Edison Awards Recognizes M-Health Leader MedApps As 2011 Best New Product Finalist

Online, February 23, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Scottsdale, AZ-MedApps, Inc. (www.medapps.com), a leader in wireless remote healthcare monitoring (mHealth), has been named as a finalist for the prestigious 2011 Edison Awards' Best New Product in the Innovative Services: Health, Wellness & Safety Segment.

The awards, which recognize the ideals of the renowned American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who set the standards for measuring technological prowess and entrepreneurship, will be presented April 5 in New York City.

The awards were judged by a group of marketing professionals and academics in a comprehensive peer-review process that focused on Societal Impact, Marketplace Innovation and Success, Technological Innovation and Market Structure Innovation.

MedApps®, one of three remaining finalists in its category, provides an innovative wireless technology platform featuring products and services for the remote monitoring of patients with chronic conditions including diabetes, hypertension and congestive heart failure. The FDA-cleared MedApps System automatically collects health readings from popular retail medical monitors and forwards the data to the patient's electronic health record. MedApps has demonstrated that its remote monitoring solutions-which it describes as simple, flexible and mobile-can help drive down healthcare costs and stabilize or improve patient health through proactive healthcare delivery, resulting in increased communication and compliance.

"Being recognized by an organization such as the Edison Awards is certainly an honor," said Kent Dicks, MedApps, Inc.'s CEO and Chairman. "This award, combined with our recently signed strategic alliances with partners such as AT&T and SAP, is continued validation of our mission to provide cost-effective remote health monitoring to the broadest population possible."

The Edison Awards recognizes MedApps' wide-range vision and product roadmap that includes HealthPAL®, HealthHUB™, HealthAIR™, HealthCOM®, the upcoming HealthREADER™ & SmartCard, and MedApps Kiosk System - all of which are brought together by the MedApps CloudCare™ platform.

"We've already achieved a great deal of success with HealthPAL and our HealthCOM System," continues Dicks. "We realized early on that the solutions that would work best had to focus on the patients and care providers needs, while making the technology function discretely in the background - and to accomplish this, one solution simply will not fit all."

MedApps' products and services can integrate with wired or wireless monitors from a number of trusted manufacturers, as well as enterprise EHRs and consumer PHRs. As MedApps adds more driver-model based products to its cloud-based infrastructure, the System will allow patients and providers to engage in a healthcare delivery model that best suits their needs - offering a wide range of price points and features.

The CloudCare platform allows for automated, remote installation and updating of firmware in the field, which essentially allows MedApps' devices to self-configure with patient monitors with little or no user interaction. This ideal of simple, seamless and "invisible" connectivity has been recognized in previous Edison Award winners such as Kindle™, OnStar® and Apple® iPhone™.

Beyond its technological innovation, the MedApps System has demonstrated unique "societal impact", at a number of cutting-edge healthcare facilities across the country, through its ability to empower patients to self-manage their chronic conditions and improve their compliance. In particular, a very successful pilot, whose focus was to reduce incidents of re-hospitalization for CHF (congestive heart failure) patients released from acute care, achieved a 100% success rate with no re-admissions within 30 days.This program and others has shown that remote monitoring can deliver a significant return on investment, effectively addressing the needs of payers and providers who are fiscally responsible for large populations. And as the chronic disease epidemic escalates, it is imperative that these companies drive down the costs associated with care. Furthermore mHealth's ability to maximize resources while reducing costs will play a key role in enabling our country's initiatives for healthcare reform.

"This year's awards recognize a broad array of innovations including far-reaching products, services and technologies that impact daily life," said Edison Awards' Steering Committee chair Sarah Miller Caldicott, a great-grandniece of Thomas Edison. "The Awards applaud the forward-thinking innovations for which Thomas Edison remains internationally admired. It's exciting to see so many companies continuing his legacy of challenging conventional thinking."

MedApps' Kent Dicks adds, "There is no other system in the wireless remote health monitoring market that offers a solution comparable with the comprehensive foundation that we've established. We're very proud that our hard work and forward thinking has been acknowledged by our colleagues at the Edison Awards."