Verizon Wireless and remote health management provider BL Healthcare have demonstrated a 4G LTE version of a high definition video-enabled telemedicine platform.

The exhibition of BL’s TCx-I Healthcare Access Terminal enabled for Verizon’s 4G LTE-enabled network took place at the Consumer Electronics Show from Jan. 6-9.

As part of BL’s HD video-enabled platform, the company allows caregivers and patients to hold medical telemetry sessions using multipoint HD video conferencing.

In a video demonstration at CES, John Sharood, BL’s COO, said the company designed the terminal’s interface for the elderly or “anyone who can touch a button.”

The terminal can receive medical data from nearby FDA-approved Bluetooth devices and hold videoconferences with a caregiver or doctor.

During these sessions, patients can link in family members at the same time.

“There have been traditional telemedicine systems for a number of years, but what we’re doing with this particular telemedicine system is combining the medical telemetry and the videoconferencing capabilities in a novel way,” Sharood told eWEEK.

The platform also incorporates care pathways that are programmable and configurable for various patients, he explained.

The telemedicine technology allows doctors to view data such as EKGs while holding a videoconference with the patient. It can also connect devices such as blood pressure monitors, scales, pulse readers, peak flow meters and glucometers.

“BL Healthcare has introduced an integrated platform that is FDA 510K certified and includes functionality such as embedded multipoint videoconferencing, multimedia support, instant messaging, real-time alerts, and the ability to communicate with multiple wired and wireless vital sign measurement and peripheral medical devices,” David Westrom, BL’s vice president of strategy and business development, wrote in a company white paper.

Verizon provides an environment for BL and other companies to test new products under development at the LTE Innovation Center, based in the Boston area.

“We’ve provided a place to test, consult with our network folks, their expertise, but it is a BL product,” Debra Lewis, a spokesperson for Verizon Wireless, told eWEEK.

The carrier’s 4G LTE network launched on December 5 in 38 metropolitan areas and 60 commercial airports.

Opened in 2008, the mission of the LTE Innovation Center is to “establish and facilitate a multidisciplinary, collaborative community that rapidly develops tomorrow’s LTE nontraditional market-driving products and services using the advanced broadband capabilities of Verizon Wireless’ next generation network,” Verizon states on its Web site.

A 3G version of the Healthcare Access Terminal, which debuted in early 2010, is FDA approved and available on both Verizon and Sprint, Sharood told eWEEK.

Arrival of the 4G LTE version awaits FDA clearance, he added.

“One of the things that really stands out about the 4G LTE experience is just the incredible bandwidth that you get and the quality of the videoconferencing you’re able to execute along with the telemetry,” Sharood said.

The low latency of Verizon’s LTE network could make such remote health monitoring work well on the network, Verizon’s Lewis noted.

“Health care is potentially one of those industries that could see value in seeing solutions on a 4G LTE network,” she said. “Telemedicine is obviously very popular and could be a very real world application that takes advantage of LTE.”

Of American wireless users, one-third currently use Verizon’s 4G LTE Mobile Broadband network, according to the carrier. The company hopes its entire 3G coverage area will use 4G LTE within three years.

Not to be outdone, at CES AT&T launched its own 4G LTE network, which the carrier says will begin operating in mid-2011.

The City of Seoul, South Korea, the Community Chest of Seoul, Korea Telecom (KT), MacroEye and Qualcomm—through its Wireless Reach initiative—are expanding the Seoul Family Helper program. The project provides mobile devices to caregivers and senior citizens to provide health care related support. The pilot project received positive evaluations from participants and is now being adopted by the City of Seoul as one of its budgeted welfare services in 2010. The pilot involved 40 caregivers and 400 elderly participants, and it is now going to include 500 caregivers and 5,000 participants.

The Seoul Family Helper program offers services to senior citizens through a team of caregivers referred to as “helpers.” These helpers visit participants in their homes and facilitate any health related support that is needed.

Funded by Qualcomm through its Wireless Reach initiative and managed by the Community Chest of Seoul, this project and service are supplemented by the City of Seoul, KT and MacroEye. The MacroEye SHOWCare device enabled by KT’s 3G network allows helpers to aid seniors more effectively.

Services and applications include automatic reception that provides direct access to a helper by allowing senior citizens to be heard and seen by the caregiver even when they are unable to reach the device. Direct access devices are programmed for direct dialing to the Seoul Family Helper helpline. By pushing one button, the participant is automatically connected to the center’s helpline. Remote functionality services enable helpers to establish personalized communications with senior citizens using video, photos and other applications. This functionality allows helpers to check on the health and well-being of participants without having to wait for a scheduled visit.

The KT SHOWCare Monitoring System uses Qualcomm’s mirasol display which is suited to benefit the elderly participants within the Seoul Family Helper program. Based on reflective technology, mirasol displays use significantly less energy than traditional displays which enables low power consumption and extended battery life for the SHOWCare device. In addition, the bistable nature of the mirasol display allows for near-zero power usage in situations where the display image is unchanged. This allows caregivers to aid participants in placing the device in a stationary setting and leaving it for extended periods of time without having to worry about charging the battery. The display’s nature-inspired design also provides viewing in nearly all broad spectrum lighting environments, including bright outdoor sunlight, meaning that images can be seen in a wide range of participant environments. Furthermore, mirasol display technology’s rapid refresh rate makes it suitable for video and multimedia, allowing communications with senior citizens using video and photos.

“South Korean society has preserved a strong tradition of family bonds and responsibility,” said Young Koo Cha, senior VP and president of Qualcomm Korea. “Qualcomm is pleased to enable key services and applications for senior citizens and their caregivers using mobile broadband technology.”

“Demand for elderly social welfare programs is increasing as the Korean population ages and grows in number,” said Byoung-ho Kang, director of Senior Citizen’s Welfare Division of the City of Seoul Family Helper Program. “This collaboration with Qualcomm allows caregivers to stay connected in between home visits and monitor the well-being of their patients when they need it most.”

“Through the expansion of this program, low income and/or disabled senior citizens in South Korea are better able to lead healthy, independent lives,” said Dong-soo Kim, president of the Community Chest of Seoul. “These devices provide an important service by allowing consistent contact with helpers, which addresses feelings of loneliness and social exclusion.”

Technology is increasingly mobile. Telehealth is on the cusp of a major boom. The federal government is pouring billions of dollars into health IT. Put the pieces together and it’s no surprise that so many big companies see tremendous growth potential in mobile healthcare.

Even during this traditionally slow Thanksgiving week, chip-maker Intel comes out with an announcement promoting the growth its remote pateint monitoring system, Intel Health Guide. And that wasn’t even the biggest piece of mobile healthcare news to hit this week. No, that honor belongs to telecommunications giant Verizon Communications, which on Monday unveiled its Telehealth Collaboration Services initiative, part of a relatively new business unit called Verizon Connected Healthcare.

It’s a two-pronged strategy, according to Nancy Green, Verizon’s managing principal for healthcare, who spoke with FierceMobileHealthcare on Monday. The patient-centric part of the equation will focus on traditional telehealth services such as remote consultation, while other services will provide technology for continuing medical education and, increasingly, virtual encounters between management of hospitals, physician practices, laboratories and government agencies. “Verizon is moving beyond the communication side [of healthcare] to the business-process side,” Green says. She envisions the latter group of applications to include research and development, grand rounds and simply multi-site business meetings.

Verizon won’t divulge many details just yet, but Green promises an announcement in the first quarter of 2010 about cloud-based telehealth connectivity. The company, which is a member of the Continua Health Alliance, also is looking at home-based remote patient monitoring, and news about so-called body-area networks is “in the works,” Green says.

Earlier this year, Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications and British telecom Vodafone Group, formed a wireless venture with equipment-maker Qualcomm. Brace yourselves for other announcements by major telecommunications companies. After all, there’s plenty of money to be made in health IT. – Neil

Can detect whether medication has been taken, or predict heart attacks
By Duncan Geere

Swallowable pills that contain sensors could be just around the corner. A company called Proteus Biomedical is working with Qualcomm to build both pills and patches that can monitor your vital signs and send them to a mobile device.

The idea is that those with chronic health problems can be kept an eye on – these “smart” pills can tell if you’re taking your medication or not, and notify either you or your doctor/nurse. However, the pills and patches can also be used as more of a preventative option – one of the first signs of cardiac arrest is a buildup of body liquid and the sensors embedded inside can detect this.

The sensors contained in the pills and patches can monitor temperature, motion, respiration and your heart rate. The pills have a “wet battery” that’s activated when it hits your stomach, and the patch contains an external battery. Both connect wirelessly to an external unit, like a mobile phone, which then uploads your data to a private database on the web.

The company says that it’s seeing interest from healthcare organizations across the world, but that the UK’s NHS was yet to bite. Developing countries like China are expected to be the first to try out these new technologies, as they don’t have the established infrastructure of more developed nations.

Andrew S. Grove, the 73-year-old former chief executive of Intel, has long brought a piercing intellect and a personal passion to the subject of health care.

In 1996, Mr. Grove famously wrote a cover story in Fortune magazine, “Taking on Prostate Cancer,” which chronicled his personal research, after he found out he had cancer, into the state of the art of treatments. The piece, most of all, displayed his logical assault on a problem, combining the risk-benefit analysis of a businessman and the technical acumen of a scientist, who is the author of a widely used text, “Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices.” And after Mr. Grove was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at 64, he set up a foundation to support research in the disease.

Mr. Grove will deliver a presentation on Wednesday morning at a symposium in San Francisco, “Translating Technology into Cost-Effective Healthcare.” (His talk will be Webcast live, about 9:10 a.m. to 10 a.m. West Coast time, and 12:10 p.m. to 1 p.m. East Coast time.)

He talked about his new mission during an interview on Tuesday. Mr. Grove is focusing on the shortcomings in the medical innovation pipeline. “Why doesn’t technology give us medical treatments,” he asked, “that are better, faster, cheaper? A system that works, heaven forbid, like the chip world.”

An answer, Mr. Grove says, lies in a concept called “translational medicine.” For years, the National Institutes of Health has been funding research projects into translational medicine, and definitions seem to vary. Mr. Grove, characteristically, offers a crisp one. “It’s the art of taking laboratory, one-off discoveries and putting them into mass production — in higher volume and at lower cost than previous treatments.”

To promote the concept, Mr. Grove is advocating a new master’s degree program in translational medicine. And he’s prodding the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, to begin offering such a joint-degree program.

The degree would combine the talents mainly of the engineering and medical schools, with some business know-how tossed in. Students with engineering backgrounds would take tailored courses in anatomy, physiology and cell biology. Students from the medical school would take courses in project management, the engineering process and clinical trial design. Core courses, taken by all students, would have a business-school flavor, including cost-accounting, organizational behavior, and navigating regulatory and patent laws.

Mr. Grove looks at the challenges surrounding Parkinson’s disease as a field that could benefit one day from the practical, multidisciplinary approach of translational medicine. Modern neurological study, he noted, weighs heavily on the engineering tools of fluid mechanics and materials behavior. There are “substantial similarities” in the underlying engineering with the work of petroleum engineers, for example. “So engineers who are tired of studying seepage of oil in porous rock formations could make the jump to bioengineering,” Mr. Grove said.

Someday, Mr. Grove said, the daunting challenge of drug delivery to specific sections of the brain to prevent the degradation of the brain, and even reverse the decline, will be solved — the key to fighting Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. “That kind of cure will start as a $200,000 procedure, but it should quickly become a $30,000 procedure,” Mr, Grove said, noting that driving that cost curve down is the work of translational medicine.

Mr. Grove has a target size for a joint program involving the two California universities, about 100 students graduating annually from a two-year program. If successful, he is hopeful the model would spread.

Matthew Tirrell, chairman of the bioengineering department at Berkeley, has talked to Mr. Grove about the concept and is enthusiastic. But he said some market research with potential employers would have to be done before going ahead. “What will drive the success of this over the long term will be placement,” Mr. Tirrell said. “Can they get jobs?”

At UCSF, Sarah Nelson, a professor radiology and biomedical imaging, said the idea was “extremely intriguing.” There have been initial discussions with Mr. Grove and university professors. But most of those conversations have been with people from the engineering disciplines. “As the idea progresses,” Ms. Nelson said, “it needs more input from the medical side.”

* Fund to focus on technological development

* GE making changes to employee healthcare plan (Adds details)

NEW YORK, Oct 21 (Reuters) – General Electric Co (GE.N) is launching a $250 million investment fund intended to spur development of new technologies in the healthcare industry, the chief executive of the largest U.S. conglomerate said on Wednesday.

GE is in the midst of a major push in healthcare intended to “improve access and drive technologies that would improve access not just for the U.S., but globally,” said CEO Jeff Immelt at a press event in New York.

The company is also making changes to the healthcare plan it offers its employees, Immelt said.

GE Healthcare makes medical imaging equipment like ultrasound and CT-Scan machines and provides consulting services to hospitals.

GE’s healthcare arm, once one of its fastest-growing businesses, has slowed in the past few years, in part due to U.S. regulatory changes that made its pricey medical imaging devices less profitable for hospitals.

The Fairfield, Connecticut-based company has responded by focusing on developing lower-priced gear, with an eye towards boosting its presence in emerging economies such as China and India, which the company expects to grow more quickly in the coming years.