Patients are starting to expect healthcare to come to them in real time, and they no longer trust that the doctor knows everything. 

Before AliveCor’s much-buzzed-about iPhone ECG even received FDA clearance late last year, many in healthcare had already christened it a disruptive innovation. Now that it’s actually on the market, we’re hearing stories that prove their case.

Don Jones, vice president of global strategy and market development for Qualcomm Life, told three such stories today at HealthBeat2013 in San Francisco. (Full disclosure: the telecommunications giant’s Qualcomm Life Fund has invested in AliveCor’s technology.)

The first involved a...

Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak

The directors of the board at Medtronic must be fist bumping right now at how good their decision to hire an outsider - Omar Ishrak- as CEO has turned out to be.

The man, who took the top job in mid 2011 clearly tasked with a turnaround, just delivered 4% growth in Medtronic's fiscal fourth quarter at a time when most large medtech companies are showing sales declines. And he delivered it despite the negative impact of foreign...

When the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPAA, was passed in 1996, AOL was just beginning to crawl and the iPhone was just a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye. But with advancing technology and changing caregiver circumstances, the question of who gets to see medical records is one that is constantly evolving.

Apps like Snapchat, where an image can be taken on a phone, sent quickly, and deleted after a certain amount of time, could bring new ways for doctors to more accurately diagnose by getting a second opinion. Updated networks such as Samsung’s proposed 5G could make diagnosis easier from remote places. And as ACOs are looking towards mobile devices for help in getting the best results in the face of the Affordable Care Act, HIPAA remains an issue as to consider.

The HIPAA Security Rule, which was finalized in 2003, states that any organization that is responsible for information has to ensure confidentiality, integrity,...

A new report published by the Canadian Health Policy Institute has found that Canada's average per capita expenditure on medical devices between 2006 and 2011 was $168 far below the average per capita expenditure of its southern neighbor that stood at $318.

Still, over five years, Canada's per capita expenditure on medical devices grew nearly at the same rate as that of the U.S. It jumped 34.3 percent from $136 in 2006 to $183 five years later.

But the U.S. wasn't the country that took the top spot in terms of the five-year increase in per capital medical device expenditure. Switzerland saw its per capita expenses shoot up 55.5 percent in the same period to $445 in 2011 from $286 in 2006.

The purpose of the report, which compared Canada's data with 65 other countries, was to determine whether expenses on medical devices in Canada is to be blamed for fast-growing healthcare costs overall. The author...