Expertpatient

One of the biggest questions in biology is the nature versus nurture debate, the relative roles that genetic and environmental factors play in determining human traits.

In 2006, George Church at Harvard University and a few others started the Personal Genome Project (PGP) to help answer this question. The goal is to collect genomic information from 100,000 informed members of the public along with their health records and other relevant phenotypic data. The idea is to use this information to help tease apart the relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors.

The project does not guarantee privacy for those who sign up. Indeed, the participants can reveal as much information as they like, including their ZIP code, birth date and sex.

However, the data is ‘de-identified’ in the sense that the owners names and addresses are not included in their profiles on the PGP website and this generates a veneer of privacy.

Today, Latanya Sweeney and colleagues at Harvard show that even this is practically useless in keeping owners identities private. They say a relatively simple comparison of the list of PGP participants with other databases such as voter lists reveals the identity of a significant number of them with remarkable accuracy.

The Facebook page of TEDMED Live Bologna published some amazing infographics and sketches about different aspects of telemedicine, health 2.0 and digital technologies.

The UK NHS has launched a series of patient decision support apps for a range of common diseases to help improve patient education and understanding

Researchers found that patients saw physicians who use CDS as somehow less capable than those who don't. They saw the IT tools as impersonal, and thought the systems were a barrier between them and their caregivers.

That's the wrong way to think about it, says John Hoyt, executive vice president, HIMSS Analytics.

"They just need to understand it's not taking the place of their physician," he says. "It's an aid and reminder of the latest peer-reviewed advice and best practice alerts, etc."

It can "touchy," says Hoyt, because it may suggest, "subconsciously, that your physician is flawed, that he has a human brain – that may be a shock to some people."

But far from being a cheat, or a crutch to be leaned upon, decision support is an essential tool in the clinician's arsenal. Especially nowadays.

"Things get complex," he says. "A good physician will go out and search the literature. In days of old, they used to spend time in the medical library. But now we can bring it to their faces, at the moment."

But there's a fine line between that and "in your face," as it were.

Designing CDS to supply relevant information – at the right time and place – without risking physician alert fatigue, "is an art," said Hoyt. "We don't want to remind the physician, 'Hey, we've got a patient with high cholesterol, order a lipid test.' For God's sake, they know that."

It's even worse in the pharmacy: "Every minute, today, in these hospitals, the pharmacists are getting alerts that are far more detailed and hypnotic than the physicians get."

But clinical and business intelligence technology is changing, evolving – and getting smarter.

A range of diseases and conditions, from asthma to liver disease, could be diagnosed and monitored quickly and painlessly just by breathing, using gas sensing technology developed by a Cambridge spin-out.

The highly sensitive, low-power, low-cost infrared emitter developed by Cambridge CMOS Sensors (CCMOSS) is capable of identifying more than 35 biomarkers present in exhaled breath in concentrations as low as one part per million, and is being developed for use as a non-invasive medical testing device and other applications.

In addition to nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, we exhale thousands of chemical compounds with every breath: elevated acetone levels in the breath can indicate poorly-controlled diabetes, asthmatics will exhale higher than normal levels of nitric oxide, and glucose is a sign of kidney failure.

"PatientsLikeMe launches clinical trial search tool for patients http://t.co/3CnTcEIf77 via @pmlivecom" Could be very useful for #pharma.

Today’s patients are empowered and connected – living as much in the digital world as the “real” world. It isn’t easy to engage healthcare customers in soci...

New York-based Kinsa is trying to create a real-time picture of the country’s health with a smartphone and a simplified digital thermometer.

A British-Australian company has entered the US market with a low-cost template for individual physicians, dentists, orthodontists and small practices to customize mobile apps.

The company, Lexington Creative, which has built an app for people with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder called ADHD Organizer and notably has designed a mobile app for Dick’s Sporting Goods in the US, last month had a soft launch internationally of Apps for Doctors, according to Alex Harrington, Australia-based head of client relations.

Presentation by Lisa Rhodes of Verne Global, and Pawan Deshpande, CEO of Curata. Published on SlideShare in April 2013.

"There's a good reason why content curation is such a hot topic these days: It works! Explore real-world examples of how leading B2B marketers identify, find, organize and share relevant content with their core markets via content curation, and learn why curation delivers strong ROI for today's marketing organizations."

Original Presentation on SlideShare:

http://www.slideshare.net/G3Com/the-role-of-curation-in-content-marketing

Sometimes, too much of a substance that's supposed to help can cause serious harm.

Drug overdose death rates in the United States have more than tripled since 1990, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Just in 2008, for example, the CDC says there were 14,800 deaths in the U.S. caused by prescription painkillers.

Considering this problem, a group of Brigham Young University (BYU) students reimagined the prescription drug bottle and have developed a high-tech regulator.

Their invention, called Med Vault, basically lets a pharmacist give instructions to the bottle, which then dispenses painkillers accordingly to the patient. Via a USB connection, a pharmacist can use special software to load the pills and program how many can be dispensed per day.

"They can dispense one pill every four hours or two pills every 24 hours or whatever the doctor prescribes," said BYU senior Madison Clark, the team's electrical engineer.

It's a pretty complex design that the team claims is tamper-resistant and break-resistant. The Med Vault requires users to put in an access code to get a pill, making it harder for the drugs to get into the wrong hands (e.g., a small child).

"The physical requirements of the shell and of the material properties are such that you can't take a hammer to it and break it open," Clark told Mashable.

Panelists from a hospital forum have agreed that there is still progress needed before the devices can be integrated.

According to a panel at the Hospital Cloud Forum from the Information Management Network last week, doctors still need to be able to find a way to integrate mhealth and the data available through those systems into clinical care.

The devices that would be used would be connected to the cloud and would bring physicians and patient data together.

Mhealth could provide a very important way to bring the data regarding a patient’s current health and medical history to the fingertips of a doctor, according to the Maimonides Medical Center senior vice president and chief medical informatics officer, Dr. Steven J. Davidson, from Brooklyn, New York. He said that “I’d like to offer a vision as a longtime clinician that has talked to lots of patients over the years that the cloud is where patients and physicians are going to meet.”

Many panel members saw the value of giving doctors access to virtualized services through mhealth technology.

According to senior information and communications technology strategist and architect at Intel, Matthew Taylor, giving physicians direct access to mhealth services by way of mobile devices would give the entire healthcare industry a way to shrink the number of readmissions, and avoid unnecessary admissions from the very start.

Consumer health IT can dramatically impact patient care by facilitating such vital functions as medication management, remote patient monitoring, and tighter communication between patients and their care providers. The guide is particularly timely because in the next few years, health care providers will focus as never before on electronic linkages with their patients. Many hospitals and health systems have patient portals on the Internet, with access to rudimentary health record information, and perhaps the ability to e-mail physicians. Some offer mobile versions of those portals. But providers have so far been under no outside pressure to get patients to use those resources.

Patient-oriented health IT is officially on the national agenda through the federal “meaningful use” program, which gives billions in cash incentives to providers for using IT to improve care (and in 2015 is scheduled to start penalizing holdouts by reducing their Medicare payments). The most recent set of criteria for meaningful use, to be phased in starting in 2014, requires an active effort to link patients into the information loop. Not only do providers have to make patients’ information available to them online, they also have to show that at least 5% of the patients have accessed that information in a given year. That percentage is likely to increase with the next round of meaningful use requirements.

No matter how much technology we throw at it, the diabetes epidemic just won’t budge. Today, 8.3% of the U.S. population has the disease--a problem that cost the country $245 billion in 2012 alone.

For the past few years, drugmaker Sanofi US has run the $100,000 Data Design Diabeteschallenge, a call for entrants to design data-driven diabetes solutions. This isn’t a challenge for flash in the pan ideas that disappear soon after winning. Past competitions have yielded successful initiatives like Ginger.io, a behavioral health analytics startup that recently raised $6.5 million.

The finalists for this year’s competition (theme: using open data to make the right diabetes decisions at the right time) are below.

GOCAP

The GoCap is perhaps the simplest concept of the bunch: it’s a high-tech replacement cap for pre-filled insulin pens that can read dose amounts and time, and then wirelessly communicate that information to cell phones and glucometers. The resulting data can be used by both patients and large organizations for analysis.

CONNECT & COACH TM

A product of software development firm PHRQL, Connect & Coach TM calls itself the first clinical and consumer application to let dietitians and diabetes educators perform Diabetes Self-Management Education and Medical Nutrition Therapy in local communities. The product is designed for supermarket and pharmacy use.

ALLAZOENGINE

Created by healthcare analytics company Allazo Health, the AllazoEngine attempts to solve the niggling problem of medication non-adherence by using existing data from its members to predict who will neglect to take their pills--and the best way to get them back on track.

NUDURO

Like many products breaking into the market today, Nuduro provides healthy meal recommendations that match customer lifestyle, taste, and nutritional requirements. Unlike the other products out there, however, Nuduro presumably focuses specifically on diabetes patients.

MEDISAPIEN DIABETIC CLINICAL DATA REPOSITORY

This product, created by ZyDoc, is an enterprise healthcare analytics platform that lets users deposit all sorts of unstructured data--dictation, legacy data, transcribed text, and more--and transforms it all into fully-coded structured data. The platform is obviously relevant outside of the diabetes world as well.

More than 500 million unique visitors now access Wikipedia and other websites owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, including Wikibooks, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, on a monthly basis.

Data ...

The Children’s National Medical Center opened a new pain care complex with video games to monitor children and change treatment in real time.

Mobile technology is experiencing a surge of advances in relation to the medical industry.

Technological advances once merely imagined in Sci-Fi flicks (think of Star Trek’s communicator, Bluetooth technologies, and even a quasi version of touch enabled computer screens) are being realized and even superseded thanks to modern innovation.

Mobile technology, in particular, is experiencing a surge of advances in relation to the medical industry. Research breakthroughs, advances in supporting technology infrastructure, and even substantial allocations of resources from private investors are realizing far reaching technological dreams, and then some.

Several weeks ago, Mike Lazaridis’ Research In Motion’s Blackberry Vice Chairman, (the maker of those once ubiquitous handheld wireless devices), launched a $97 million dollar Quantum Valley Investments fund to support innovation and entrepreneurs focused on creating non-invasive medical diagnostic equipment. The idea is simply to make “Star Trek’s” medical tricorder device for diagnosis a reality.

The push to go mobile has been years in the making and has, in many respects, been assisted by underlying communications technology and the utilization of what many in Silicon Valley have termed the social, mobile, web trifecta. Smartphones, applications, and social media have helped to drive mobile advancements in relation to consumer technology adoption, and impactful breakthroughs in medical technologies have been evolving as well.