It was announced during this week’s HIMSS conference that Verizon, Motorola and BoxTone are teaming up to develop secure solutions for Android-based devices and applications with the aim of making the platform suitable for health IT implementation.

The jointly created offering leverages BoxTone’s automated “Enterprise Mobility Management” (EMM) software platform on select Motorola devices,such as the DROID RAZR and DROID RAZR MAXX smartphones, as well as DROID XYBOARD 10.1 and 8.2 tablets, all of which leveraging Verizon’s 4G LTE network.  As such, healthcare organizations can now “reliably deploy Android-based mobile devices and apps that are designed to help them meet strict compliance requirements, including privacy measures outlined in the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).”

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The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have published a new proposed rule for Stage 2 Meaningful Use that would stipulate that mobile devices that retain patient data after a clinical encounter — such as laptops, smartphones and tablets — have default encryption enabled.

Many of the recent high-profile data breaches involving sensitive health information had to do with lost or stolen mobile devices, which has brought device security and proper encryption into the spotlight.  ”We agree that this is an area of security that appears to need specific focus,” the NPRM for Stage 2 Meaningful Use states.  “Recent HHS analysis of reported breaches indicates that almost 40% of large breaches involve lost or stolen devices.  Had these devices been encrypted, their data would have been secured.”

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Though last year’s Data Design Diabetes Challenge just wrapped up not too long ago, the 2012 edition is already getting under way.

During the Care Innovations Summit in Washington D.C. recently, Dennis Urbaniak — VP of Sanofi — announced the 2012 challenge with this year’s focus on “driving innovation in the quality, delivery, and cost of diabetes care.”  The mobile application “Ginger.io” won last year’s challenge.

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The Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), the largest in the nation, has announced a partnership with AT&T’s Healthcare Community Online to provide a highly-secure, scalable and flexible clinical interface integration platform.

IHIE covers more than ten million patients, more than 19,000 physicians, and over 80 facilities, and currently has more than four billion pieces of clinical data in its repository — delivering three million highly-secure health transactions daily.  It works with hospitals, long-term care facilities, clinics and physician practices to ensure that health information is where it needs to be, when it needs to be there to help improve care coordination and patient outcomes.

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A new initiative developed by the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s Office of the Chief Privacy Officer, working with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights was launched recently to better understand the privacy and security implications of processing healthcare data via mobile devices.

The goal of the new initiative is to develop “an effective and practical way to bring awareness and understanding to those in the clinical sector to help them better secure and protect health information while using mobile devices.”

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A new report out of the U.K is praising the telehealth program sponsored by the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA) — which is the largest telehealth project in the world — while also asking the question of why telehealth hasn’t gained more momentum and adoption across the U.S. healthcare system.

The new report, published by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS), touts the VHA’s telehealth program as a prime example of how telehealth services should be rolled out on such a large scale.  Patients enrolled in the program — most of whom have chronic conditions such as heart failure, COPD, hypertension, diabetes, and post-traumatic stress disorder — receive free telemonitoring equipment and attention from care coordinators who teach them how to manage their own care.

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ID Experts, a Portland-based provider of data breach solutions, has published a new report entitled “Top 11 Trends for 2012 in Healthcare Data,” with many of which relating to mobile access to healthcare information and the security risks involved.

Before looking ahead to 2012, ID Experts offered their summary of the last 12 months by saying “2011 was the year when most physicians had mobile devices, when healthcare became one of the most-breached industries, and the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) cracked the whip with investigations and multi-million-dollar fines for organizations that didn’t meet their patient privacy obligations.”

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