According to an announcement from the Front Porch Center for Innovation and Wellbeing, one of Southern California’s largest not-for-profit providers of retirement living communities and affordable housing, SMS messages are helping seniors to remember to take their medication.

The non-profit organization has long argued that innovation plays a vital role in enhancing well-being for older adults. Now they have more proof than ever to back up that assertion.

The organization just announced the successful results from its “Minding Our Meds: Demonstrating Senior Medication Adherence with Cell Phone Texting Reminders” pilot project.

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According to an announcement from the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC has just adopted rules requiring wireless carriers and certain other text messaging providers to send an automatic “bounce-back” text message to consumers who try to text 911 where text-to-911 service is not available.

The FCC says the measure is designed to protect the public by substantially reducing the risk of consumers sending a text message to 911 and mistakenly believing that 911 authorities have received it.

“Instead, consumers will receive an immediate response that text-to-911 is not supported and to contact emergency services by another means, such as by making a voice call or using telecommunications relay services (if deaf, hard of hearing, or speech disabled) to access 911,” the announcement reads.
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Although cutting edge technologies and software-based solutions continue to exert profoundly positive influence on the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of modern healthcare, a stubborn reliance upon outdated technology is costing hospitals billions of dollars each year.

Surprisingly, “archaic communication technology” like pagers are among the biggest culprits of modern waste.

Physicians and nurses working in hospitals waste an average of 46 minutes a day when they use beepers to exchange information about patients, rather than modern alternatives like texting on smartphones, according to a new study by technology research firm Ponemon Institute.

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While the global impact of mHealth advancements is already visible, nowhere is the potential for mobile health more promising than in Africa.

In particular, mHealth applications and text messaging services have the ability to save more than one million lives across the continent by 2017.

PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates in a recent report that mobile health can aid in the treatment or prevention of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and even pregnancy-related conditions.

“Many of the deadly conditions are relatively simple to treat, prevent or contain. SMS reminders to check stock levels at health centers have shown promising results in reducing stock-outs of key combination therapy medication for malaria, TB and HIV,” the report reads.

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For 13 years, mobileStorm has been an industry-leading veteran of email, mobile, and social communication. But the company has also led the charge for mHealth patient engagement in the United States.

To that end, on Tuesday mobileStorm announced its release of the newest version of its healthcare messaging platform. In the process, mobileStorm also unveiled a host of new capabilities that promise to dramatically extend messaging for patient engagement.

mobileStorm for Healthcare clients and partners can engage in relevant messaging and meaningful dialogs with their members. mobileStorm for Healthcare provides the ability to create and execute complex, condition-based, wellness programs, across multiple messaging channels.

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Telefonica Digital has confirmed its acquisition of a controlling stake in a major Brazilian healthcare provider – Axismed, Brazil’s largest chronic care management company.

Financial terms surrounding the agreement have not yet been made public.

Brazil, as the evidence continues to suggest, is not only a major market for mobile technologies today, it’s also a market wide open to mHealth expansion.

“The market potential for remote patient management in Brazil is significant,” says Matthew Key, Chief Executive of Telefónica Digital. “The structure, the potential and the maturity of the market and the important role of private health care providers means that Brazil could take a lead globally in rolling out these services. With Axismed, we can deliver a complete end-to-end solution to the market, helping to improve quality of life for patients with chronic conditions.”

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The University of Kansas School of Medicine out of Wichita conducted an interesting study recently that asked physicians at pediatric hospitals what form of communication they prefer for “brief communication” while on the job.

Out of 106 physicians polled, 27 percent named texting their preferred method, compared to 23 percent that favored hospital-issued pagers and 21 percent that said face-to-face conversation.  Among the survey pool, 57 percent reported sending or receiving work-related text messages.  “We are using text messaging more and more to communicate with other physicians, residents and even to transfer a patient to a different unit,” lead investigator Dr. Stephanie Kuhlmann said in an AAP press release.  “The way that physicians are communicating appears to be shifting away from the traditional pager method.  Personally, I probably get 50 to 100 text messages during a shift,” she added.”

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