NewsBytes, Part 2 — Chain Pharmacy, 6/25/12
DEERFIELD, Ill. — Walgreens in May named Alan London chief medical officer of Take Care Health Systems Consumer Solutions Group. In the newly created position, London will have leadership responsibility in building and maintaining external physician and health system relationships for Take Care Clinics while also providing strategic direction and leadership for the group’s service expansion, quality, clinical education and training, and collaborative practice agreement functions.
London is a family physician with more than three decades of experience in patient care delivery, healthcare strategy and business development, including 12 years at the Cleveland Clinic.
LEESBURG, Va. — RxAlly, a coalition of more than 22,000 pharmacies around the country, has appointed Peter Duran VP and chief privacy officer, responsible for ensuring that the group’s privacy practices comply with laws and regulations. Prior to that, Duran spent 15 years at Medco Health Solutions, where he helped build the company’s privacy program.
LONDON — Telemed Ventures has partnered with Walmart to deliver a managed visual collaboration solution for the retailer’s in-store medical clinics.
BSC Global enables remote video consultations between a patient and doctor through a life-like, virtual face-to-face video interface over a secure video network. The telemedicine technology will be implemented in Walmart’s retail medical clinics, which are operated by Telemed Ventures’ Smart Care Doc brand. Users of the BSC Global service have the ability to conduct telepresence-quality face-to-face interactions over the Internet using existing laptops, smartphones or tablets — making it a very affordable solution for patients, doctors and healthcare providers, the companies said.
NEW YORK — More patients are actively looking for and expecting to find mobile health solutions, according to the global Economist Intelligence Unit report released in June.
Roughly one-half of patients surveyed for the report, commissioned by PricewaterhouseCoopers, predict that mHealth will improve the convenience, cost and quality of their health care in the next three years. Meanwhile, 6-in-10 doctors and payers believe that its widespread adoption in their countries is inevitable in the near future.
The top three factors that would drive patients toward greater utilization of mHealth in managing their own healthcare — more convenient access (46%), lower healthcare costs (43%) and greater ability to manage individual health care (32%).