Brian Dolan

Earlier this month a small MedPanel survey of 415 physicians practicing in the US reportedly found that a very small percentage of them -- just 15 percent -- were discussing health apps or wearables with their patients.

The first six months of 2015 have brought with them a pair of high-profile, digital health IPO announcements, a half dozen or more important policy moves, at least one new promising reimbursement code, and plenty of new health initiatives from the world's largest technology companies.

Fitbit Surge This morning San Francisco-based Fitbit debuted its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange after increasing the price of its shares to $20 apiece: The IPO raised $732 million, making it the biggest consumer electronics IPO in history, according to Dealogica.

During Apple's recent World Wide Developer Conference an iOS Software Engineer named Shannon Tan gave a presentation for developers that discussed the new features added to HealthKit as part of the iOS 9 launch.

Gwen Hines, RN, Practice Administrator, Atlantic Adult & Pediatric Medicine, an Aledade partner Bethesda, Maryland-based, tech-enabled accountable care company, Aledade, has raised $30 million in venture funding led by return backer ARCH Venture Partners with participation from its other existing investor Venrock.

This week the American Medical Association’s ethics council attempted to come to an agreement over a set of guidelines focused on ethical considerations related to the use of online or mobile visits between patients and physicians, but a physician from Texas helped convince the committee to rethink its plans.

As expected Australia-based medical device company dorsaVi has received a new FDA 510(k) that expands the use case for the suite of wearable sensors, called ViMove, to allow providers to use them for tracking additional static postures like a natural standing posture and various sitting postures.

There's been a cluster of important telemedicine news in the past few days: the AMA is developing ethical guidelines for remote visits, a majority of states now have telemedicine parity laws in place, and details about Teladoc's business came to light through an SEC filing related to its hoped-for IPO.

In late April news broke that remote visits company Teladoc had taken the first steps toward filing for an IPO, but the initial filing was private.

The University of Rochester has teamed up with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based medical sensor company MC10 to test the company's BioStamp platform in clinical settings and help it develop its disease-specific algorithms for predictive health analytics.