Etisalat made a strong showing at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where it took home three awards for its telecommunication operations in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

With its Mobile Baby healthcare platform, Etisalat swept up two awards at the Congress. The Service for Women in Emerging Markets and Best Mobile Health Innovation awards were presented to the company for the success and scalability of its program.

Mobile Baby was created in conjunction with Qualcomm, D-Tree International, and Great Connection as a means of providing affordable healthcare solutions for anyone, no matter how remote their location. This program was first implemented in Tanzania, where it accompanied a 30 percent drop in maternal mortality rates.

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It’s been announced that Allscripts and MyCareTeam (MCT) have launched a new integrated diabetes management solution that will integrate the latter’s application with Allscript’s Enterprise EHR platform.

Patients will leverage “MCT-Clinical for Diabetes,” which after being combined with Allscript’s Electronic Health Records system, will transmit blood glucose readings directly from patient’s glucose meters, along with blood pressure, weight, vital signs, caloric intake and exercise to a central web-based database.  With the Allscripts integration, this data automatically connects to the Allscripts Enterprise EHR, and can create user-defined alerts that are routed to a diabetes educator, a care manager, a nurse, the patient’s primary care physician or, if serious enough, an endocrinologist.  This process facilitates remote monitoring and coaching, increases user compliance with protocols, and most important, based on early results from UMASS and other studies, reduces hospitalizations.

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It’s been announced that Polyglot Systems, who provides award-winning “Meducation” content to hard-to-reach patients through mobile web, apps and e-mail technology, has partnered with CellepathicRx to deliver its medication adherence solution through the latter’s mHealth platform.

Polyglot specializes in providing medication adherence solutions aimed at patients who have low health literacy or difficulty understanding English.  Through its Meducation content, patients and healthcare providers can access medication instructions that are written at a 5th to 6th grade reading level in any of over twelve languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean, Haitian Creole, Italian, French, Arabic, Russian, Bengali, Polish and others.  Instructions can also be printed in large fonts for those with impaired vision.  The solution even lets patients access online videos demonstrating proper medication use for medications that are especially hard to use and understand.

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Zephyr Technology, a provider of various remote monitoring solutions, announced today that it now supports Qualcomm’s recently introduced 2Net Hub and mHealth platform — a cloud-based connectivity solution for healthcare information.

Zephyr’s technology is a perfect fit for Qualcomm’s new connectivity platform, as it’s developed a central mobile health portal that receives aggregated bio-data from the company’s bluetooth-based “BioHarness” mobile medical device.  The device collects vital sign information and communicates by using Android Smartphones to send the data back to the Mobile Health Portal.

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Though Qualcomm has always had a keen interest in healthcare, the tech giant is getting even more serious with the launch of a new wholly-owned subsidiary focused solely on wireless healthcare — Qualcomm Life.

In addition, the company has launched a new back-end wireless connectivity platform to further facilitate its efforts.  The new platform is akin to the one used by Amazon on its Kindle e-readers, and in fact, Qualcomm was the one that built it for Amazon.  Put simply, the new platform will allow medical device makers to include wireless connectivity in medical gear without worrying about paying for a data plan from a wireless carrier, integrating connectivity software or creating a secure technology system to collect and dispense medical data.  In essence, it tears down many of the connectivity barriers health IT companies and startups face when innovating within the healthcare space.

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Coinciding with the announcement by AT&T that it’s developing  a new mHealth Platform, the company put together an infographic that details some interesting stats on the mobile healthcare segment and outlines some of the tools the company is developing through its new platform initiative.

“Imagine a set of tools designed to help people control and access their health information better than ever before,” the company said in a blog post.  ”Today, we showcased a new platform that we’re developing that may someday do just that – The mHealth Platform.  It’s part of an ecosystem that we’re opening up to developers.”

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Consumer healthcare solutions provider, Sensei, has debuted a unique solution designed to provide rewards and other incentives to encourage consumers to live healthier lives and adhere to things like medication regimens and doctors’ appointments.

The new solution is called the “Sensei Rewards & Incentives Engine,” and is designed to “engage consumers with integrated, immediate and targeted savings to drive engagement and reinforce positive health behavior change.”  A growing trend in healthcare is providing incentives, whether simple or complex, to encourage people to enroll and participate in health programs.  It’s become especially popular with companies and organizations looking to keep their employees or members healthier in an effort to reduce time-off and overall company-sponsored healthcare costs.  It’s predicted that 62% of employers will adopt “outcomes-based incentives & rewards” by 2012.

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