A potential HLTH competitor/takeover cadidate:
biz.yahoo.com
Health Hero Network, Inc. and OpenTV Form Alliance to Bring Health Services to Consumers Through Interactive Television
- Interactive Service to Enable Personalized Health Content and One to One Communications Between Healthcare Providers and Their Patients in the Home -
NEW YORK, March 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Health Hero Network, Inc., a privately held e-health company, announced today a strategic alliance with OpenTV (Nasdaq: OPTV; Amsterdam Stock Exchange), the leading worldwide provider of software that enables digital interactive television, to bring interactive health content and services to consumers worldwide through digital interactive television. The new service will offer consumers an extremely simple, in-home method to access a wealth of personal health and wellness programs, while enabling healthcare providers to communicate with patients between visits and monitor health status online.
Through the newly formed alliance, Health Hero© and OpenTV intend to create the first-ever ``Interactive Health Channel' offering a broad range of personalized health content, community, and commerce services. OpenTV will offer this interactive application to its worldwide partners (network operators or set-top box manufacturers) to enable delivery to digital TV subscribers worldwide through their television set-top boxes. While Health Hero will create multiple health services using the OpenTV software platform, the initial focus is on Health Buddy©, Health Hero's intuitive interface that enables subscribers to receive and respond to structured communications directly from caregivers and personal health and wellness programs on a daily basis. This patented capability allows healthcare professionals to use the Web and interactive TV to communicate with and manage their patients' health directly in the home.
``Access to health programs needs to be extremely convenient and user-friendly, and needs to fit into the lifestyles of healthcare consumers,' said Steve Brown, CEO of Health Hero Network, Inc. ``Our partnership with OpenTV, the leading provider of interactive television software, allows us to extend the Health Buddy functionality and brand from appliances on the countertop to front-and-center in the living room.'
``Much like personal banking and shopping, health and wellness information is another natural extension of interactive television and we're excited to offer our network operator partners the ability to provide these services to TV viewers worldwide,' said Jan Steenkamp, CEO of OpenTV. ``This new alliance reinforces OpenTV's new vision for television -- one that now will bring personalized health and wellness services right in to consumers' living rooms.'
About Health Hero Network, Inc.
Health Hero Network, Inc. develops and markets the industry's most advanced tools and technologies for delivering structured, daily, communications between healthcare providers and their patients in the home. The Health Hero© platform includes a secure, private labeled web-site for sending queries and viewing patient responses, and the Health Buddy© patient appliance. The Health Buddy is an easy-to-use information appliance that enables caregivers to remotely collect data about a patient's symptoms, behavior, and knowledge, as well as data from a variety of home medical devices such as blood glucose meters and blood pressure cuffs. The Health Hero platform empowers caregivers to rapidly identify changes in a patient's health condition, focusing attention on those in need of intervention, a factor that has tremendous impact on reducing healthcare spending while improving the quality of care.
For more information about Health Hero, visit healthhero.com.
About OpenTV
OpenTV is the leading worldwide provider of software that enables digital interactive television. OpenTV provides a complete end-to-end solution for the development and delivery of interactive services via digital satellite, cable, and terrestrial broadcast. OpenTV set-top box software has been shipped with, or installed in, more than 6.1 million digital set-top boxes worldwide. To date, OpenTV software solutions have been selected by 25 television network operators worldwide, including British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) in the United Kingdom, TPS in France, Via Digital in Spain, Senda in Sweden, Stream in Italy and EchoStar's DISH Network(TM) in the U.S.
The OpenTV set-top box software is licensed to more than 25 digital set- top box manufacturers, and OpenTV's authoring tools are licensed to more than 100 independent developers and content and service providers. OpenTV is a member of the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) project, CableLabs OpenCable initiative, ATSC DASE, and JavaTV. OpenTV is a licensee of Personal Java(TM) from Sun Microsystems.
OpenTV is now supported by investments from eight leading Internet and broadcast companies including America Online (NYSE: AOL - news), General Instrument (NYSE: GIC - news), Liberty Digital (Nasdaq: LDIG - news), News Corporation (NYSE: NWS - news), Shaw Communications (NYSE: SJR - news) and Time Warner (NYSE: TWX - news), in addition to Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW - news) and MIH Limited (Nasdaq: MIHL - news). |
