News roundup: Philips allies with Humana for pop health, Dexcom’s outage outrage, Halamka ankles Lahey for Mayo, Google and NHS Wales changes, Agfa’s health sale, Victrix/WhatsApp, more

December 5, 2019 | by

Insurer Humana is identifying high-acuity and chronic CHF Medicare Advantage members and deploying two support programs utilizing Philips PERS and remote patient monitoring (RPM) systems. The first program identifies at-risk older people with chronic conditions and offering them Philips Lifeline with AutoAlert, Lifeline’s fall detection technology, and their CareSage predictive analytics. Philips Lifeline is already offered in select Humana Medicare Advantage plans. The second is a pilot with telehealth RPM to monitor a select group of CHF patients. This will use a Philips interactive tablet and connected measurement devices for care teams to actively monitor congestive heart failure patients. The rationale in the press release is centered on population health management, quality of care, and positively influencing patient outcomes, with “more efficient resource utilization” a/k/a lowering cost of care. Philips release.

Health tech is great, when it works–and Dexcom found out how serious it can get when it doesn’t. Dexcom, a continuous glucose monitoring system, experienced a server outage over the US Thanksgiving holiday weekend into Monday. It knocked out its updates in the Follow feature, frequently used by parents to monitor Type 1 diabetic children, and those with artificial pancreas devices that adjust insulin based on monitored BG levels. Dexcom was not only blasted by users on the server outage, which they attributed to ‘overload’, but also on its communications of the problem to users which depended on Facebook postings and not on real-time direct contacts or messaging. It was a ‘big surprise’ to their CEO, who also dismissed the possibility of a data breach, which seems a bit premature. Both Google and Microsoft provide cloud and tech services to Dexcom. CNBC 12/2, 12/3

Comings and goings: HIT pioneer, strategist, and general guru John Halamka is following the AI Star, leaving Boston’s Beth Israel Lahey Health to head up a machine learning/AI initiative at the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis. Mayo this fall announced a 10-year high-level partnership with Google Cloud to store patient data and analysis. Modern Healthcare  According to the Healthcare IT News article, he’ll be returning on weekends to the Bay State to his 250-acre working farm….Also moving on to Google Health is Facebook’s Hema Budaraju, a product management director. Business Insider has annoyingly hid the news behind its paywall, leading to speculation in Mobihealthnews that she will be engaged in Google’s “social and environmental impact” efforts as she was at FB…And speaking of Google, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping down at long last from active management. Google CEO Sundar Pichai will now be running Google and its corporate parent, Alphabet. See their letter on the GoogleBlog.…DigitalHealth reports on changes at the NHS Wales Informatics Service. Helen Thomas is now interim director as NWIS director Andrew Griffiths is departing this month. NWIS is also transitioning to a new Special Health Authority….Agfa’s Healthcare Information Solutions and Integrated Care, plus their imaging division, are definitely going to Italy’s Dedalus Holdings S.p.A. for €975 million. It awaits approval from various authorities, their employee groups, and the usual closing conditions. Release, DigitalHealth.

UK healthcare analytics company Victrix Socsan has signed a licensing agreement last month with WhatsApp. Victrix will use Whats App for communications with beneficiaries as part of their furnishing proactive preventive care services and provide secure information. Release.

TTA’s Friday roundup of interesting articles, updates and weekend reads

September 16, 2016 | by

Fitbit may succeed in blocking Jawbone from selling in US? The Jawbone wins [TTA 27 July] in the US International Trade Commission court was apparently reversed due to a judge’s error for two Fitbit patents, and this may open the way for Fitbit to further block Jawbone. An additional California court action on infringement and misappropriation on trade secrets by Jawbone is headed for court in 2017. Mobihealthnews…..Maybe texting is enough? Dr Joseph Kvedar seems to think so for simple medication adherence and reminders, with reasons like the easy scaling of text messaging in EHRs, but prefers installing an app to deliver them due to the downsides of plain text messaging such as HIPAA and security. Thus we return to the logic of the desktop unit days (e.g. Health Buddy, Viterion) but delivered via smartphone. CHealthBlog….550 US primary care docs say no reimbursement, no telehealth (actually telemedicine). Usage in the past year was a scant 15 percent, with higher usage in Federally designated ‘safety net’ clinics (FQHCs) and HMOs versus PCMHs and ACOs where reimbursement by Medicare, Medicaid and private payers is far chancier. The survey was conducted by their association, the American Association of Family Physicians (AAFP). mHealthIntelligence….iHealth Andon Group buys France’s eDevice for $106 million. The aim seems to be integration of eDevice’s backend infrastructure to iHealth’s RPM devices. Mobihealthnews….A analysis of what went wrong at HealthSpot is in the new publication Telehealth & Medicine Today. A summary is that they had a business model that started out on point quite a while ago (2010) but then competitors and fresh technology ate their lunch (Editor’s term). They didn’t pivot to fit, moved too slowly and were overly wedded to their business model. A big problem was scaling costly kiosks and not finding the right places for them. While initially impressive, there was something all too elephantine about HealthSpot from the start. Our Readers interested in a Trip Down Memory Lane may read our collection of articles from 2013 here which pointed out most of the above….In the industry moves department, Peter Radsliff, whom this Editor worked with briefly on AgeTek-The Aging Technology Alliance (apparently defunct), has joined Arrayent, an IoT developer, as VP Marketing. Now that tells us something! Congrats to Peter!

And finally for a good long, but not light, read, this article in The Atlantic will give you a chilling glimpse of front-line medicine attempting to heal the carnage in Syria, using WhatsApp, texts and the simplest forms of telemedicine. A dedicated group of primarily Syrian-American doctors on a WhatsApp volunteer group called Madaya Medical Consultants uses it to perform consults with the minimal medical resources available in Syria. And yes, they know what Aleppo is.