Kaiser Permanente has announced the launch of its latest mobile initiative — a full featured “Health Management” app for iOS.

Like its other mobile offerings, the new app allows members to access many of the same tools already available via its “My Health Manager” tool on kp.org.  Members can email their providers, check lab test results, order prescription refills, manage appointments and more — all from their iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches.  This latest move comes on the heals of Kaiser making the largest electronic health record system in the world accessible via smartphones with the launch of its mobile-optimized website m.kp.org.

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It’s been revealed that more than $439M has been poured into 70 different Web 2.0 healthcare startups that develop mobile health apps and tools for online social networking and collaboration in 2011.

In 2010, a little more than $305M was raised for 43 different deals, meaning 2011 showed a 44% increase in dollars invested and a 63% increase in deals funded compared to 2010.  ”We are at the very early stages of an evolution in the entire healthcare system,” Jessica Canning, global research director for Dow Jones VentureSource, told InformationWeek Healthcare. “We are essentially witnessing the democratization of healthcare where detailed information is being collected both from healthy people as well as individuals trying to improve their physical wellness.”

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Back in December at the mHealth Summit, the Surgeon General’s office launched a challenge that called on mobile app developers to create apps in three different categories; healthy eating & nutrition; physical fitness/activity; and integrative health and well-being.

In the healthy eating category, joint winners were selected as “equally outstanding submissions,” including GoodGuide — an app that makes it easy to get the information you need about your food, personal care and household products to aid in making healthy decisions — as well as Fooducate, which uses barcode scanning to allow you to scan the products you buy to quickly get information on that food’s health value.

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Cambridge Consultants has designed new Bluetooth low energy (BLE) iPhone 4S applications, which may play a large role in the future development of the mobile health market. These apps have been developed to operate on CSR’s BLE devices, which Cambridge Consultants has worked to specialize with the company in order to create tools and device software that will be useful to those developers who are looking to create iOS and Mac OS applications.

BLE is aimed at the mHealth market as a means of establishing ultra-low power connectivity and data transfer. This can be used with applications, such as blood pressure monitors, which have been previously limited by power consumption, size, and compatibility constraints. In order to make this a reality, Cambridge Consultants aims to demonstrate how to optimize both the Bluetooth and mobile device performance within mHealth with these BLE applications.

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ChartLogic, a company known for its EHR suite that spans Electronic Medical Records, patient portals, billing/document management and patient education solutions, has announced a new voice recognition overlay technology designed for compatibility with all leading EHR systems.

Called “Stella,” the new solution works similar to Apple’s Siri personal assistant by leveraging the same type of cloud-based natural language processing (NLP) technology to “greatly speed workflow for physicians by enabling them to use iPads, iPhones and other mobile devices with their hospital’s EHR system.”  Voice recognition has long had a place in the healthcare space, and with the proliferation of mobile devices the concept is finally coming to fruition.

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New research published recently by the GSMA suggests the market for mHealth will produce a revenue opportunity worth more than $23B by 2017.

The findings come as part of a new report published recently called ‘Touching Lives through Mobile Health: Assessment of the Global Market Opportunity.’  Conducted by PwC for the GSMA, the report looks at the key challenges the healthcare industry is facing worldwide and the opportunity mobile technology provides in overcoming these challenges.

The report says that despite advancements in medical technologies and a general increase in income levels, healthcare continues to pose challenges of affordability, complexity and access across the world, while in contrast, mobile access is almost ubiquitous.  With the increasing penetration of smartphones and new and innovative ‘connected devices’, and the proliferation of Mobile Broadband networks and services worldwide, mobile will play a far greater role in healthcare in both developed and developing countries in the future.

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AT&T is continuing its large-scale mobile health initiative by announcing the introduction of its “Developer Center for mHealth,” which provides an open set of developer tools and infrastructure services to “streamline, accelerate and lower costs in the development, deployment and management of enterprise-grade mHealth applications.”

Launched as a beta version, the new developer center has the aim of providing an ecosystem where disparate applications can link together, at the direction of the healthcare consumer, to create a more complete, accessible, and personalized healthcare experience.

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