Ebola and health tech: where it can help, where it failed (Updated)

October 17, 2014 | by

 [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/keep-calm-and-enter-at-own-risk-3.png” thumb_width=”150″ /]Ignore the sign…come on in, we can be quarantined together! Everyone is on Ebola-overload, so we will keep it short and sweet. The Gimlet Eye (recovering after an argument with a box, see below) advises a calm, adult-beveraged, low-media weekend with Mantovani, Bert Kaempfert or Percy Faith on the stereo.

  • Yes, digital health is addressing the needs that Ebola screening and care are generating. MedCityNews spotlights Medizone International’s AsepticSure peroxide/ozone aerial mist sterilizer which was originally developed to kill MERS and MRSA in field hospitals, to be tested by Doctors Without Borders in a 40-bed unit. Startup AgileMD launched a free mobile app for clinicians containing the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Ebola prevention treatment guidelines (for what anything from CDC is worth….) Text message alerts used first in Sierra Leone are being expanded to seven West African nations for use by the Red Cross and Red Crescent (also BBC News). Sanomedics International has the TouchFree InfraRed Thermometer which is being used at US airports which are screening for passengers originating in West Africa, and Noninvasive Medical Technologies is promoting their ZOE fluid status monitor because it applies electrical currents externally to determine hydration levels.
  • Even crowdfunding’s getting into the act. Researcher Erica Ollmann Saphire and her colleagues at Scripps Research Institute  (more…)

Life expectancy up, but so is death from falls (US)

October 16, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/gimlet-eye.jpg” thumb_width=”175″ /]The Gimlet Eye falls outside the box, and is writing this from recovery. Our companion in curmudgeonliness, Laurie Orlov, whacks us upside the head with first the good news then the bad. US life expectancy is up: if you are 65 today, on average you will live to 83 (men) and 86 (women), even with the rise in chronic conditions that affect quality of life, such as diabetes and heart disease. But the bad is that death from falls is also up. This is despite all the systems and gizmos the Digital Health Industry has concocted to detect falls beyond 1970s PERS technology. Once upon a rose-colored Telecare Time we thought we could infer falls purely by sensors detecting lack of activity (the basis of QuietCare, GrandCare, Healthsense, the late WellAWARE). Then with accelerometers, fall detection would be automatic, (more…)

Google testing telemedicine program via Helpouts

October 16, 2014 | by

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/google-doctor-video-chat1.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]If Sergey and Larry don’t get your data one way…they will another. Google has quietly devised another use for Helpouts, its languishing live video help service. In given (but not disclosed) markets, you may be searching for information on a medical condition, and get the option to connect to a live doctor for a virtual visit. It was enough under the radar that it was stumbled upon; a developer searched via Google for ‘knee pain’ and found this (left), posted it to Reddit and it was later confirmed by Engadget. The cost is free (for now). According to iHealthBeat, via Modern Healthcare (subscription required), Scripps Health and One Medical Group are the reported participants. The Washington Post adds that not every medical-related query (more…)

12 percent of US veterans now using VA telehealth services

October 15, 2014 | by

The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has some good news (for a change)–that during the just-closed Federal FY 2014, 690,000 veterans, or 12 percent, used telehealth services. This was a 13.3 percent increase over FY 2013 (608,900). While this report is preliminary (beware!), we see a slowing of growth in the number of veterans accessing telehealth and a concentration–not dispersal–of telehealth services in rural areas (+ 10 points). This chart compares the numbers:

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/VA-2014-vs-2013.jpg” thumb_width=”350″ /]

Chart: EIC Donna. Please note that percentage of telehealth users add up to over 100 percent due to usage (one patient could access two or three forms of telehealth. FY14 telehealth user breakout is estimate based on FY13 percentage, to be eventually compared to official figures.)

Telehealth as defined by VA: (more…)

Faux Glass: not just a knockoff, but a sendup

October 15, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/gI_147093_Faux-Glasses-Sample-Picture-Spotlight-On.png” thumb_width=”150″ /]Need to impress your Silicon Valley/Alley buds, but the exchequer is low? Didn’t get to be a Glass Explorer on the first round? Fret no more! Faux Glass is here. It’s missing a few things that Glass has–like a phone, photo/video camera, a GPS, internet search access smack in your eye–but does have a magnifier, a spotlight and eight LED indicator lights which light in sequence to a “crack me up” command, like Where the Faux (the product’s built in GPS to nowhere), Faux-to Shop (for fixing photos never taken), and What the Faux (for general searching). All on Indiegogo for $1,480 less than Glass! “They’re not fake anything; they’re real Faux” says Faux-In-Chief Robin Raskin (who’s also a tech journalist, author and founder of Living in Digital Times and FashionWare). The full court press on Faux Glass is of course leading up to International CES in January and their conferences including the Digital Health Summit. Ms Raskin through this also reminds us that crowdfunding and digital tech is not to be taken too seriously. PRWeb release. Website.

Of course there’s the possible faux that presents itself as seriously real, or what’s been dubbed ‘scampaigns’ on crowdfunding sites like…Indiegogo. (more…)

Telemedicine getting out of the waiting room–perhaps

October 13, 2014 | by

Will reimbursement by insurance payers and private employers (presumably self-insured) and a greater comfort level with the video consult mean that telemedicine will finally step out of the waiting room? This Economist article (free registration may be required) with high points from a recent Rome conference seems to not be able to make up its mind, though it tries to be positive. Taking a comparative view, Israel leads with ‘relatively lax guidelines’, with doctors able to e-prescribe and perform referrals to specialists online. China’s health-care reform focuses on telemedicine“, but Peteris Zilgalvis, a health official at the European Commission pointedly states “If you have a chaotic system and add technology, you get a chaotic system with technology” (Editor’s emphasis). The US is somewhere in between (more…)

Three seminars on negotiating IP licensing, IT procurement and services (US)

October 13, 2014 | by

If you negotiate IP licensing or deal with IT procurement or services in the US, now or in the future, which are all part of anything digital health or TECS,  you might want to schedule in one of Mark Grossman’s three upcoming speaking engagements. Mark has written four articles for TTA as a guest columnist (index here), has 30 years as an attorney specializing in business law and IP, and is with Tannenbaum Helpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt in New York City.

  1. Savannah, GA, CAUCUS IT Procurement Summit 2014,’ SaaS Deals Without Pain’, 21 October (2:45-3:45pm).  More information
  2. New York City, Practicing Law Institute’s (PLI) Advanced Licensing Agreements 2014, mock negotiation of a licensing agreement, 4 November.  More information
  3. San Francisco, American Conference Institute’s IT Service Agreements and Licensing-Cloud, Open Source, and Software Summit, 17-18 November. Co-chairing and hosting ‘Planning Your Exit Strategies When Terminating a Contract While Maximizing Your Resources’. More information

Can’t make them? Mark’s online seminar ‘Negotiating Tech, Telecom & Outsourcing Deals’ is available on demand here at Lawline with setting up a free account.

4 year telehealth study charts ~40 percent CHF readmissions reduction

October 9, 2014 | by

Finally an encouraging long-term, large N study on telehealth reducing same-cause hospital readmissions. Pennsylvania’s Geisinger Health Plan, the managed care arm of integrated health system Geisinger Health, has released findings from a four-year (2008-2012) study of 541 GHP Medicare Advantage beneficiaries with congestive heart failure. Hospital readmissions after 30 days were 44 percent lower and after 90 days 38 percent lower. Return on investment: “for every $1 spent to implement this program, there was approximately $3.30 return on this investment in terms of the cost savings accrued to GHP.”

Patients were assigned case managers and provided with a relatively simple program combining Bluetooth-connected weight scales and interactive voice response (IVR) calls to answer questions such as shortness of breath, swelling, appetite and on prescription medication management. The case managers used a platform to aggregate the data (more…)

Philips enters hospital readmissions reduction fray

October 9, 2014 | by

Perhaps this Editor has attended too many new-company pitches of late, but there is another US ‘gold rush’ similar to EHRs (2009-12). This time, the gold glinting in the stream is reducing same-cause (disease) readmissions after the patient departs through the hospital doors. The latest prospector with pan, pick and shovel, quite amazingly, is Philips USA with the Transition to Ambulatory Care (eTrAC) (!) post-discharge program. Their first two applications, eCareCoordinator and eCareCompanion, just received FDA 510(k) clearance. (more…)

IBM Watson decision tools expand, lands at NYC HQ

October 9, 2014 | by

Confirming that New York metro’s once-devastated (post-dot.com bust) ‘Silicon Alley’ is increasingly attractive to healthcare and tech firms, IBM this past Monday opened its new NYC downtown headquarters at Astor Place for the IBM Watson Group. Our readers have been following the development of Watson in the healthcare decision-making process since 2012 [TTA’s article index here], primarily in oncology (breast and lung cancer), in the UK (via the RSM’s 5 June ‘Big Data’ conference) as well as the US. IBM Watson has smartly created Ecosystem Partners where third parties integrate Watson. The spread is fairly wide: travel (your Editor’s former industry), retail, veterinary care, IT security and support, cognitive computing and of course healthcare. Spotlighted were three companies: @PointofCare, Welltok and GenieMD. (more…)

The ultimate ‘comfy sensor patch’–an implant

October 8, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/3036175-inline-i-2-from-the-designers-of-fitbit-a-digital-tattoo.jpg” thumb_width=”175″ /]John A. Rogers and his ‘skunkworks’, take notice. From the design shop that brought you Fitbit, NewDealDesign (FDR would be puzzled), comes the next big step in wearables–a sensor patch concept which would be implanted in your hand and multi-task till the cows come home. Project Underskin would detect fitness levels, vital signs such as blood glucose or body temperature, unlock your door or pre-authorize your credit card. The curved implant (more…)

Humanoid robots and virtual humans in the ‘uncanny valley’

October 8, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/uncanny_2.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]One of the challenges that designers of both robots and ‘virtual humans’ in online simulation settings is to make them, in the dictum of pioneering industrial designer Raymond Loewy, MAYA–‘most advanced yet acceptable’. The MAYA of robotics appearance was stated about 40 years ago by Professor Masahiro Mori at the Tokyo Institute of Technology; the more human and less machine-like the appearance, the more positive a real human’s emotional response will be. But as simulated humans have progressed in commercial animation and in online settings to ‘almost human’, there is a ‘creepiness factor’ that emerges (more…)

TSA’s annual International Telecare and Telehealth Conference

October 7, 2014 | by

17 – 18 November 2014, Celtic Manor Resort, South Wales

“Solutions for 21st Century Care” is the theme of the TSA’s annual two-day interactive conference which will look closely at these five key areas: Service Integration, Standards, Innovation and Technology, Business Modeling and Leadership, Education and Training. There will be industry-focused breakout sessions as well as exhibition and showcase zones featuring the latest technology innovations. The chair for the conference will be Nick Goodwin, CEO, International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC). Confirmed speakers include: Mark Drakeford AM, Minister for Health and Social Services, Welsh Government; Esther Rantzen CBE, Founder of The Silver Line; Helena Herklots, Chief Executive, Carers UK; – Professor George Crooks OBE, Medical Director, NHS 24; Trevor Single, Chief Executive, Telecare Services Association; Michael Seres, Patient Entrepreneur and special guest speaker Colin Jackson CBE, Olympic Medalist. For more information, see the TSA Conference website here and register online here (booking forms are also downloadable on the earlier page).

Cigna, Care Innovations expand Tennessee CHF care management pilot

October 7, 2014 | by

Healthcare payer Cigna’s Healthspring Medicare plan unit has been piloting a congestive heart failure (CHF) care management program with Intel-GE Care Innovations in Tennessee to reduce same-cause hospital  readmissions. The initial year-long 50-patient program is being expanded to 250 patients who have had a CHF diagnosis plus a previous ER visit or hospital admission. Patients are supplied at no cost a blood pressure cuff, a scale and the Care Innovations Guide on a tablet platform. Daily biometrics are sent to Cigna-HealthSpring nurse practitioners, and also complete an educational program to help them manage their CHF at home. After a 90-day minimum, once certain goals (e.g. weight loss, blood pressure and heart rate) are met, the patients stay in the program, the tablet is withdrawn but they continue to monitor and log their vitals with a case manager. What is curious about this seemingly anodyne (more…)

NYeC Digital Health Conference (New York City)

October 6, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/nyec_dhc_2014_logo.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]17-18 November 2014, Pier 60, Chelsea Piers, New York

The New York eHealth Collaborative will hold its fourth annual Digital Health Conference with two full days of meetings and presentations. They are returning to Chelsea Piers on the Hudson River which will have ample room for the more than 850 attendees expected.

  • Keynote speakers include Eric J. Topol, MD, Director, Scripps Translational Science Institute and the controversial
    Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, Vice Provost for Global Initiatives & Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania.
  • The agenda includes ‘Big Data in Healthcare: Hype and Hope on the Path to Personalized Medicine’ to ‘Designing Wearables for the Long Run’ with a stop at Xanadu…no, Scanadu courtesy of their chief medical officer Alan Greene MD speaking on ‘Science, Sensors, and Superpowers—From Sci-Fi to Reality’.

Important: TTA readers receive a 10% registration discount. Use code TTA when registering at DigitalHealthConference.com  TTA is a media partner of the 2014 Digital Health Conference.

Tunstall secures additional £20 million from Charterhouse: implications?

October 6, 2014 | by

Breaking News  Tunstall Healthcare Group quietly announced on 25 September an additional investment of £20 million from its private equity owner, Charterhouse Capital Partners. Our readers know from our May and July articles the business challenges Tunstall has faced. We have particularly focused on–as have Bloomberg in May, this Editor and our Founder/EIC Emeritus Steve Hards over the years–on the heavy burden of Tunstall’s debt service, multiple management changes on both sides of the Atlantic, and a decided ‘failure to launch’ in the US market.

Readers of the Sunday Times woke up to this headline and lede (what news writers use to introduce the topic and entice you to read on):

Headline: £20m to steady ship at Tunstall

Lede: CHARTERHOUSE Capital Partners, one of the City’s oldest and most secretive private equity firms, has been forced to provide a multimillion-pound lifeline to another of its investments. A fortnight ago, Charterhouse ploughed £20m into Tunstall, a healthcare technology company that makes equipment to monitor the elderly and sick at home.

Insider Media Limited (business news review) had a more measured take in its ‘Yorkshire News’ section:

Headline: BACKERS PUMP £20M INTO HEALTHCARE FIRM (more…)