, The Motivator; website featuring MSi online educational videos; equipment distribution ranging from grab bars to wheelchairs; cooling accessories for heat-sensitive individuals; MRI funding and insurance advocacy; educational events and activities; Networking Program; Lending Library; and more.

About Ringful Health
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Ringful Health is a leader in providing patient-centered and evidence-based teamwork solutions to help hospitals and communities improve healthcare outcome, patient safety, and reduce cost through mobile and decision support technologies.

About Multiple Sclerosis
The most common neurological disorder diagnosed in young adults, multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system. This disorder damages or destroys the protective covering (known as myelin) surrounding the nerves, causing reduced communication between the brain and nerve pathways. Common symptoms include visual problems, overwhelming fatigue, difficulty with balance and coordination, and various levels of impaired mobility. MS is not contagious or fatal.

Meet us at ATA 2011 booth #937

Atanasoff — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 01:02:29 +0000

Ringful Health will be exhibiting at ATA 2011 – the largest international conference focusing exclusively on telemedicine. Our booth number is 937. It is located on the right side of the main track from the entrance, facing TATRC booth #837.

Come to Tampa, FL between May 1-3 to see some of our latest demos that we have never shown before!

HIMSS and Patient Engagement

Michael Yuan — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 04:19:51 +0000

John Moore at Chilmark Research wrote another insightful blog piece on his post-HIMSS impressions. John was disappointed that there are little talk about ACOs, and by the requirements of ACOs and Meaningful Use, patient engagements. In his words:

HIMSS and most vendors are still giving lip-service to patient engagement. Rather than seeing a slow rise in discussing how to engage consumers via HIT, this issue is something that few vendors bother mentioning and when they do, it is still with the old message of how to market to consumers with these types of tools rather than engaging consumers/patients as part of the care team.

That is inline with our observations. Like most enterprise IT departments, hospital IT is set up to address operational issues — not to provide strategic insights into the hospital’s overall goals. So, it is quite natural that they are very deep in building and certifying their EHRs to get government money these days. As a conference of healthcare IT and their vendors, the HIMSS rightfully reflects this.

However, that does NOT mean that the hospital clinical executives are oblivious to the challenges of ACO and patient engagement. In fact, hospitals are already under a lot of financial pressure to reduce un-scheduled re-admissions within 30 days from discharge. That is very ACO-like if you ask me. They have to do it through patient engagement. So, how do they do it? The IT department is too busy with EHR deployment! Many hospitals we know are taking the most expensive and potentially wasteful approach — hiring nurse case managers to follow up EACH PATIENT.

At Ringful Health, we thrive to build solutions for hospitals to better and more efficiently engage their post-discharge patients. Our solutions uses multi-modal communications to reach patients, incorporate evidence-based guidelines and contents, leverage automated rules and workflow engines, and fits into existing hospital teamwork frameworks (e.g., TEAMSTEPPS, HPI/HPC).

If you are a hospital executive clinician looking for a solution to better engage post-discharge patients, please get in touch with us!

Meet us at SXSW next month!

Michael Yuan — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:42:45 +0000

From last year’s SXSH to this year’s official health track in SXSW, healthcare IT, especially consumer driven healthcare, has become an increasingly important theme of the massive SXSW conferences. See below for the health track talks on

Sunday, March 13th
Monday, March 14th

Notice that all the talks on the 13th are in the Hilton Hotel, which is right across street from the Convention Center. I actually liked the hotel location better — it is more intimate and better furnished.

If you are coming to town, please drop us a note (email: michael AT ringful dot com) and we will show you some some local austinite favorite places to go to!

BTW, I will be speaking at SXSW this year again in the “Mobile Future 15″ sessions. My topic is How to get your app approved, which draws from own extensive experience battling Apple, BlackBerry, and Verizon app stores. It is 3/14 (pi day!!) 4:45pm at Ballroom E in the Austin Convention Center. Drop by when you get a chance!

Healthcare sector among top adopters of iPad

Atanasoff — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:33:41 +0000

The healthcare sector is among the top three industries seeing the heaviest adoption of the iPad for business use, according to data from Good Technology, a Redwood City-based provider of multiplatform enterprise mobility.

The data comes from an analysis of Good Technology’s user base, which includes more than 4,000 enterprise customers, whose iPad deployments range from one to more than 1,000 iPads.

Read more from Molly Merrill at Healthcare IT News.

Mobile healthcare key to improved minority outcomes

Atanasoff — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:29:27 +0000

Smartphones, health apps and other mobile health technologies may prove more valuable than a hospital-based EHR for improving communication with minority patients, according to a set of five studies, published by the American Health Information Management Association’s Foundation’s Perspectives in Health Information Management.

Read more from Sara Jackson at FierceMobileHealthcare.

From the Texas Tribune: Are Payment Reform, Texas Budget in Conflict?

Michael Yuan — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 21:12:54 +0000

by Emily Ramshaw, The Texas Tribune

Call it a primary care conundrum. On one hand, lawmakers are crafting legislation to make health care more affordable and effective through a series of programs to reward doctors and health care providers who achieve the best medical outcomes. On the other, they’re proposing meeting the state’s budget crunch by slashing Medicaid provider rates and eliminating funding for family practice medical residents — the same workforce they’re relying on to implement key parts of their reform.

“They’re completely contradictory policy objectives,” said Tom Banning, chief executive of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians. “To get the health care delivery system turned around, absent financial support, is like tilting at windmills.”

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who is championing the payment reforms in the Senate, doesn’t see a contradiction. The state stands to generate massive savings — and Texans will have far better health care, he said — if doctors and hospitals are paid for how well they treat patients, not for how many tests they run, or how many days they keep someone in the intensive care unit.

“Whether we’re sitting on a surplus or looking for savings, it doesn’t make any difference,” Dewhurst said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “We can’t afford, as a country or a state, to be spending a third of our entire budget on health care.”

Under the guidance of Dewhurst and Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Grapevine, the Senate approved legislation last session that would have created a variety of outcomes-based health care initiatives, from pay-for-performance pilot programs that provide incentives to doctors in the private market, to preventative care-focused “medical homes” for disabled and needy Texans on Medicaid and CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The measure died in the House — stuck behind an end-of-session voter ID stall-fest.

This session, with the estimated $15 billion to $27 billion budget shortfall on everyone’s minds, Dewhurst and Nelson are determined to get such legislation through. They believe such programs are in the best interest of patients. They are also keen to achieve the cost savings that reform could create, at least in theory. Dewhurst estimates those savings could be as much as 40 percent of health care spending overall and up to 28 percent of spending in hospital settings. “If we don’t come together on a change in our payment structure, on how we pay doctors and hospitals, we’re going to crowd out spending on essential public programs,” Dewhurst said.

But early House and Senate drafts of the proposed 2012-13 budget have not been kind to anyone, Nelson acknowledges, including primary care physicians. The House version eliminates all funding for the state’s Family Practice and Primary Care Residency programs, which received a combined $26 million this biennium. The Senate version cuts the programs by 29 percent and 45 percent, respectively. The House budget also wipes out all funding for the Physician Loan Repayment Program, which got $23 million this biennium to help relieve doctors who agree to work in underserved communities — the majority of them in family practice — of their medical school debt. The Senate version cuts a quarter of the program’s funding — nearly $6 million.

Meanwhile, both chambers have suggested cutting by 30 percent certain subsidies for training graduate medical students, an estimated $24 million hit over the next two years. And they’ve proposed slashing by 10 percent the payments paid to health care providers who treat Medicaid patients, a devastating blow to the primary care doctors who struggle to stay afloat at the current Medicaid rates. If these providers go the way of a growing number of doctors who refuse to accept Medicaid, Texas’ ever-growing population of needy patients will have few options for care — save the emergency rooms that are prohibited from turning them away, and drive everyone’s costs up.

“We’re spending so many health care dollars in emergency rooms, which is the most expensive place to get care,” Nelson said. “Clearly we need to rethink our whole philosophy and to increase our general practitioners.” In such a tough budget year, she added, “we have to make sure every dollar we’re spending on health care has a direct impact on people.”

Health and Human Services Commissioner Tom Suehs is hopeful that family practice doctors can be protected from the Medicaid rate cut. The state is already well short of its primary care needs. A January study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Texas would have the third-toughest time meeting the expected surge in new Medicaid enrollees — a result of population growth and the terms of federal health care reform — with its current primary care capacity, after Oklahoma and Georgia.

“I want to work with lawmakers to protect rates for primary care providers as much as possible,” Suehs said. “Maintaining access to preventive services will help us head off higher-cost medical care for many of our clients.”

But even if family practice doctors avoid the brunt of the rate cut, medical educators say the cuts to primary care residency programs could knock them out of operation. Dr. Clare Hawkins, the family medicine program director for San Jacinto Methodist Hospital in Baytown, said the roughly two-dozen family practice residency programs in Texas won’t make it through such cuts unscathed — and that those operating with the narrowest margins will be forced to shut their doors.

“If the Legislature wants a long-term solution to the rising cost of health care, it’s the primary care workforce that’s the solution,” Hawkins said. “This will end up decreasing the supply, and eliminating residencies that serve as social safety nets.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/dZs6Fw.

Big Data Day in Austin

Michael Yuan — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 07:36:55 +0000

“Big Data” is a red hot topic in technology today. With the great success of data-driven companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others, every company is now interested in unlocking the riches in the data they could collect (or already collected) from their users / customers. Internet clicks, location streams, shopping habits, status updates, Internet chats, stock trades — everything is now target of data mining.

However, collecting, managing, and making sense of vast amount of user data is no easy task. The need for frequent writes, flexible schema, and complex query makes it difficult to fit the data system into the traditional SQL relational data model. That has given rise to the “NoSQL” (i.e., Not Only SQL) movement to build “Big Data” systems.

While the most visible Big Data “web 2.0″ companies are on the west coast, Austin has proven to be a hot bed for the underlying technology behind “Big Data”. Local companies like DataStax and InfoChimps have been significant contributors to the movement. That is evident today at the first Austin “Data Day” conference. Several hundred data geeks showed up on a Sat for a full day of discussions on Cassandra, Hadoop, and other hot technologies. Cassendar 0.7′s capacity to support 2 BILLION columns per row left many of us quite bewildered to say the least! It is a great event — I am already looking forward to the next one! It is amazing to see the level of talent and developer interest represented in the Austin community!

At Ringful Health, our interest in Big Data is to drive healthcare research. In 2008, scientific journal Nature published a special issue on Big Data. It outlines how Big Data is revolutionalize different areas of scientific reaesrch with a focus on bio-medical research.

For Ringful Health, our research interest is mostly around Personalized Medicine and healthy behaviors. A mega trend in medicine today is to tailor medical interventions based on individual’s genomic makeup, exercise / healthy behavior patterns, environmental exposure, and continous vital sign monitoring. But in order to make personalized medicine work, a large amount of data must be collected from each individual and analyzed in real time for patterns. That is a classic Big Data problem. At Ringful Health, through our research collabortion with universities and hospitals, we are actively engaged in building the data infrastrure to support behavior informatics through personal data collected from automated accelerometers, GPS devices, and vital sign monitors. Stay tuned for more!

2011: Healthcare reform begins

Atanasoff — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:40:26 +0000

The healthcare reform is now an acting law and it is starting to impact our lives. Two important pieces of news came out immediately after the holidays. Seemingly unrelated, they are framing the picture of a new healthcare reality in the US from its oposite ends: .

One was the CBS report on January 7, 2011 that broke the shocking news of individuals receiving letters from their health insurance company informing them that the monthly premiums are suddenly, without prior warning jumping up as high as 60%. In one example the premium jumped from $271 each month to $431. The hike does not add any new coverage to the policy. It only reflects higher costs for the insurance company.

People tuned into the healthcare reform proceedings have been expecting these insurance premium hikes to occur. Majority of folks across the country however have been busy with their lives and will wake up to a big surprise in the coming days of 2011 when they receive a letter by their insurance company, just as the individuals interviewed in the CBS report. When that happens they will have to face the new reality and make a decision. Whether to:

Pay the higher monthly premium if they can afford it; or if they can’t afford it, cut other expenses and work harder.
Switch to a lower premium insurance plan that fits their existing budget. But lower premium means higher deductible. These folks will be paying a lot more out of pocket when they go to see a doctor. An ER visit for a cut that needs a few stitches costs north of $3,000.
Drop health insurance altogether. There are speculations that young, healthy people will consider this option at the risk of paying the full price of any potential medical bills.

For many Americans each of the options above is either bad or worse. None of the options sticks out as a path to a better future. Indeed the healthcare reform does not promise an instant gratification and relieve for everyone. Its hoping to achieve wide reaching results over time.

Yet there are a few early positive examples made possible by the reform. They put the higher insurance costs in perspective. One such example is a personal story published by Nancy Foster in her blog on January 6. She explains how her son of age 22 is now able to live a normal life because of the new healthcare law.

So how are things going to turn better for more people over time? This is where the second news report comes in.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announced that Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs and Medicaid Payments Have Already Been Issued by Two States. The first payments under the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program were issued by Oklahoma and Kentucky. Kentucky processed payment to the University of Kentucky‘s teaching hospital, University of Kentucky Healthcare. The first payment, $2.86 million, was one-third of the hospital’s overall expected amount for participating in the program. Oklahoma issued payments to two physicians at the Gastorf Family Clinic of Durant, OK, for $21,250 each, for having adopted certified electronic health records (EHRs). These incentive payments for the adoption of certified EHR technology are federally-funded under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

This announcement is important because it marks with actions and dollar signs, rather than talk and paper, the beginning of a long and hard effort by the government to improve healthcare quality and outcomes across the country, while reducing healthcare costs. Reduced healthcare costs will translate to reduced health insurance costs. That will in turn lead to better healthcare system for everyone, not just for certain demographics.

It remains to be seen how effective the healthcare reform will turn out and how long it will take to achieve results that benefit majority of Americans. However the time seems right. Its a perfect storm of an obsolete healthcare system spinning out of control, political will and action for change, rising wave of personal alertness and exploding technological innovation that enables everyone to take responsibility and participate in a meaningful way in a more effective and safer quality of care.