Call for presentation proposals: mHealth Summit (US)

May 22, 2015 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/mHealth2014_logo4c_FINAL-thumb.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]You have till 8 June to submit a proposal for a presentation at one of the largest digital health conferences in the US, the mHealth Summit (which is same place–near Washington D.C.–but a month earlier than usual–8-11 November). This year’s theme is “Anytime, Anywhere: Engaging Providers and Patients” and centered around one of five topics: clinical care, technology, patients and consumers, research, policy or business. The co-located Global mHealth Forum has a separate submittal process. Information and submittal link. Telehealth & Telecare Aware has been a media partner of the mHealth Summit US since 2010 and the 2015 Global mHealth App Developer Economics Study presented earlier this month at mHealth Summit Europe in Riga.

‘Internet Plus’ nurturing China’s nascent digital health market

May 21, 2015 | by

Back in April this Editor was surprised by the interest Chinese investment companies had in Scanadu–and vice versa. Two of the three, Tencent Holdings and Fosun International, led the $35 million Series B round. Scanadu in return reportedly is developing products primarily for the China market, such as a urine analyzer.

Somewhat surprising, but it should not be, is the extent that private money tacks to the winds of official Chinese government policy. Ecns.com, the online site of the state China News Service, reports that part of the government ‘Internet Plus’ initiative will be targeted to the health and social care needs of 212 million people over 60 in China–a surprising 15.5 percent of the population. The civil affairs vice-minister has publicly advocated the use of the Internet, cloud computing and big data to transform care for the aged. Oddly, this also includes the development of ‘e-commerce’ for seniors.The language is also interesting and very careful–“The country’s population also features a large number of elderly people who are disabled and who are faced with empty nests and poverty” and a similar to the West shortage of carers. (more…)

Aetna may ‘buy into’ more analytics, digital health

May 20, 2015 | by

Rumors now mainstreamed into press surround Aetna’s apparent interest in fellow insurers Humana and Cigna. Forbes last Friday started the ball rolling with an article last Friday focusing on the main event driving insurance payer consolidation: the transition of Medicare from fee-for-service to value-based bundled payments and accountable care organization (ACO) models. Humana has substantial Medicare business and a foot in home care (SeniorBridge), but has innovated in digital health: partnerships (Healthsense, TTA 20 Dec 13), purchases (what remained of Healthrageous, TTA 16 Oct 13), employee wellness (Vitality) and app development. Cigna is a major insurer with corporate business, but has struggled a bit in the digital health arena with the flashy-but-flopped patient engagement platform GoYou. It’s piloted telehealth to reduce readmissions with Care Innovations [TTA 7 Oct 14]  and Coach by Cigna, a mobile health platform in conjunction with Samsung for the Galaxy S5 and S6 phones.

Aetna has had some success with working with ACOs, with 62 contracts covering about 1 million lives, but this Editor counts over 400 practice-based ACOs in the Medicare Shared Savings incentive program alone. Their experiment in consumer app aggregation, CarePass, came to a quiet end last August and Healthagen, their ’emerging businesses’ unit, has had some swerves in rationale including iTriage and even ActiveHealth Management, their long-time population health analytics arm. While digital health is part of it (see Mobihealthnews), (more…)

Do startups truly threaten the ‘healthcare establishment’?

May 19, 2015 | by

Or are successful startups fitting into their game? Chris Seper in MedCityNews paints the picture of one side of a quandary. The ‘healthcare establishment’ fundamentally and to its detriment does not understand and is threatened by the startup and innovation process. A startup may begin with an idea which is, in his words, ‘almost always flawed, sometimes deeply’. If the founders are smart, they will test their ideas, validate them and change them appropriately. If not, they will fail. But it is easier for the Establishment to point at the most egregious of the bad ideas and use them to rationalize the status quo.

But being congenital contrarians, we paint the house on the other side of the street. Has the Establishment caught up with–or in some cases, co-opted startups, making them and their funders ‘do their diligence’ and be more cautious before emerging? This Editor would argue yes, and largely for the better.

**The ‘Wild West’ days are over. A few years ago, a truly bad or deeply flawed health tech idea or could easily find funding, because it was all blank slate, new and ‘transformative’.The sexiest hooks were Quantified Self, sleep, employer health incentives, interactive coaching, genomics, app prescribing and (last) wearables. A lot of founders imagined themselves as the Steve Jobs of Healthcare, down to the black turtleneck. Now there is a history of success and failure. The railroads reached the dusty frontier towns.

**There’s now a ‘Startup Establishment’. National accelerators (more…)

Indian Health adopting telemedicine in Southern California for diabetes treatment

May 14, 2015 | by

Tribal-owned Riverside-San Bernardino County Indian Health, which serves nine tribes through seven health centers in the ‘Inland Empire’ of California, is adopting telemedicine to reach Native American patients and reduce their rate of diabetes. According to an Indian Health spokesperson, Native Americans constitute the largest diabetic population in the world and are 177 percent more likely to die from the disease. In San Bernardino County alone, 13 percent of adults are diabetic, and nearly 80 percent are overweight or obese. The initial program brought endocrinologists serving other Western tribes in on video consults with doctors in Indian Health clinics. Later rollout of the program will include pulmonology, cardiology, gerontology and dermatology. The market potential for telehealth remote patient monitoring–better information and analytics for clinicians, self-monitoring training and education for patients–could be substantial here for companies willing to invest time, learning and to build relationships. California Healthline. FierceHealth IT

UK, Nordics lead best EU countries for mHealth business: survey

May 14, 2015 | by | 1 Comment

Respondents to research2guidance’s fifth annual mHealth Economics survey rated UK and the Nordic countries the best for mHealth market success, based on factors of market readiness and maturity including doctors and consumers. Other top countries were Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and Finland. Germany and France were significant because of market size and investment in healthcare. According to the survey where over 5,000 healthcare app publishers and health professionals ranked countries on multiple points, “In UK, Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands doctor’s acceptance of apps and high level of digitalization are seen as main drivers. Germany is attractive mainly because of its substantial market size and its big number of potential users.”[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/EU-segments.png” thumb_width=”400″ /]

Findings were presented this week at the mHealth Summit in Riga, Latvia and is the first part of a larger study on developer economics and future healthcare delivery. As a media partner, TTA participated starting in March in inviting respondents to the survey. A free download of the report is available to our readers here (minimal registration required). Release. 

Really big data analytics enlisted to fight soldier suicide (US)

May 14, 2015 | by

Suicides by US active duty soldiers have more than doubled since 2001, according to a January Pentagon report, and current prevention programs have not been that effective in reducing the over 200 reported suicides per year. Enter a huge database program called STARRS–Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Service–to identify risk factors for soldiers’ mental health. The US Army not only likes acronyms, but also never does anything small–a five-year, $65 million program analyzing 1.1 billion data records from 1.6 million soldiers drawn from 39 Army and Defense Department databases. Researchers are looking at tens of thousands of neuro-cognitive assessments, 43,000 blood samples, more than 100,000 surveys, hospital records, criminal records, previous risk studies, family and job histories plus combat logs. The study, also using resources from the National Institute of Mental Health, the University of Michigan and other educational institutions, will conclude this June–and researchers are now wrestling with the privacy and moral consequences of responsibly using this data for health and in leadership. NextGov

Nano nano nano: DNA sequencers in toothbrush, phone analyze, match genetic markers

May 12, 2015 | by

Oxford Nanopore in the UK has developed microchip sequencers that read and encode DNA by passing it through a gap in the microchip some 1.5 nanometres across – 80,000 times thinner than a human hair. A small current is passed through the DNA which encodes the genetic material into a digital record, which can be compared against disease markers– for instance, Alzheimer’s and cancer. Microchips in this size can be embedded in future in toothbrushes and smartphones. Oxford Nanopore’s current palm-sized detector is currently being used to track Ebola in West Africa. Daily Express.

Drawing a parallel between healthcare and … newspapers

May 12, 2015 | by

…is the point that Dave Chase, who founded patient information/engagement portal Avado and sold it to WebMD in 2013 (and with them until last month), is making in this Forbes article. As newspapers found their readership leaving in droves for online websites that delivered ‘news they could use’ faster and more interestingly, healthcare systems are finding that their patients are finding healthcare services outside their bricks-and-mortar:

  • Onsite workplace clinics (including telehealth/telemedicine hybrids such as HealthSpot Station–Ed. Donna)
  • Direct primary care providers such as Iora Health, Qliance, DaVita’s Paladina Health
  • Retail clinics: MinuteClinic, TakeCare Health
  • Medicare Advantage-only programs such as CareMore [TTA 5 May] and Healthcare Partners
  • Domestic medical tourism by large, self-insured companies for elective surgeries

This Editor would argue that these forces are at work even in (and perhaps because of) centralized payment systems, and are worldwide, not just in the US. Certain communities such as Rochester, NY, Dubuque IA and Seattle are focusing on lower healthcare as attractions to business–and countries such as Costa Rica, Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Hungary and India are capitalizing on US-quality facilities and doctors to gain medical tourism for elective and self-paid surgery.

ATA’s hottest trend: advancing to Healthcare 2.0 via personalized healthcare

May 12, 2015 | by

Guest columnist Dr Vikrum (Sunny) Malhotra attended ATA 2015 earlier this month. This is the third of three articles on his observations on trends and companies to watch.

For those who attended the American Telemedicine Association‘s meeting in Los Angeles, the overarching trend was how a personal healthcare system is taking shape. The three pillars include: care anywhere, care networking and care customization.

The ATA stage opened with a keynote speech by Dr Sanjay Gupta about celebrating new innovation and technology advancements. This is the year where healthcare models are being built around patients in the home to support patient autonomy.These three pillars of personalized healthcare are being made possible by disruptive technologies, wearables/implantables, social networks and analytic technologies to automate remote care. Wearables and biosensors allow patients to move anywhere without interfering with day to day schedules while allowing for optimized data collection.

Access to care anywhere has been a challenge and is becoming realized through providing cheaper wireless tools that takes it to far corners. Dr Gupta focused on the use of telemedicine for delivery of care and its utility for improving access. He endorsed it as a tool for providing care for those with limited healthcare accessibility and locally for more a mainstream solution to a larger healthcare problem. We have seen telemedicine become mainstream (more…)

Short takes for a spring Friday: wounds, babies and ‘frequent fliers’

May 8, 2015 | by

Starting off your spring weekend….WoundMatrix, which uses generally older model smartphones to take pictures of wounds which are uploaded either to their own or to a destination clinical platform, with proprietary software that helps a clinician analyze the wound remotely and then to track healing progress, has gone international with Honduras’s La Entrada Medical and Dental facility run by non-profit Serving at the Crossroads, and in Rwanda in the care of nearly 1000 patients by the Rwanda Human Resources for Health Program, established by their Ministry of Health with the cooperation of several American universities. At ATA they also announced a new release of software. Release (PDF attached)….A BMJ (British Medical Journal) article critiquing the surge in what we call ‘telehealth for the bassinet set‘ scores the Mimo onesie (Rest Devices), the Owlet sock and the Sproutling band as taking advantage of concerned parents. It’s too much continuous monitoring of vital signs that can vary and yet be quite normal, and no published studies on benefit. A reviewer did find that Owlet is in clinical tests at Seattle Childrens and University of Arizona. MedPageToday (BMJ requires paid access)….A surprise from Philips, which we in the US associate with the Lifeline PERS. They have quietly moved into telehealth focusing on post-discharge programs that target the most costly patients, often dubbed ‘frequent fliers’ based on their frequent stays in hospital. The ‘Hospital to Home’ telehealth pilot with Banner Health in Arizona, dubbed for them the Intensive Ambulatory Care (IAC) program, focuses on the top 5 percent of complex patients which are the highest cost and most care intensive. IAC results among 135 patients over six months reduced hospitalizations by 45 percent, acute and long-term care costs decreased by 32 percent and overall cost of care by 27 percent. However, is this program continuing–or transitioning their patients?  iHealthBeat, PR Newswire

Redesign of Kinect to detect, prevent Parkinson’s freezing of gait (UK)

May 8, 2015 | by

Two researchers at London’s Brunel University have repurposed a common Microsoft Kinect game controller to detect and help prevent the freezing of gait (FOG) that is a common result of Parkinson’s disease. FOG strikes without warning–the muscles freeze and the sufferer generally falls. To both detect falls and help prevent them, the Brunel researchers mounted a laser projector on the ceiling controlled by the Kinect. If a fall happens, it initiates a video conference call to assist the person. The prevention comes in with projecting visual cues–lines ahead on the floor, which has been found to help unfreeze the muscles. According to the Brunel release, it has passed proof of concept stage and is moving to patient trials. The further proof will be if this can scale. Brunel University News

ATA trend #2: is this the ‘second generation’ of remote patient monitoring?

May 8, 2015 | by

Guest columnist Dr Vikrum (Sunny) Malhotra attended ATA 2015 last week. This is the second of three articles on his observations on trends and companies to watch.

During the course of the ATA conference, I was inundated with the concept of “dumb” data whereby biosensors track patient clinical data and will alarm to clinical staff if outside designated parameters. However, the call center filter between the patient’s data and physician is often a primary cause of increased unnecessary admissions. The Sentrian Remote Patient Intelligence Platform (Sentrian RPI) received recognition for its advancement in utilization of sensors, enabling healthcare providers to utilize this “dumb” data and make it “smart”. For clinicians like myself, this was a new way of looking at an age old problem: “How do we safely and comprehensively support physician decision making at a standard high enough to detect pathologies earlier and more accurately?”

Sentrian has used machine learning to support the work of a dedicated clinical team by monitoring patient data 24/7 to detect subtle signs that warn a family member or care provider of future problems through biometric patterns of thousands of patients, comparing their medical histories, vitals and health information. This novel approach to remote monitoring won Sentrian the ATA President’s Innovation Award. (more…)

ATA trend #1: Is a sustainable RPM infrastructure fact or fiction?

May 8, 2015 | by

Guest columnist Dr Vikrum (Sunny) Malhotra attended ATA 2015 last week. This is the first of three articles on his observations on trends and companies to watch.

The advancement of remote patient monitoring is a visible trend from the American Telemedicine Association’s 2015 meeting, with care moving from the doctor’s office and being shifted to the patient’s home. A more diverse range of data is being collected for patients to facilitate more informed decision making at the patient visit and after the patient is away from the practice. As information is being collected and monitored on a more comprehensive basis, we have seen creative modalities to view a broad array of data points that would typically have been collected in a doctor’s office with the hopes of early diagnosis and preventive care, versus reactive care.

Patient autonomy has now come to the forefront and network infrastructure is being built to support that shift. Wearables, implantables and home based lab/ urine diagnostic kits are becoming smaller, cheaper, less invasive, wireless and cloud-based so that patients can be monitored without interfering in day to day living. (more…)

ATA 2015: Day 1 news

May 5, 2015 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ATA-15-show-floor.jpg” thumb_width=”250″ /] HealthSpot/Xerox, Sentrian/Scripps, American Well, Honeywell, vitaphone, more

HealthSpot unveiled the first results of its partnership with (and investment by) Xerox, leveraging their HIT cloud infrastructure and back-end for the HealthSpot Station. The telehealth/virtual consult walk-in kiosk has targeted over 30,000 retail pharmacies with a newly developed consumer retail pharmacy personal health record (PHR). Upgraded patient and portal interfaces process insurance claims through a payment data feed and integrates with EMRs. Release….The US/UK predictive data/remote patient intelligence company Sentrian, winner of this year’s ATA Innovation in Remote Care award, is a part of a year-long 1,000-patient COPD remote patient monitoring study by the Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) with members of Anthem’s CareMore health plan. The goal is to use the Sentrian platform data to accurately detect COPD patient decompensation in advance to reduce avoidable hospital readmissions, which on average in the US is 1 out of 11 within 30 days of discharge. Release….American Well launched a platform for individual physicians to connect with current patients (more…)

Teen inventor develops video communicator, med dispenser debuting at ATA 2015

May 5, 2015 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/dispenser.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Teen inventors come up with interesting designs and apps at science fairs and codeathons, but it’s unusual when a 15 year old brings to market an assistive technology product targeted to remote caregiving and socialization of much older people. This is the case with iC Loved Ones, a smartphone/tablet + independently controlled med dispenser for remote caring. A desktop PC, smartphone or tablet loaded with the iC Loved Ones app remotely controls the dispenser, delivering medications in pre-loaded dishes. A separate smartphone or tablet, which can be positioned anywhere in the home on the provided stand, is used for video chat and virtual visits. The auto-answer setup (more…)