17-Jan-17 India’s Practo has raised US$55 mn in funding led by China’s Tencent. The funds will be used to foray into health insurance, bundling it with its consumer-facing services. Practo aggregates over 200,000 doctors across 10,000 hospitals, 8,000 diagnostic centers and 4,000 wellness and fitness centers in India, Brazil, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. [image: Tech In Asia]

16-Jan-17 One of the Philippines' Department of Health's initiatives to achieve its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is an eHealth Strategic Framework, which aims to integrate ICT with healthcare. The SDGs got the support of Globe through a partnership with Salud Interactiva. Globe is offering the KonsultaMD service which provides access to licensed doctors. With 24/7 phone consultation, patients receive medical assessment. [image: Cebu Daily News]

12-Jan-17 Samsung Electronics will develop 'wearable healthcare devices' as its new business for the future instead of the robots that LG and other rivals are paying attention to. "The roles of home robots recently introduced by home appliance companies can be realized by adding artificial intelligence to existing devices such as smartphones, TVs and IoT refrigerators,” said a representative. [image: Business Korea]

11-Jan-17 In 2016 only three mHealth apps obtained medical device authorization in Korea - and one of them was the National Health Insurance Service’s. In contrast, the USFDA authorized 36 digital healthcare devices in 2016. Regulations on cloud services and time-consuming approval of innovative devices are also hindering the growth of the Korean smart healthcare industry. [image: Business Korea]

10-Jan-17 Over 80 per cent of Australians are comfortable with AI being used to diagnose common medical problems and interpret test results. However, people also acknowledge some of the limitations of AI technology and identified privacy concerns over patient records and medical confidentiality and the lack of human intuition as issues. [image: i-stock / Which-50]