General News

AMA sets guidance for augmented intelligence in health care

June 20, 2018 by Kathy Dion Leave a Comment

CHICAGO – The American Medical Association has released a set of recommendations on augmented intelligence, a technology it says is designed to enhance human intelligence, not replace it.

“The promise of augmented intelligence in spurring technological innovation in medicine has generated growing interest among health care stakeholders,” said Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, AMA board member, in a statement. “It also has spurred a range of concerns about the novel challenges in the design, implementation and use—especially how AI will be incorporated into the practice of medicine and affect patients.”

The recommendations state the AMA will: leverage its ongoing engagement in digital health and other priority areas for improving patient outcomes and physicians’ professional satisfaction to help set priorities for health care AI; identify opportunities to integrate the perspective of practicing physicians into the development, design, validation and implementation of health care AI; promote development of thoughtfully designed, high-quality, clinically validated health care AI; encourage education for patients, physicians, medical students, other health care professionals and health administrators to promote greater understanding of the promise and limitations of health care AI; and explore the legal implications of health care AI.

The recommendations stress that AI systems need to be developed and evaluated in keeping with best practices in user-centered design, and usability should be tested by participants who are demographically representative of end users.

“As technology continues to advance and evolve, we have a unique opportunity to ensure that augmented intelligence is used to benefit patients, physicians and the broad health care community,” said Ehrenfeld. “Combining AI methods and systems with an irreplaceable human clinician can advance the delivery of care in a way that outperforms what either can do alone. But we must forthrightly address challenges in the design, evaluation and implementation as this technology is increasingly integrated into physicians’ delivery of care to patients.”

Sage Bionetworks gives boost to digital health researchers

June 19, 2018 by Kathy Dion Leave a Comment

BOSTON – Sage Bionetworks has introduced a program to help researchers get their digital health technologies off the ground and advance innovation.

The Digital Health Catalyst Program, announced last week at the Biomarkers & Immuno-Oncology World Congress, will provide pro bono consulting and in-kind infrastructure to support innovative ideas for biomedical research.

“We’re looking for innovations that leverage digital health technologies to answer a pressing question,” said Dan Webster, principal scientist of digital health at Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit organization that promotes open science and patient engagement in the research process.

Winners of the program will receive support from Sage throughout the research lifecycle, as well as have their research highlighted through Sage’s Qualified Research Program. The program has already introduced studies like: mPower, a mobile study of Parkinson’s disease; Mole Mapper, an iPhone based melanoma study; and the Asthma Mobile Health Study.

“Smartphones and other wearable sensors have put touchscreens and sensors into the pockets of billions of people,” said Webster. “These technologies provide an opportunity to paint a rich understanding of health and disease in the natural world outside of the clinic; they also provide communication tools that allow participants a more active voice in research programs.”

But the promise of these emerging technologies has been accompanied by challenges requiring infrastructure and other needs not typically found in traditional biomedical research organizations. Supporting the development of digital health technologies throughout the research lifecycle is critical because the analysis and sharing of the resulting study data is key to advancing health care, Webster said.

“We want to know if an open and crowd-sourced analysis with the wider research community can get us to a better health care solution,” he said.

UCHealth building innovation lab

June 15, 2018 by Kathy Dion Leave a Comment

AURORA, Colo.– UCHealth is building a new innovation center at the Catalyst Health-Tech Innovation building in Denver, with plans to develop a technology innovation hub to help transform the delivery of health care.

“Artificial intelligence, big data, decision support, virtual health and wearables are rapidly disrupting health care as we know it,” said Dr. Richard Zane, chief innovation officer at UCHealth, in a statement. “We are committed to being at the forefront of this change and partnering with other innovators to improve the quality, experience and safety of health care while helping control costs.”

Catalyst HTI is a real estate development that brings together stakeholders from across the health care and wellness industries to collaborate and incubate innovative ideas. UCHealth IT experts and members of the organization’s creative team will also have space within the facility.

UCHealth plans to build an innovation lab at the location with a ‘hospital room of the future,’ a location to test equipment and devices and actually create a new type of clinical setting. By experimenting with virtual health options, wearable monitors and the electronic health record, health care organizations might be able to transform a patient’s bedroom into a space where medicine is delivered in a novel way that is both convenient and comforting to the patient while also lowering costs, said Zane.

“Our industry integrator concept allows UCHealth to be plugged in at the point of innovation by physically housing a health care innovation ecosystem in a single location—allowing entrepreneurs, technologists and clinicians to collaborate through the entire process of innovation,” said Mike Biselli, co-founder of Catalyst HTI, in a statement.

UCHealth is already partnering with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and more than a dozen innovative companies, and together, products have been developed to improve the efficiency of operating rooms, boost the accuracy of medication prescribing, inject the latest research and protocols into the electronic medical record, and to utilize wearable devices to constantly monitor the vital signs of patients. More innovations are currently in development.

“The most exciting part of innovation and the Catalyst location is that we can only anticipate what’s next,” said Dr. Jennifer Wiler, founder and executive director of the UCHealth CARE Innovation Center, in a statement. “We don’t know yet what ideas and innovations will be inspired and developed here and we can’t wait to expand the work we’ve already started.”

Digital endpoints could drive more meaningful clinical trials

June 12, 2018 by Kathy Dion Leave a Comment

BOSTON – Dr. Daniel Karlin believes that digital health technologies can drive progress in clinical trials and help the health care industry develop treatments for patients faster and more efficiently.

“We are carrying around a ton of sensors that act as information collectors every day,” said Karlin, head of clinical informatics and regulatory strategy, digital medicine, and the Pfizer Innovation Research Lab, to attendees of this week’s Biomarkers & Immuno-Oncology World Congress. “The hope is that we’re able to progress clinical trials in a myriad of ways.”

Karlin said in the past, and still today, some clinical trials involved a face-to-face visit between participating patients and a physician to get information about how a new treatment or medication is working. The question-and-answer session gives researchers endpoints in the trial and reveal a trend.

“In our modern era, we have Internet of Things-everything that pick up signals and send data back and forth,” said Karlin. “Now we can record data every day, or multiple times a day, and get more points on the graph to show the complex reality.”

More frequent endpoints often reveal a different health trend than what traditional trial methods may have shown before.

“Often the realities we discover don’t line up with our current models,” Karlin said. “Today we can measure people better, more frequently, more objectively and in more ways to give us more data-rich trials.”

Karlin said the work doesn’t stop with digital endpoints, however, and researchers still have to interpret what all the data means.

“You have to think about what the sensors do, what that means, and how you can gain clinical understanding from them,” he said. “We have to try to use clinical knowledge to come up with better diagnoses and treatments, and always ask how our work will affect a patient’s ability to do what they need to do.”

Health technology innovation will help seniors stay healthy at home, expert says

June 12, 2018 by Kathy Dion 1 Comment

BOSTON – The health care industry is going to need real innovation from the business community to help a growing senior population stay healthy, said Dr. Christine Cassel, presidential chair and visiting professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

“If we don’t improve the way we deliver health care for seniors, the impact will be huge,” she said to attendees of the d.health summit last week.

Cassel, former president and CEO of the National Quality Forum, said that technology innovations play a crucial role in the future of health care delivery.

It is estimated that all Baby Boomers (those born between 1946-1964) will turn 65 by 2030, accounting for a full 18% of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center.

“We need to see innovation in health care delivery to get these people out of the hospital and allow them to stay healthy in their homes and communities,” Cassel said.

Pharmacists will also play a larger role in health care than ever before and become part of ‘virtual teams’ of caregivers, Cassel believes.

She said that pharmacists have all of the information regarding the costs and risks of medication and can identify risks ahead of time to avoid potential adverse outcomes.

“It makes sense to put them at the heart of health care for seniors,” Cassel said.

When it comes to technology innovation, the nation’s health system is in its infancy—but innovation is happening, she said. An innovation economy will help drive a health care delivery transformation by connecting families and helping patients understand their condition.

As people extend their life expectancy longer than ever before, it will be important to find ways to fill the gaps in health care, like a lack of physicians and rising costs.

“There is an innovation challenge as we talk about seniors,” Cassel said. “I would like to challenge innovators to come up with ways to drive down the cost of health care.”

PULSE@MassChallenge announces winning startups

June 11, 2018 by Kathy Dion Leave a Comment

BOSTON – MassChallenge, a global network of startup accelerators, awarded $200,000 in cash prizes last week to three digital health startups from the 2018 cohort of PULSE@MassChallenge competition.

“We are thrilled by the results of this year’s program,” said Nick Dougherty, program director of PULSE, in a statement. “The 2018 cohort received over 100 offers from our Champion partners, touched millions of patient lives, earned millions in funding, and generated millions in revenue.”

This year’s winners include:

Leuko ($100,000), providers of a non-invasive device for the screening of severe neutropenia;
InsightRX ($60,000), a platform that enables data-driven health care with quantitative pharmacology and machine learning; and
Fitly ($40,000), providers of SmartPlate, an intelligent nutrition platform that uses computer vision, deep learning and proprietary image recognition techniques to help consumers and patients track their food intake.

In addition to the program winners, the following startups were also awarded through generous support from PULSE partners:

The Sunovion Startup Choice Award ($10,000): Medumo, which delivers navigation and instructional support to help patients successfully complete and recover from their care;

The Mayo Clinic People’s Choice Award ($10,000): Multisensor Diagnostics, a health and disease management device and software company; and

The Massachusetts Competitive Partnership Women in Digital Health Award ($10,000): Folia Health
Folia Health, which allows family caregivers and chronic disease patients to capture detailed information on symptoms, treatments, side-effects and more at home.

As part of the Massachusetts Digital Health Initiative, the Massachusetts eHealth Institute at MassTech and the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission announced that they will double the Commonwealth’s annual commitment to PULSE, bringing the total investment to $340,000 over the coming year. In addition, MeHI will also invest an additional $80,000 into TechSpring, Baystate Health’s innovation center in Springfield, to support programming there.

Also, AARP announced that it will jointly support PULSE and MassChallenge’s newest vertical accelerator, MassChallenge FinTech, over the next three years.

Launched as a strategic component of Mass Digital Health and fueled by public-private partnerships, PULSE accelerates the impact of digital health startups around the world, at zero cost and for zero-equity. It connects startups with industry champions that support entrepreneurs throughout the six month-long program by facilitating key advisor introductions, pilots, research and investment opportunities.

Apple offers Health Records API to developers

June 6, 2018 by Kathy Dion Leave a Comment

CUPERTINO, Calif. –Apple has delivered a Health Records API for developers and researchers to create an ecosystem of apps that use health record data to better manage medications, nutrition plans, diagnosed diseases and more.

The Health Records feature allows patients of more than 500 hospitals and clinics to access medical information from various institutions organized into one view on their iPhone. For the first time, consumers will be able to share medical records from multiple hospitals with their favorite trusted apps, helping them improve their overall health.

“Medical information may be the most important personal information to a consumer, and offering access to Health Records was the first step in empowering them,” said Jeff Williams, COO of Apple, in a statement. “Now, with the potential of Health Records information paired with HealthKit data, patients are on the path to receiving a holistic view of their health. With the Health Records API open to our incredible community of developers and researchers, consumers can personalize their health needs with the apps they use every day.”

Health Records data is encrypted on iPhone and protected with the consumer’s iPhone passcode. When consumers choose to share their health record data with trusted apps, the data flows directly from HealthKit to the third-party app and is not sent to Apple’s servers.

Developers building health apps can individualize experiences, with the user’s permission, based on the user’s unique health history across key categories, including: medication tracking; disease management; nutrition planning; and medical research.

With the new Health Records API, doctors can integrate patient medical data into their ResearchKit study apps for a more complete view of their participants’ health background. Traditionally, researchers used arduous survey questionnaires to determine pre-existing conditions, which puts the burden on the patient to remember the details. Now, with the participants’ approval, researchers can access that patient-specific information to ensure more comprehensive research.

PGHD drives better population health

June 5, 2018 by Kathy Dion Leave a Comment

The big question: What do we do with the data?

BOSTON – Patient generated health data (PGHD) has the power to bring new insights to population health and predictive models, said Dr. Fatima Paruk, chief medical officer at Allscripts, at the recent Bridge to Pop Health conference.

“We have lots of solid data, but we’ve never really been able to combine it effectively to drive better population health,” she said.

Artificial intelligence and neural networks are tackling that challenge, but now health organizations need to leverage the progress that has been made, she said.

“The electronic health records industry has facilitated the collection of large scale data and health organizations can afford to keep this data in the cloud,” she said. “The question becomes what do we do with it?”

Allscripts has been working on building neural networks and incorporating machine learning on large amounts of PGHD to predict health outcomes for patient populations with chronic conditions and opioid abuse disorder.

The company has been able to show some payers the annual direct cost estimate of care for people with certain chronic conditions, like diabetes. It used their technology, for example, to show one payer that 80% of the patients they studied converted from pre-diabetes to diabetes over a five-year period. The payer believed it was 30%.

“We are trying to get payers on board for paying for diabetes care and other conditions,” said Paruk. “We are proving that we can use Big Data for better disease management.”

Paruk said the time is right for the health care industry to leverage new technologies and the consumerization of health care to manage patient populations.

“Patients are willing to share their data,” said Paruk. “We can use it to help them take better care of themselves.”

AHA, Philips, UPMC team for $30M cardiac health technology innovation fund

June 4, 2018 by Kathy Dion Leave a Comment

DALLAS – The American Heart Association has partnered with Philips and UPMC to launch Cardeation Capital, a $30 million venture capital fund designed to spur health care innovation in heart disease and stroke care.

Managed by Aphelion Capital, each of the three organizations has committed $10 million to the fund to bring products and solutions to market that address critical areas of health care delivery and health management.

“New approaches are urgently needed to increase prevention and treatment strategies to reverse the trend for those already suffering from heart diseases, as well as prevent populations from ever getting heart disease,” said Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, in a statement. “Through Cardeation Capital, we expect to deliver better outcomes and improve the quality of health care delivery for the people who are counting on us the most.”

The new venture fund will invest in emerging health care companies that can measurably impact the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases and stroke, and their risk factors, including diabetes.

“At Philips our goal is to improve the lives of 3 billion people a year by 2025,” said Richard Wilmot, head of health technology ventures at Philips, in a statement. “To achieve this ambition, we co-create solutions with health care providers, invest in start-ups and partner with other industry players.”

The fund’s investments will include technology startups focused on areas including prevention and patient education, not capital-intensive drugs and devices, said Dr. Joon Sup Lee, co-director of the UPMC Heart and Vascular Institute, in a statement.

“Cardeation Capital is really another opportunity to fill some of the gaps in cardiovascular care,” he said.

WSU researchers develop smartphone laboratory

May 31, 2018 by Kathy Dion Leave a Comment

PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University researchers have developed a low-cost, portable laboratory on a smartphone that works almost as well as clinical laboratories to detect common viral and bacterial infections.

The work of the researchers, led by Lei Li in collaboration with Ping Wang, was published recently in Clinica Chimica Acta.

The WSU researchers found that their portable smartphone reader was comparable to standard lab testing in detecting 12 common viral and bacterial infectious diseases including mumps, measles, herpes, and Lyme Disease.

The researchers tested the device with 771 patient samples at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and found that it provided false positives only about 1% of the time.

The smartphone reader, which includes a portable device, takes a photo of 96 sample wells at once and uses a computer program to analyze color to determine positive or negative results.

“This smartphone reader has the potential to improve access and speed up health care delivery,” said Li in a statement. “If we find out about infections, we can treat them more quickly, which makes a difference especially in low-resource, remote areas.”