Fall prevention: the technology–and Dutch–cures

January 10, 2018 | by

The ‘Holy Grail’ of fall detection is, of course, fall prevention. The CDC statistics for the US are well known: One in four Americans aged 65+ falls each year. Every 19 minutes, an older adult dies from a fall. Falls are the leading cause of fatal injury and the most common cause of nonfatal trauma-related hospital admissions among older adults–2.8 million injuries treated in emergency departments annually, including over 800,000 hospitalizations and more than 27,000 deaths. In 2014, the total cost of fall injuries was $31 billion. In the UK, AgeUK‘s stats are that falls represent the most frequent and serious type of accident in people aged 65 and over, the main cause of disability and the leading cause of death from injury among those aged 75+. 

The technology ‘cures’ as noted in this NextAvenue/Forbes article centers around predicting if and when a person will fall.

  • The ‘overall’ approach, which is constant monitoring of ADLs through activity sensing and modeling/machine learning to detect early signs of decline or health change. Companies in this area are Care Innovations’ QuietCare (sensor arrays) and CarePredict (wrist worn).
  • Gait detection. Relatively small changes in gait and walking speed are an accurate, fast, and straightforward indicator of fall risk. Ten years of research performed at TigerPlace in Missouri showed that people whose gait slowed by 5 centimeters per second within a week had an 86% probability of falling during the next three weeks. Shortening of stride had a 50 percent probability of fall within three weeks.
  • Read the brain. Research at Albert Einstein School of Medicine in NYC indicates that in otherwise high-functioning older people, high levels of frontal brain activity while walking and talking can predict higher long term fall risk, up to 32 percent.
  • Balance impairment. Tests using VR to simulate falling in healthy subjects and tracking their muscular response also could be used to roadmap a person’s balance impairments and future fall risk–along with training and targeted physical rehabilitation.

The Netherlands has taken this last point and gone ‘low tech’ with physical training courses that teach older adults both not to fall and to fall correctly if they do. Students negotiate obstacle courses and uneven surfaces, then learn to fall properly on thick inflated mats. Many of those attending use walkers or canes, but complete the courses which reduce the fear of falling or getting up–and provide both fun and socialization. The courses have become popular enough that they are government rated with insurance often defraying the cost. New York Times

January’s Crazy Week: JP Morgan, StartUp Health, Health 2.0 WinterTech…and CES takes the cake!

January 9, 2018 | by

This week is Crazy Week for healthcare and technology folk, with multiple major events centered in San Francisco and Las Vegas.

JP Morgan’s 36th annual healthcare conference started today 8 Jan through Thursday 11 Jan in San Francisco. It annually hosts 450 companies presenting to 9,000 attendees. It attracts hundreds of investors and is A Very Big Deal for both investors and companies angling for same. It kicked off with Medtronic‘s Omar Ishrak touting their success with Tyrx, an anti-microbial resorbable envelope for their cardiac devices to prevent post-surgical infection. In value-based care, it may not be in itself reimbursable, but improves outcomes (MedCityNews). The official hashtag for the conference is #JPMHC18 but there’s also #JPM18.

Of interest to Readers will be Teladoc’s presentation at JPM, provided by Seeking Alpha. 

CNBC’s tip sheet on the action. Genalyte‘s lab-on-a-chip demos their blood sampling in 15 minutes technique to MedCityNews‘ writer. And Vive La Biotech–why American investors should be looking at French companies.

Within the event is the invite-only StartUp Health Festival Monday and Tuesday which hashtags at #startuphealth. Separately, but with many of the usual suspects, is Health 2.0’s one-day WinterTech conference in San Francisco the following day on Wednesday 10 Jan, also with an investment focus. (You can imagine the investor and company hopping between conference locations!) Alex Fair is also leading a Meetup tweetup for the week–more information here. You may also want to check out #pinksocks—pinksocks is an ad hoc group dedicated to health and wellness innovation and doctor-patient connectedness.

Further south, the sprawl of Las Vegas has been taken over by the sprawl of CES (aptly dubbed ‘Whoa!’) starting Tuesday 9 Jan through Friday 12 Jan. The substantial health tech focus (more…)

Deals of the day: American Well partners with Philips for global telehealth apps, gains $59 million partnership with Allianz

January 9, 2018 | by

The large partners with the large, adding a global dimension. Telemedicine provider American Well and Philips announced today a global alliance to integrate American Well’s patient-doctor video consults with a range of Philips’ healthcare monitoring program. First up will be adding American Well consults to the Philips Avent uGrow parenting app. This is an Apple/Android app that presently tracks baby feeding, weight, and sleeping patterns, tying into Philips baby monitoring products such as an ear thermometer and babycam. The second stage with American Well involves their mobile telehealth software development kit (SDK) to integrate video consults into other Philips’ digital health solutions and the Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform. Philips also announced that uGrow will include voice activation with the ever-trendy Amazon Echo and the Philips Avent smart feeding kit to automatically monitor the time, volume and duration of a baby’s feeds. Philips release

American Well’s second global deal of the day is with insurer Allianz’s digital investment fund, Allianz X.  The latter, funded with a $59 million investment, creates another partnership dedicated to developing a digital product that combines wearable sensors, remote monitoring, and virtual visits. The goal is to widen patient access, lower cost and improve healthcare quality. As part of the deal, Allianz X will be joining American Well’s Board of Directors. Allianz is not well known as a health insurer in the US, but is active in the international health insurance area for individual expats and employers with international employees.  Release, Mobihealthnews

EHR action: Allscripts acquires Practice Fusion, expands footprint in small/ambulatory practices

January 9, 2018 | by

A significant EHR acquisition kicks off an action-packed week. Announced today by leading EHR Allscripts is their acquisition for $100 million of independent practice EHR Practice Fusion. Allscripts, which has been usually in the top five US EHRs (Kalorama April 2017 survey), vastly expanded its hospital market share with August’s acquisition of #2 McKesson‘s health IT business and with this would be ranked just behind EHR leader Cerner. In acute care settings, Epic and Cerner dominate with 25 percent of the market each with Allscripts/McKesson far behind #3 Meditech (KLAS April 2017). 

Practice Fusion, one of the pioneers in the small practice/ambulatory EHR starting with a basic free, ad-paid model in 2005, has 30,000 ambulatory sites serving about 5 million patients each month. In the Allscripts view, they will now be able to offer “last mile” reach to the under-served clinicians in small and individual practices” and close gaps in care. Allscripts President Rick Poulton noted in the statement that “We believe this transaction will directly benefit Practice Fusion clients, who will now have access to Allscripts solutions and services. We look forward to welcoming Practice Fusion team members to our family.” which leads one to believe that the Practice Fusion name will be sunsetted. Allscripts release and Healthcare IT News

From being the leader in small practice EHRs, Practice Fusion found the last few years difficult as competition expanded into their segment, from eClinical Works, drchrono, athenahealth, and NextGen to small practice packages from Epic and Cerner.

It should be noted that Practice Fusion in 12 years went through 13 funding rounds, raising almost $158 million from a long list of VC luminaries such as Kleiner Perkins, Artis Ventures, Founders Fund, and Qualcomm Ventures (Crunchbase). However, it disappointed its investors and Wall Street, which expected two years ago a $1.5 billion IPO. The $100 million from Allscripts is all cash and the price is “subject to adjustment for working capital and net debt”–an exit which was surely not the sugarplum in the eyes of its 2014 and prior  investors. CNBC

Advances in 2017 which may set the digital health stage for 2018

January 3, 2018 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Lasso.jpg” thumb_width=”100″ /]Our second Roundup takes us to the Lone Prairie, where we spot some promising young Health Tech Advances that may grow up to be Something Big in 2018 and beyond. 

From Lancaster University, just published in Brain Research (academic/professional access) is their study of an experimental ‘triple agonist’ drug developed for type 2 diabetes that shows promise in reversing the memory loss of Alzheimer’s disease. The treatment in APP/PS1 mice with human mutated genes used a combination of GLP-1, GIP, and Glucagon that “enhanced levels of a brain growth factor which protects nerve cell functioning, reduced the amount of amyloid plaques in the brain linked with Alzheimer’s, reduced both chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, and slowed down the rate of nerve cell loss.” This treatment explores a known link between type 2 diabetes as a risk factor and the implications of both impaired insulin, linked to cerebral degenerative processes in type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease, and insulin desensitization. Other type 2 diabetes drugs such as liraglutide have shown promising results versus the long trail of failed ‘amyloid busters‘. For an estimated 5.5 million in the US and 850,000 in the UK with Alzheimer’s and other dementias, and for those whose lives have been touched by it, this research is the first sign of hope in a long time. AAAS EurekAlert—Lancaster University release, video

At University College London (UCL), a drug treatment for Huntington’s Disease in its first human trial has for the first time safely lowered levels of toxic huntingtin protein in the brain. The group of 46 patients drawn from the UK, Canada, and Germany were given IONIS (the pharmaceutical company)-HTTRx or placebo, injected into spinal fluid in ascending doses to enable it to reach the brain starting in 2015 after over a decade in pre-development. The research comes from a partnership between UCL and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. UCL News release, UCL Huntington’s Research page, BBC News

Meanwhile, The National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s All of Us program, part of the Federal Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), seeks to track a million+ Americans through their medical history, behavior, exercise, blood, and urine samples. It’s all voluntary, of course, the recruitment’s barely begun for a medical research resource that may dwarf anything else in the world. This is the NIH program that lured Eric Dishman from Intel. And of course, it’s controversial–that gigantic quantities of biometric data, genomic and otherwise, on non-genetic related diseases, will simply have diminishing returns and divert money/attention from diseases with clear genomic causes–such as Huntington’s. Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Let’s not forget Google DeepMind Health’s Streams app in test at the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust Hospital in north London, where alerts on patients at risk of developing acute kidney infection (AKI) are pushed to clinicians’ mobile phones, (more…)