Press release. An object lesson in how to avoid all those long and winding road issues about the fiasco of its commissioning, its cost and speed of delivery.
Future’s digital for healthcare, says tech tycoon (UK)
Peter Wilkinson, the self-effacing tech entrepreneur who launched, built and sold technology businesses including Planet Online, Freeserve and Sports Internet has given an inteview to his local newspaper, the Yorkshire Post, about his belief in the digital nature of future healthcare provision. He is an investor in telehealth company inHealthcare. Future’s digital for healthcare, says tech tycoon. The InTechnology company’s profile of Peter Wilkinson.
The diabetic experience: help on the way?
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IV-AA370_DIABET_G_201304051645212.jpg” thumb_width=”175″ /]Last week’s article on the limitations of QSing outlined the precursor ‘fly in ointment’: how diabetics have been living long-term with monitoring and self-management. Type 1 diabetes is the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’ for life. The ideal is to create a device that replaces the non-functioning pancreas, which releases insulin in the amount and time as needed to closely balance blood glucose and avoid devastating seizures and blackouts. Technology available for the past few years in Europe is just now (to this Editor’s amazement) in FDA approval in the US (Medtronic’s insulin pump.) Closer to the ideal is an insulin pump that connects to a continuous glucose monitor, which is being developed by Johnson & Johnson’s Animas division. The market, according to the JDRF, is 3 million people in the US. For Diabetics, a Longtime Goal Is Within Reach (Wall Street Journal)
Healthcare moving towards the ‘Wal-Mart Moment’: IBM
Perhaps this is more a wish than reality right now, but IBM’s Barry Mason, their VP in charge of global healthcare payers, sees the ‘Wal-Mart moment’ of transparency between insurance companies, hospitals, medical devices and pharma coming up shortly. The four are actually considering sharing data, restructuring their organizations to work more closely together and even going ‘joint’. This sentiment seems to be on display in this week’s World Health Care Congress. The aforementioned ‘Wal-Mart moment’ is when Wal-Mart opened its books on sales data and inventory levels to vendors, creating a superior level of transparency. The ambitious list he proposes includes supply chain data (claims data), complete sharing of clinical data from providers and all consumer data. Amazing potential here…but many rivers to cross, filled with rocks. Again. Healthcare convergence moves beyond the buzzword. But here’s what still needs to happen (MedCityNews)
FNIH spearheads Alzheimer’s Disease neuroimaging initiative
This news could not be more timely, as Alzheimer’s Disease has become the sixth leading cause of death in the US, and one which has increased by 68 percent between 2000-2010 [TTA 25 March]. The National Institutes on Health (NIH) with the National Institute on Aging and 27 private sector companies and non-profits has started the second phase of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI II). It will continue to track the ADNI subjects from the study that ended in 2010, and enroll additional normal, mildly cognitively impaired, and Alzheimer’s disease patients. Additional plans for ADNI II include PET imaging scans on every new patient enrolled. Foundation for the National Institutes on Health.
Thick as BRICS?
The developing nations dubbed BRICS–Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa–have prosperity, uneven as it may be, but their public health is not keeping up. In addition to communicable diseases, obesity and diabetes are exploding. This Atlantic article is insistent on ‘infrastructure’–which is needed–but here are five countries which are wide open for mobile health. High rates of cell phone ownership and the huge job to be done in helping people towards awareness and self-management — means opportunity, as long as it is kept simple and inexpensive. Which health tech systems now at BluePrint Health or StartUp Health will help these people manage food consumption, tracking weight, exercise, blood glucose in a non-QS way? Brazil, China, and India Are Fat, And Getting Fatter
Telehealth tiptoeing into skilled nursing facilities (US)
Shattering a few stereotypes on older adults and technology use is this profile of Las Colinas of Westover Rehabilitation, a short and long-term-care (LTC) residence near San Antonio, Texas Technology. Their short and long-term residents–largely in their 70s and 80s–use CogniFit brain training games, videos and Skype-ing on a Kindle Fire and Apple TV for brain stimulation, games, socialization and connectedness with families.The facility is also up to date with the specialized long-term-care EHR PointClickCare. Perhaps not typical in LTC now, but a pointer to where the near future should be. Senior care goes high-tech (San Antonio Express-News)
Growing Army-Navy ‘jointness’ in telehealth (US)
Our readers will note that most advances in telehealth, in smartphone-based support and TBI research have originated out of the US Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), the Army Research Laboratory, Medical Research & Materiel Command and the Research, Development and Engineering Command. The US Navy has jumped in with Kinect for rehab with the West Health Institute. Now the US Army Medical Information Technology Center at Fort Sam Houston (Texas), part of the Joint Base San Antonio (JBSA), is the point of contact for the Navy for a pilot program using instant messaging hardware and software–Jabber–to be tested at Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune, North Carolina and planned to be rolled out through worldwide naval medical facilities. JBSA is the locus for medical training in the Army and much of the armed forces; the Army’s medical school AMEDDC&S is located there. Fort Sam Houston’s Video Network Center also handles telemedicine consults for the Army, Navy and VA. USAMITC helps telehealth become a reality for Navy medicine (JBSA release).
Two more useful – Simple Telehealth – items for GPs (UK)
Nearly a month ago we posted links to GP Online two articles written by Professor Ruth Chambers for UK GPs about practical ways to use the NHS Simple Telehealth system–aka Florence or Flo. They covered hypertension and inhaler use. Now we discover two further articles, oddly, on a different part of the site. They follow the same useful pattern as the earlier ones. They are:
- Adopting remote monitoring via telehealth in your CCG’s practices – part 3: smoking cessation
- Adopting remote monitoring via telehealth in your CCG’s practices – part 4: weight loss
How telehealth can fail to manage chronic diseases
For a US nurse’s view of telehealth (remote monitoring), see a blog by Kavita Radhakrishnan, RN, PhD. Start with this article, which is positive in tone: Can Telehealth Improve Chronic Disease Outcomes in the Community? but make sure to follow up with this item which swings the other way: Unintended Consequences: How Telehealth Can Fail to Manage Chronic Diseases.
EU ahead of US on telehealth
US law firm Epstein Becker Green analyses two key differences between the US and EU regulations affecting telehealth. First they identify the ability of health workers to treat their patients even when the patient moves to another EU state. Second is about getting health insurance companies to cover costs when health services are received abroad – it seems that insurance companies are required to do so under an EU directive whereas in the US cover is mostly state based: E.U. Way Ahead of the Game on Telehealth. Heads-up thanks to TANN England editor Chrys Meewella.
The diabetic experience: the fly in the Quantified Selfing ointment
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/gimlet-eye.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Quantified Selfers (QSers) maintain that their obsessive practice not only is the be-all and end-all of leading a Healthy Life, but if only more of the hoi polloi would do it, we’d avoid doctors and healthcare costs, the seas would part and we’d bounce to the Gates of the New Jerusalem with a gleam in our eye, driving our Fords with Allergy Alert SYNC. Well, this Eye has gazed Gimlety on this entire Movement for quite a while, to the raised noses of the Healthcare Digerati, and now has found a fellow nay-sayer and nose lower-er in the unexpected pages of The Atlantic. The Eye now slaps the Head for not thinking of the following.
Who were the early adopters of QS? Diabetics. From the late 1970s on, patients were handed glucose meters in the doctor’s office, stacks of reading material and told to go forth and self-manage. Are they happy? Empowered? In control? Au contraire, mon frere!
The fact that diabetics have been doing this for years, and that they largely loathe the experience (author’s emphasis), not only serves as a caution to the vogue of self-tracking. It also offers an opportunity, serving as an object lesson in what works, and what doesn’t work, when people track their health.
Loathing Can Be Quantified as in the 2012 BMC Health-published survey where diabetics told researchers that self-monitoring was the enemy, a Sisypheian task, a perpetual Battle of Stalingrad. No wonder why they are DEPRESSED. The sheer tedium of every day, several times a day, pricking fingers with crude monitors, making the decision on to eat, what, to inject or take pills, meds that get you sick, and never, ever being ‘in balance’, feeling wrong, guilty and scared, would depress The Eye more than sitting through a Jim Carrey movie. Fine to take away a few steps with LifeScan’s VerioSync and iBGStar to send the metering to the smartphone, or to Telcare’s system, and know that hovering in the future may be the non-invasive glucose meter and fully automated insulin pumps that work with your smartphone, but… Thomas Goetz’s point: don’t expect QSing to be a panacea as hyped, do expect that emotional baggage is in the trunk of the car, and that tracking for people is WORK that is really to be avoided. And as Editor Donna continually reminds The Eye, only undertaken when it is a solution to an unavoidable job to be done. And if they don’t see the job… The Diabetic’s Paradox
Your Friday robot fix: senior housing helpers, getting more humanoid
Care Innovations, which has no stakes (thus far) in robotics, highlights what robots can do and change in the senior housing area in this (sponsored) article in Senior Housing News. Featured: the ‘Hector’ assistance robot, developed by the EU’s CompanionAble Project [TTA 23 August]; ‘Monitoring Platform 3.0’ iPad and iPhone mobilizers such as Helios [TTA 2 Oct]; as ‘little armies of telepresence’ for non-emergencies (a small mention of telecare here); solving the worker shortage [TTA 19 May 11 on Robosoft and the Kompaï care robot, which Editor Steve has been following ever since, recently updated] and enabling independence [Robot & Frank, anyone?]
But a problem with more humanoid robots like Roboy is not developing arthritis but an inherent stiffness in the joints. COMAN, from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), mixes in compliant joints to make them less so, and safer (pulling a robot off the floor can be hazardous for your joints!) This Humanoid Robot Gets Pushed Around But Stays on Its Feet (IEEE Spectrum) Another hat tip to Toni Bunting, TANN Ireland.
Device vs. Device: a mobile health faceoff
MedCityNews pits unrelated mobile health devices and apps against each other in this series you may have overlooked last pre-holiday week. Some surprising winners in these eight short ‘n’ sweet matchups:
AliveCor smartphone ECG vs. DrawMD by Visible Health iPad app for general surgery patient ed
Related news: AliveCor names new CEO, experienced medical device and healthcare entrepreneur Dan Sullivan (Mobihealthnews)
Diabetes Manager by WellDoc (FDA cleared) vs iTriage by Healthagen
AirStrip ONE by AirStrip Technologies (FDA cleared) vs Lab Counter by ZappyLab
BT gets Cornwall telecare/telehealth service as part of service outsource package (UK)
The on-off-on saga of BT’s attempt to become the major supplier [latest posts] of services including telecare and telehealth for Cornwall has finally been confirmed. The deal will involve the transfer of 303 full time equivalent staff with the majority of staff expected to transfer in July. BT to be awarded Strategic Partnership contract (Insider Media).
Trafford Council pledges free telecare trial for over 80s (UK)
After checking the date on this item (not 2007 or 1st April) I can post it with congratulations to Trafford Council and its partners AgeUK, Trafford Housing Trust and LMCP Carelink. Trafford Council pledges free Telecare trial for over 80s. Messenger Newspapers.
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