Doctor and senior woman wearing facemasks during coronavirus and flu outbreak. Virus protection. COVID-2019..

» David R. Hunt, M.D., FACS, the medical director of Health IT Adoption and Patient Safety in the Office of the National Coordinator, urged uniform standards for health IT at the LTPAC HIT Summit in Baltimore. Patient safety is “completely embedded in the concept of a shared vision of interoperability,” he explained. It is “indistinguishable from the delivery of quality healthcare.” However, providers should resist the urge to consider the reduction of errors as being the same as mitigation of harm.

» A former nursing home worker fired for a Facebook status update has not succeeded in an appeal to the Idaho Supreme Court. The language of the skilled nursing facility’s social media policy was an important factor in the June ruling. The worker wrote he wanted to “slap the ever loving bat snot out of a patient” at the 60-bed Desert View Care Center in Buhl, the Twin Falls Times-News reported. 

» EYEBRIDGE, a mobile app from EyeBridge Limited expected to launch in October, will provide 24/7 on-demand remote visual assistance for people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired, the company said. Within 30 seconds of opening the EYEBRIDGE app, a live operator connects to the customer and his or her smartphone’s rear-facing camera, ready to provide video assistance with navigation and product identification, written word interpretation or device operation.

» A new method called “Facelock” may solve the issue of forgotten passwords. Users can nominate a set of faces well known to them, such as a favorite author or musician. By combining faces from a user’s domains of familiarity, the system is able to create faces known only to that user. The user is asked to say which faces in a grid look familiar, not to identify them. 

» Researchers at Intermountain Medical Center in Utah have developed smartphone technology to screen patients for certain adrenal gland diseases, including Cushing’s syndrome. They developed a saliva test that uses a smartphone and attached device to feed in the results. The app quantifies and interprets the results of the salivary cortisol assay and gives results in five minutes.