Last month’s Health 2.0 three-day conference in San Francisco appears to be almost totally on video, with presentations ranging from 5 minutes to over 1/2 hour. The 15 pages include demos, keynotes and interviews. Warning–don’t use the categories at the upper right hand corner or the sidebar to try to sort through them, because these group together multiple meetings by topic. Everything you wanted to know about Quantified Selfing, patient communities (PatientsLikeMe, Medivizor), HIT, EMRs, employer wellness programs (Keas), discussing end of life care (Blaine Warkentine’s Vimty) as well as other ‘unmentionables’ like vulnerability, caregiving, social support, death, sex, taxes. Quite a few on the US health insurance exchange which was going to lead Americans to The New Healthcare Jerusalem in a few days. Somehow GetInsured.com manages to calculate possible individual insurance savings in two-three screens, though you have to call about insurance. Tim Kelsey, the NHS National Director for Patients and Information, announces £1 billion in a technology fund here. Health 2.0 San Francisco 2013.
Startup accelerators come to Germany
Hubraum, based in Berlin, announced the seven startups in its program including health technology, an online education startup, a digital identity provider and a service that lets users monetize their own personal data (perhaps Primal Shield will find a way to pay back those QS Obsessives, but alas it’s only from the social network). Three out of the seven are in health tech: Goderma (teledermatology), OPTretina (teleopthamology) and PocketAid (rewards for your wait time in hospital or doctor’s office room). Hubraum is backed by Deutsche Telekom, launched 2012 and recently collaborated with two accelerators in Tel Aviv to bring early-stage Israeli companies to Berlin and recently launched a programme in Krakow. Hubraum’s new accelerator batch…(Venture Village Berlin)
Humana, Healthrageous and some object lessons
The acquisition of the assets of Partners HealthCare spinoff Healthrageous by insurance and health service giant Humana is reverberating in the field in the US, particularly those in the buzziest digital health sectors. Some may look away, but a hard look provides some object lessons at the sheer unpredictability of the field for those who are innovating and attempting to shape consumer behavior and health. (Not behavioral health)
- Healthrageous had an impressive lineage and credibility. Developed over three years at Partners HealthCare, it was spun off in 2010, PHC members on the board, leadership from well-known/regarded figures such as Rick Lee and Mary Beth Chalk–and enjoyed abundant, rapid startup funding–$12.5 million in two rounds, the last exactly one year ago, from equally impressive investors, reportedly $15 million total. No raiding the credit cards here.
- It occupied what everyone for the past few years thought of as a sweet spot–personal health management targeted to employers/benefit managers along with health plans to lower costs that combined sensor-based telehealth data with individualized coaching and feedback–and data from a broad base of 10,000 users. (more…)
Oxitone Medical developing pulse O2 telehealth at wrist
Israel’s Oxitone Medical is one of the Lucky Thirteen participants in the GE/StartUp Health Academy Entrepreneurship Program [TTA 4 April]. By this profile in MedCityNews, it appears they are getting closer to being in market with their wrist-worn device. Current fingertip devices are uncomfortable and not wearable for long periods of time, a major advantage with a bracelet style (if not too clunky). The device is still in prototype, but the system will send out alerts to family, caregivers and a call center if saturation drops below a pre-set level, who can then attend or call for medical assistance. Their first markets are COPD and CHF patients. Device moves continuous oxygen saturation monitoring from the fingertip to the wrist
Google Glass for gait improvement
The University of Twente in the Netherlands is doing some unusual research in developing an app to help improve the gait of a group at high risk of falls–those with Parkinson’s disease. Current research has found that certain patterns and rhythms when viewed or heard improve gait, such as stripes on the floor or a metronome’s ticking. Glass or another intelligent glasses would display these pattern and/or rhythmic sound, and it would interact with the cameras and accelerometers already built into the devices. The MIRA Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine is working on the project together with the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (Nijmegen), the Medisch Spectrum Twente hospital and the VUmc University Medical Centre in Amsterdam. Smart glasses can improve gait of Parkinson’s patients It also sounds like an investigatory area for smartphones and fitness bracelets. Hat tip to contributing editor Toni Bunting.
The sea of security ‘red flags’ that is Healthcare.gov
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/120306.png” thumb_width=”170″ /]It’s just a fact of life
That no one cares to mention
She wasn’t very good
But she had good intentions
That no one cares to mention
She wasn’t very good
But she had good intentions
—Lyle Lovett, ‘Good Intentions’
Confirmed by experts to the more-than-mainstream Christian Science Monitor are the layers of insecurity completely feasible on the current Healthcare.gov website–and the 14 state (plus DC) websites feeding into the Federal health insurance exchange and up into the mysterious hub linked to other Federal agencies. Healthcare.gov is supposed to adhere to NIST standards but these are no guarantee–and the state sites are not required to. ‘Red flags’ cited by experts (aside from ‘Wildman’ John McAfee) make for interesting reading:
- Cross-site request forgery
- ‘Clickjacking’–an invisible layer over the legitimate website
- Cookie theft, and not by the Cookie Monster
- Problematic verification from state to Federal, from legitimate third-party assistance, from brokers and so on
- Log in fraud–the happy hunting ground of hackers and DDOS attacks
Warnings were apparent as early as 2 October [TTA 8 Oct]. And as our later coverage has explained, undoing all of this is near-impossible even with funding, in the less-than-a-month window till the crash time deadline in mid-November and then early January. Obamacare website security called ‘outrageous’: How safe is it? (+video)
Our 11-14 October compilation is a narrative and summary of major articles on the failure of the Healthcare.gov website and its consequences like none you will see elsewhere.
Wanted: Connected Health Symposium correspondents 23-25 October-Boston
With our successful request for CATCH at Sheffield, TTA is asking for one or more of our readers who are already attending the Symposium to be volunteer correspondents for the Connected Health Symposium in Boston from Wednesday 23 October through Friday 25 October. If you are willing to write up an article or a compilation of impressions within 72 hours of the event or even as the days end or start, please email EIC Donna here (donna.cusano@telecareaware.com). It is a large event so it’s expected that you can be selective and interesting rather than comprehensive. You will be credited of course but expenses and article will not be covered.
European Telemedicine Conference–HIMSS Europe
29-30 October 2013, The Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, Scotland
The first annual European Telemedicine Conference (ETC) combines the efforts of several leading European healthcare organisations into one event. This year, the ETC incorporates the annual NHS 24 Scottish Centre for Telemedicine and Telecare Conference with the Scottish Government’s Joint Improvement Team and also combined with the UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) International Telemedicine Conference. Website, speaker information and registration.
VA Department data breaches soar (US)
If after the Healthcare.gov debacle, there’s still any confidence that centralized Federal systems are secure and trustworthy, please read this HealthcareITNews tally of the multiple data breaches and HIPAA violations taking place at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
From 2010 through May 2013, VA department employees or contractors were responsible for 14,215 privacy breaches affecting more than 101,000 veterans across 167 VA facilities, including incidences of identity theft, stealing veteran prescriptions, Facebook posts concerning veterans’ body parts, and failing to encrypt data, a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review investigation revealed.
The two-month investigation by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review published this weekend found that the VA led the way in HIPAA violations–17 in the past few years–for reasons centering on lack of accountability, shoddy safeguards, sloppiness in handling data and failure to encrypt data even after the 2006 theft of a laptop put records of 26.5 million veterans in danger. There are few firings, disciplinary actions or HHS fines.
This should put telehealth and telemedicine providers on notice that their encryption will have to be ‘stronger than the VA’, as both they and Department of Defense (DOD) are the single largest users of telehealth in the US.
Delays in ‘game-changing’ PERS
Both Philips GoSafe and Lifecomm have apparently blown past at least two in-market dates.
Philips Lifeline GoSafe: Announced at CES in January [TTA 11 Jan], it is a mobile, souped-up PERS chunky neck-worn pendant with the fall detection features of Lifeline Auto-Alert plus GPS detection through multiple systems such as Skyhook, Wi-Fi and ‘intelligent bread crumbing’. The CES-announced debut was March, reconfirmed in February to Leading Age [TTA 14 Feb]. Then a small blog, The Senior List, confirmed with Philips in June that in-market would be delayed till fall. Now that fall is here, an industry insider tipped us to the further delay till December, confirmed by a later article in the The Senior List blog. Notably Philips is beefing up its website and video demo presence, apparently building up to an announcement near the end of the year. In the PERS category, one of the peak selling seasons is post-New Year’s, after holiday get-togethers bring the realization that a loved one is getting frailer and in need of some protection.
On the polar opposite, the Lifecomm PERS (from the Qualcomm/Hughes Telematics-now-Verizon/AMAC-now-Tunstall JV) seems to be hanging in limbo–again. (more…)
Hands-free telehealth-telemedicine crossover consult
A neuroscience research team at the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) in Augusta has developed a way to decipher a video image of a person to measure a person’s heart and breathing rates. Using any single-channel video camera, including a web or cell phone cam, in day, low-light or even at night using near-infrared images, they have developed algorithms to track how the body moves slightly from the way light is reflected off of it and recorded. This can determine within fair clinical accuracy of physical measurements, with false positives only 3 percent of the time and false negatives less than 1 percent. If produced to work with systems to scale, this could vastly assist telemedicine consults especially at distance and facilitate hands-free in-person examinations. Research published in PLOS ONE with a summary in Healthline News. Philips in July started marketing a ‘Vital Signs Camera’ app for $1.99 in the iTunes Store that also measures heart and breathing, but not to clinical quality.
First M&A roundup for 3rd quarter: more action, less value, whither digital health?
VC/research firm TripleTree is first out of the gate with its roundup of merger and acquisition activity in healthcare, July through September. The news and directions are mixed. Deals are up 28 percent from the two previous quarters but down 12 percent in total deal value. Most are in the healthcare facilities area with home care giant Gentiva acquiring Harden Healthcare and insurance giant Humana adding to its LTC, Medicaid/Medicare portfolio with American Eldercare. 19 healthcare companies had successful IPOs totaling ~$3 billion of transaction value. Two highlighted here are Envision Healthcare Holdings (ambulance and outsourced physician services) and Benefitfocus (benefit administration software and tracking). Given that they are the creator of the iAwards at the annual Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance in May which focuses on digital health, the decidedly non-buzzy companies getting the action here are perhaps another indicator of the funding cooling preceding M&A as projected by Rock Health back in July [TTA 9 July], with their 3rd Quarter report due out shortly.
More color(s) on Calico
Fortune, rolling off sister TIME‘s announcement of ‘Can Google Solve Death?’ [TTA 19 Sep], provides more background on how Calico, Google‘s new company which will focus on aging and associated diseases, came to be. It is the brainchild of Google Ventures’ managing partner Bill Maris who was once in biotech, and saw that this area was missing the root cause of much disease–that we all keep on getting older and experience cellular failure. “Now that the entire genome had been coded, Maris wondered if it was possible to actually study the genetic causes of aging and then create drugs to address them (a question that was heavily influenced by talks with futurist and Googler Ray Kurzweil).” He initially attracted major non-Googly investors, (more…)
Non-functional Obamacare exchange websites? $500 million estimated to date. 2014? Priceless. (US)
Updated/Revised for breaking news and analysis, 12-14 October (US). Much new information noted in dark blue. (Grab your tea or coffee…this is a long one as this story rolls on.)
The mainstream reports continue to build that both the Federal HealthCare.gov site, which provides health exchange enrollment for 36 states, and many of the state-run health insurance exchanges (14 plus District of Columbia) are a nightmare of programming glitches and simply don’t work. It is not the demand–which has been high but not unanticipatedly so with an initial 8 million hits–but more disturbingly, the programming appears to be is unsound. “Computer experts” quoted by CBS This Morning are making statements like “It wasn’t designed well, it wasn’t implemented well, and it looks like nobody tested it,” going on to say ” It’s not even ready for beta testing for my book. I would be ashamed and embarrassed if my organization delivered something like that.” A more technical dissection of the site’s multiple system architecture problems is provided by Reuters here, with the best quote “The site basically DDOS’d itself,” he said. (DDOS–distributed denial of service, a hacking technique but here, the website overwhelmed itself!)
Counting the cost
A rough calculation of the cost has been made on a tech website, Digital Trends. Andrew Couts (who is pro-Obamacare) ran some public numbers on the IT cost of setting up the Federal part of the exchanges and add in associated 2012-13 costs, and arrives at $500 million—not including the $2 billion to build out and operate the exchanges in 2014 (General Accounting Office). Larger numbers north of $600 million have been bandied about, but this Editor will go for now with Mr. Couts’ perhaps low estimate which has been supported by more mainstream reporting. (more…)
Wanted: Launch Event correspondent 19 Nov-Sheffield
TTA is asking for one (or two) of our readers to be a volunteer correspondent for the launch 19 November of the Centre for Assistive Technology and Connected Healthcare (CATCH) at the Millennium Galleries in Sheffield from 12.30pm until 4.00pm. CATCH is being established at the University of Sheffield as a strategic research centre and interdisciplinary research hub to study and develop new user-friendly technologies which enable independent living and improve healthcare for older and disabled people. Unfortunately none of the Editors will be in the area to take up their kind invitation to view their exhibition, presentations and demos. If you are willing to write up an article within 48 hours of the event, please email EIC Donna here (donna.cusano@telecareaware.com) as I must authorize this with the Sheffield group. You will be credited of course but expenses and article will not be covered.
Update 14 October: We have two volunteers! Thanks to Drs. Kenneth Law and Mutaz Aldawoud of the Hillside Bridge Health Centre in Bradford for offering to attend and write their observations.
Body computing, sensors and all that data
This past week’s Body Computing Conference at University of Southern California (USC) had three sessions focusing on wearable sensors and the big names such as the well-financed Fitbit, Jawbone, BodyMedia, the ingestible sensor Proteus and Zephyr. The panels were split between the medical-grade and the consumer oriented with this report indicating some friction between the two. The notion of the Quantified Self died hard, even with Basis Science’s Marco Della Torre noting that 80% of health app users abandon them within two weeks, so the discussion moved to form factor and the ‘holy grail’ of getting the 90% of never-ever QSers to pay some attention. Of course, it’s the flood of data that has to somehow be processed (one of the FBQs) even though the doctors appear to be unconvinced of the evidence…but the ‘big data’ may be proving it after the fact. The future of wearable sensors in healthcare (iMedicalApps)
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