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The COVID-19 outbreak exposed several problems faced by health systems worldwide, especially concerning the safe and rapid generation and sharing of health data. However, this pandemic scenario has also facilitated the rapid implementation and monitoring of technologies in the health field. In view of the occurrence of the public emergency caused by SARS-CoV-2 in Brazil, the Department of Informatics of the Brazilian Unified Health System created a contingency plan. In this paper, we aim to report the digital health strategies applied in Brazil and the first results obtained during the fight against COVID-19. Conecte SUS, a platform created to store all the health data of an individual throughout their life, is the center point of the Brazilian digital strategy. Access to the platform can be obtained through an app by the patient and the health professionals involved in the case. Health data sharing became possible due to the creation of the National Health Data Network (Rede Nacional de Dados em Saúde, RNDS). A mobile app was developed to guide citizens regarding the need to go to a health facility and to assist in disseminating official news about the virus. The mobile app can also alert the user if they have had contact with an infected person. The official numbers of cases and available hospital beds are updated and published daily on a website containing interactive graphs. These data are obtained due to creating a web-based notification system that uses the RNDS to share information about the cases. Preclinical care through telemedicine has become essential to prevent overload in health facilities. The exchange of experiences between medical teams from large centers and small hospitals was made possible using telehealth. Brazil took a giant step toward digital health adoption, creating and implementing important initiatives; however, these initiatives do not yet cover the entire health system. It is expected that the sharing of health data that are maintained and authorized by the patient will become a reality in the near future. The intention is to obtain better clinical outcomes, cost reduction, and faster and better services in the public health network. read more at https://publichealth.jmir.org/2021/6/e28643/
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The Future of Health care needs Doctors and Technologists to work well together
In a new report - The Truth About Doctors - Covid 19 Edition, McCann Health identifies four key ways how health care technology has changed since 2016. It highlights the the role of the health care industry in leveraging these changes to carve a new way forward In the past, technology has been gradually revolutionizing health care. While patients have adopted it whole heartedly, It has received push back from various quarters of care providers. Many think it may be having less-positive effects for physicians, some of whom eye it as a threat to doctoring. However, come Covid-19, and the world simultaneously looked up to technology and the medical community in more or less an equal measure. They wanted Tech to help us navigate the pandemic and the medical community to get us out of it, and the need for both to work together and amplify became clearer with each day since the pandemic started As the world moves towards a period of renewal, it will be increasingly important that technology plays a complementary role in care, not just supporting doctoring but super-powering it. Lets look at the 4 main focus areas mentioned in the report. Technology is redefining the where of care Home defines most individuals’ physical, mental, and social health. Until recently, home has also been a place where doctors are absent. That changed with Covid-19 and the rapid growth of telemedicine If marketers and others within the health care industry can help doctors acclimatize to the new where of care — supporting them to embrace the home as an extension of their domain rather than something outside of it — health can be elevated in a more holistic level. Technology can help cultivate inter-professional collaboration During the pandemic, by using social media and messaging platforms like Twitter and WhatsApp, doctors with diverse backgrounds were able to pool knowledge and emotionally support each other in the collective effort to fight Covid-19. They collaborated in new ways with allied health care professionals, government, and industry, sparking a reimagining of the health ecosystem. The challenge moving forward is giving this organic way of working across care teams and borders a structure to make it scalable. How can the health care system evolve so an expert in peripheral neuropathy in Australia can collaborate with a startup in Belgium? On a more local level, how can health care systems ensure that the different health professionals involved in a patient’s care work together? Secure, shared platforms can nurture a sense of belonging and create a new kind of community for doctors — a “care tribe” that has the power to connect perspectives and passions to advance the experience of care. Technology can foster continuity and ‘contiguity’ There is a new willingness to take control over personal well-being in light of the pandemic. However this can only go so far in a health care system where time is limited and resources are fragmented. With the proliferation of sensors there may be no better time to apply the quantifiable self to achieve more personalized care. However, new self-monitoring technologies must be integrated with the full health care ecosystem to make personal health care easier and more seamless, rather than adding to the confusion. Even if technology provides access to more health information, it does not necessarily follow that patients or health care providers will understand it. Health care providers must be taught the skills to not only help patients decipher their health information but to advance their care by proactively identifying and addressing their health risks. With this comes a need to ensure that work is being done in a way that overcomes health inequities rather than heightens them. Technology can care for the carers Covid-19 has shown that, instead of posing an existential threat to doctors, technology may be a lifeline for them. By assessing patients before a consult, tech platforms can allow doctors to channel their energy to the problems that need it most. In complicated therapy areas such as oncology, it can ease their load through supporting diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. In the day-to-day practice of caregiving, technology can enrich relationships by enabling doctors to focus on the human art of medicine. Combined with the flexibility of video consultations and the panoramic perspective of integrated systems, technology can give doctors their time back to practice care on their own terms. It’s easy to think that health care is behind the curve when it comes to embracing technology. Covid-19 has shown that this just isn’t the case. When it comes to the relationship between doctors and technology, the pandemic has been an epiphany. Instead of displacing doctors, technology has the power to help them provide better care, supercharging the humanity and empathy that lies at the heart of medicine. Technology has a role in medicine, especially in the service of care. along with my own insights and thoughts
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In a study published in the AMA Journal of Ethics, researchers explored the role of social and behavioral data in precision medicine research. Electronic health records (EHRs) can offer information on social and behavioral data, which can aid research investigating genetic and social factors across health disparities; for example, factors such as substance use and eating habits inform some of the risk associated with preventable premature deaths in the United States. Brittany Hollister, PhD, and Vence L. Bonham, JD, from the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, discussed potential biases in collecting, using, and interpreting EHR-based data in precision medicine research. Current collection of behavioral and social data by precision medicine researchers is increasingly done using EHR data, as opposed to self-report methods such as surveys. However, extraction and use of EHR data poses challenges of inconsistencies or inaccuracies. Another challenge is determining what data are included or excluded from EHRs, and the consequences of using data collected through biased methodologies. The National Academy of Medicine addressed some of this in recommendations for the systematic capture of behavioral and social measures.2 They recommended intentional collection of structured social environment data, as well as the development of a plan by the National Institutes of Health to include social and behavioral data in EHRs. The current inconsistencies in collecting social and behavioral data pose difficulties to use in precision medicine research, but with improved collection methods these difficulties could be amended. more at https://www.medicalbag.com/ethics/precision-medicine-research-ehr-data/article/808747/
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Researchers used people's Facebook data and their medical records to detect early symptoms of a mental health problem. In research described the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists analyzed language from study participants' Facebook status updates to predict future diagnoses of depression. The researchers say their technique could lead to a screening tool that identifies people in need of mental health support and formal diagnosis, while raising serious questions about health privacy. If this line of inquiry sounds familiar, you're not imagining things: Scientists have been studying the association between Facebook and the mental state of its users for years—often without the consent of the people being examined study subjects. Earlier this decade, scientists at Facebook and Cornell conducted an infamous emotional contagion study, which targeted the moods and relationships of more than half a million Facebook users without their knowledge. But many scientists continue to use above-board research methods to access Facebook's data. For instance: By asking study participants to provide their consent, log into their accounts, and share their data—all in person—to provide one-time access to said data. The overhead is tremendous; it can take years to amass a large enough sample population using in-person study recruitment. Yet the effort can be worth it to social science researchers, many of whom regard Facebook's trove of user information as the most significant data repository in the history of their field. read more at https://www.wired.com/story/your-facebook-posts-can-reveal-if-youre-depressed/ also check out the opinion piece referencing this post at http://wordpress.futurism.com/ai-depressed-facebook-posts/
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Text Messaging (SMS) technology is widely adopted in developing countries. Text message-based health surveys distributed to 6,694 Liberians during an Ebola outbreak were generally on par with baseline demographic data collected in a prior household survey, according to a study recently published in Nature Digital Medicine. Further, the text surveys suggested that women sought fewer hospital-based deliveries during the outbreak, a trend consistent with other retrospective studies that have been published since the outbreak. The Ebola outbreak was, and in some areas continues to be, a test of public health infrastructure. In regard to maternal care in particular, the researchers noted that many communities perceived a reduction in care quality as practitioners were advised not to make physical contact patients espousing fluids whenever possible. As such, a viable, real-time data collection system that is based on a technology widely adopted by residents can be a substantial boon to health systems facing crisis, Why it matters Taken together, these findings would indicate that these text-based surveys could be an avenue toward more real-time data collection in developing countries gripped by outbreaks. for more, read the original unedited article at https://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/text-based-survey-offers-accurate-real-time-health-info-during-ebola-outbreak-study-says
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A national network of “disease detectives” has cracked the complicated medical mysteries of more than 130 patients with rare, previously unidentified diseases, though the bulk of the cases that come to them remain unsolved, according to an analysis of the network released Wednesday. The Undiagnosed Diseases Network — which now has 12 clinics nationwide, including one at Stanford — has a solve rate of about 35 percent, according to the analysis, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Considering that all of the cases the network investigates involve patients with extremely complex conditions for which they’ve gone years — sometimes decades — without a diagnosis, that’s an impressive outcome, said the authors of the report. Most patients were diagnosed after a thorough analysis of their genome revealed a rare genetic mutation. Some were diagnosed only after the network was able to find just one or two other patients in the world with similar symptoms who had gotten a diagnosis. If doctors can access previous research that has connected certain symptoms with specific parts of the genome, that can at least give them a clue of where to look for a diagnosis. The Undiagnosed Diseases Network, which often relies on genome sequencing to diagnose patients, could be a major contributor to that greater understanding the original unedited story : https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/Disease-detectives-crack-cases-of-130-13297547.php
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As the Internet of Things (IoT) and other emerging technologies continue to proliferate in healthcare, BlackBerry has developed a set of technologies to help leverage these technologies while prioritizing data security. The first of these tools is a blockchain solution, powered by the company's network operation center (NOC), that aims to facilitate safer storage and transfer of medical data, the release said. For example, the data could be anonymized for use in medical research, it noted. BlackBerry will be offering its blockchain tool to the Global Commission, an organization focused on eradicating rare diseases in children, the release said. The Global Commission hopes to use the tool to create real-time insights that will speed diagnoses. "We are applying our expertise in security, data privacy, and communication work in regulated industries such as automotive, financial services, and government to tackle one of the biggest challenges in the healthcare industry: leveraging healthcare endpoints to improve patient outcomes while ensuring security and data privacy," BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in a press release. read the original unedited piece at https://www.techrepublic.com/article/blackberrys-new-blockchain-tools-could-boost-security-for-medical-iot/
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As data and analytics are increasingly leveraged in various aspects of the healthcare system, some companies are making use of such capabilities to help clinicians make the best decisions for patients. One such company is naviHealth. Based in Brentwood, Tennessee, naviHealth provides both payers and providers with post-acute care management expertise. Its nH Predict tool allows clinicians to better predict a patient’s outcomes in order to craft a personalized post-acute care plan. Using NaviHealths nH Predict tool, clinicians are better able to predict a patient's outcomes and generate a personalized post-acute care plan. The result of the tool is a simple outcome report that is generated at the beginning of the patient’s stay in a facility or hospital. The report breaks down the patient’s basic information as well as how they’re doing in a variety of categories. For instance, nH Predict outlines the individual’s gender, date of birth and admission date. It also includes their primary diagnostic group (such as COPD) and their usual living setting (like at home alone or in an assisted living facility). Finally, the outcome report provides a score for a few of the patient’s functions based on the data of similar patients. It gives a score on the patient’s basic mobility (such as wheelchair skills or ability to take the stairs); daily activity (like bathing and dressing); and applied cognition (including memory and communication). Additionally, the report creates a total average score for the patient based on their mobility, activity and cognition scores. read the complete story at https://medcitynews.com/2018/10/navihealth-data-patient-outcomes/
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Scribes have the potential to address several causes of physician burnout at primary care practices High-quality scribes generate high-level gains in primary care practices. That's the conclusion of recent research published in JAMA Internal Medicine, which found scribes decreased physician EHR documentation burden, boosted work efficiency, and improved patient visit interactions. Scribes can have a significant impact on a prominent factor for physician burnout, the researchers wrote. "Emerging evidence indicates that EHRs, as currently implemented, increase clerical workload and physician stress and interfere with direct physician-patient interaction, thereby diminishing professional satisfaction and contributing to professional burnout," the researchers wrote more at https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/clinical-care/scribes-slash-physician-ehr-burden-boost-efficiency-improve-patient-visits
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The EHR interoperability challenge is what stands between a physician's ability to look up, extract, and track a patient's medical activities and records at medical sites other than their own. This could be at a laboratory where a patient's specialty blood work is being analyzed or they're having surgery on an inpatient or outpatient basis. When it comes to tracking these patients, it's literally as they move about in the sphere of the healthcare world. The interoperability challenge occurs because you need your EHR to talk to systems outside your practice. Solving this challenge means maintaining continuity of care for patients, minimizing or eliminating the duplicity of services, and helping physicians share patient information so they can gain insight from specialists that would complement their diagnoses. Many EHR companies aren't willing to share access to their systems unless a physician is part of their overall user base. If you work in a particular hospital or practice that has their product, these particular companies will share information with physicians. The problem is they won't work with peripheral players, or physicians who are unaffiliated with the hospital or practice where their EHR is installed. Why is it in the hospital's interest to provide access to patients via their EHR? Sharing access to patients via the hospital's EHR creates a win-win situation where the hospital can keep the patient in their system. these are excerpts from an interview David Wasserman, an advisor with the practice solutions and medical economics group at the Massachusetts Medical Society. read more at the original http://www.diagnosticimaging.com/ehr/solving-ehr-interoperability-challenge
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The Ministry of Health and the Ghana Health Service has engaged the services of Lightwave ehealthcare Services (LWEHS) to roll out an integrated health care solution that includes a Centralized data center with a 24 hour recovery unit to serve as an infrastructure platform for a patient-centered health care solution. The solution will network all health facilities including agencies of the Ministry of Health, provide electronic Medical records for care seekers, enable and facilitate tele medicine, and develop a a real time bio-surveillance system – which will support the fight against disease outbreaks and the spread of communicable disease. The system which integrates with the current National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) enables the development of a patient management system – this will streamline the Admission, discharge and transfer process of healthcare. Chief Technology Officer of Lightwave Mr Thomas Mac Scofield, said the project was a culmination of years of planning and working with the MOH to bring ehealth solutions to the public health care industry. Mr Thomas Mac Scofield revealed to Ghanahealthnest.com that, the cost of the project is covered by the government through the MoH and GHS thus will not require patients or subscribers to pay for it. Nrip Nihalani consulting director with LightWave revealed to Ghanahealthnest.com that the project follows Ghana’s Data privacy and HIPAA laws to ensure its safety. He added that, the time was right for Ghana as most countries have gone ahead and made significant mistakes. “Ghana is at the absolute time with the technologies, the budgets, the preparedness all meeting together to launch its e-health”, Nrip intoned. more at : http://ghanahealthnest.com/nationwide-paperless-ehealth-project-commenced-ghana/
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The worst part of a sniffle or a sore throat is wondering what it is you're coming down with
A new app, called HEALTHYDAY, comes from a division of Johnson & Johnson and uses sickness-searching algorithms to take the guesswork out of your hypochondria by warning you when the flu is overtaking your neighborhood or pollen is driving allergies sky-high. as a kind of subtle advertising for its products.
The basic health tips the app offers up don't outright tell you which medicines to buy — instead they are each "brought to you" by one of the company's over-the-counter brands, which include Zyrtec and Tylenol.
The app's algorithm syncs self-reported data from local doctor's offices, Google searches, social media mentions on Twitter and Facebook and user data from people who use the app, then funnels it down into easily digestible trends, blurbs and infographics, according to McNeil's VP of marketing Katie Devine.
In San Francisco, for example, the app warns of a particularly high risk of allergies and cold symptoms and a middling likelihood of the flu. The team wants to expand the app's features with more ailments and information once it has a bigger user base.
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As practices look to integrate newer and hopefully advanced technologies to help them reduce readmission rates and improve outcomes, there is a lot to consider.
Buzzwords abound, like big data and coordinated care, but what those things actually mean vary largely from one place to the next.
ECRI Institute’s 2015 Top 10 Hospital C-Suite Watch List discusses a blend of novel, new, and emerging technologies that will demand attention and planning over the next 12 to 18 months, plus important issues and programs affecting care processes and delivery in 2015 and beyond.
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The linked interview gives us all in Healthcare Technology a lot of food for thought. This below is a set of points extracted and massaged with my viewpoints The biggest barrier to physicians having the most complete medical history for their patients at every point of patient care is the lack of interoperability among information systems. State of Interoperability today: The industry has made progress in developing open standards and application programming interfaces to facilitate data fluidity and sharing among multiple electronic health record systems and data repositories. As a result, commercial and open source interoperability services are coming online. While there is room for optimism, the industry is still grappling with data structure and management challenges . First, incomplete, disparate and disconnected data. Most health and patient data is stored as unstructured medical format, and identifying information in the data is a manual and time-consuming process. There are significant variations in the way data is shared, read and understood across health systems, which can result in information being siloed and overlooked or misinterpreted . Further, most EHR systems do not follow patients on their care journey beyond the hospital or clinic walls. As a result, only a portion of healthcare data is available at any point of care, resulting in a fragmented view of a patient's health history. Second, slow adoption and scaling of open interoperability standards. Standards can streamline the structured data exchange needed to improve preventive and value-based care for people, predictions, diagnostics, post-marketing surveillance of medical products (for example drug, device), care quality, cost reduction and clinical research. Industry guidelines and resources like the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) from Health Level Seven International (HL7) have helped to set a standard, though there is still more work to be done to support organizations to remove barriers toward adoption and make the electronic exchange of data more seamless, with the goal of providing a better provider and patient experience. Third, risks due to siloed data: When it comes to storing health information including clinical, genomic, device, financial, supply chain and claims, data security is the top priority. Storing patient data across different systems and platforms makes it difficult to deliver personalized care, draw data insights and streamline service. This is a pivotal moment in time when healthcare can take what it's learned over the past year and fix the underlying problems. Perhaps the most important learning is that achieving true healthcare interoperability requires understanding, evaluating and solving issues in the underlying syntactic and semantic characteristics of the data. Syntactic interoperability requires a common structure so that data can be exchanged and interpreted between health IT systems, while semantic interoperability requires a common language so that the meaning of data is transferred along with the data itself. This combination supports data fluidity. The industry has made meaningful progress on this front. Unlocking Benefits of Interoperability As technology creates more data across healthcare organizations, applying technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning will be essential to help take that data and create the shared structure and meaning necessary to achieve interoperability. Shared structure and meaning will enable interoperability solutions that transform data input from various media types and forms: voice, image, scan, PDF, etc., into a common text format which can be shared with and leveraged by every entity in the value chain. Instead of moving static, electronic documents or faxes like care summaries between healthcare providers, clinical AI-service APIs can enable EHR vendors and health systems to communicate in a standardized way with apps and other EHRs. With access to all available information, advanced analytics and machine learning can then enhance medical and scientific insights tied to patient outcomes in an accurate, scalable, secure and timely manner. read more at https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/amazon-web-services-exec-talks-interoperability-lessons-past-year
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Healthcare is currently one of the most dynamic sectors witnessing rapid changes. In a candid conversation with Broadcast1, Nrip Nihalani and Aditya Patkar explain life at Plus91, its services, and the crucial role Plus91 plays in the future of digital healthcare. We talk about - Plus91’s journey over the past decade,
- about being an integral part of the rise of digital healthcare
- about Plus91's work on helping Healthcare organizations adopt digital tools
- about our programs on Early Warning Alerts, Syndromic Surveillance, Predicting Disease Outbreaks and Preventing Epidemics
- about creating an open culture within Plus91
- about the crucial role Plus91 plays in the future of digital health and moving healthcare forward.
Do Watch! https://www.forbesindia.com/business-evangelist-of-india/plus-91-technologies/17
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Every year, more than 3 million people in Europe experience a heart attack. For half of them, this is not the first time. Most of these recurrent heart attacks can be prevented by improving the lifestyle after the first heart attack, for which patients are often offered cardiac rehabilitation. These programs consist of exercise and lifestyle recommendations. Cardiac rehabilitation is provided at specialized centers.
According to estimates, if all cardiac patients were to undergo cardiac rehabilitation, the mortality from myocardial infarctions could fall by 26 percent and hospital admissions by more than 30 percent. Despite these benefits, less than half of cardiac patients receive cardiac rehabilitation. This lack of participation is mainly due the distance to the cardiac rehabilitation centers, which patients experience as being too far. There are also many objections to the limited possibilities for taking an individualized program.
Research has shown that an internet-based rehabilitation program can achieve the same results as rehabilitation at a center. An e-health application for cardiac rehabilitation could therefore eliminate many obstacles for patients. However, such an application is not yet available. With Eurostar funding of € 1.9 million, a European consortium of researchers and companies will create CaRe, a mobile platform for cardiac rehabilitation. Maria Hopman is creating this e-health program for cardiac rehabilitation together with a consortium of Danish and Swiss companies. Starting in 2021, the program will be available for physiotherapists and hospitals in Europe. more at https://www.radboudumc.nl/en/news/2018/major-grant-for-development-of-e-health-program-for-cardiac-rehabilitation
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Using electronic health records (EHRs) to create a learning healthcare system, say the authors, can enable researchers to generate new knowledge that will accrue benefits to future generations of patients. Real-world data are increasingly viewed as a crucial factor in the eventual acceptance of biosimilar drugs, and indeed, current real-world evidence points to the safety and efficacy of these products in the marketplace. In a recent paper, officials from the European Medicines Agency, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation, and other European government entities explained that such data can help make decisions about pharmaceuticals—from development to reimbursement—more efficient. The authors called for international cooperation on a learning healthcare system that will better harness these data.
The authors note that the expense of prospective data generation in a research setting is high, limiting the number of research questions that can be answered in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). RCTs are rarely large enough to detect infrequent outcomes, nor are they long enough to determine long-term outcomes.
Using electronic health records (EHRs) to create a learning healthcare system, say the authors, can enable researchers to generate new knowledge that will accrue benefits to future generations of patients. However, current inadequacies of EHRs present a “technical bottleneck” to the objective of gathering real-world data.
The paper’s authors propose that governments establish and implement national health data governance frameworks to encourage the use of personal health data to serve the public interest. The collection of data must translate into the production of useful evidence.
A coordinated and international effort will be key to speed the implementation of a true learning healthcare system for global benefit. read the news article at https://www.centerforbiosimilars.com/news/european-officials-promote-use-of-ehrs-to-gather-real-world-data-on-pharmaceuticals--
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Estonia and Finland will start exchanging digital prescriptions at the end of the year, in a groundbreaking move that Estonian Health Minister Riina Sikkut said she hoped other EU countries will follow. Speaking to EURACTIV.com on the sidelines of the European Health Forum in Gastein, Austria, Sikkut said that in Estonia, it is common practice for healthcare professionals to use the e-health system to exchange patient medical records. “But it is also important for people who have a need for healthcare services abroad to have his or her health data available to a doctor, nurse or a pharmacist so that they could also provide quality healthcare services and continuity of care,” she said. The cross-border flow of data has taken centre stage in the discussion in Brussels. Right now, when citizens move to another EU member state, their healthcare data is in fact simply “lost”. Advocates of the digitisation of healthcare say data mobility, or the “5th freedom”, in the EU could unlock the potential of innovation in the sector and make EU patients’ lives easier. Estonia is known for its digitisation push in all sectors, and during its EU Presidency (July-December 2017), it took significant steps to create a “coalition of the willing” of EU member states to speed up healthcare data mobility in Europe.
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Healthcare providers who access clinical decision support through mHealth platforms are finding a world of information at their fingertips – and they could be saving lives. Digital technologies are changing the way medical information is gathered and exchanged. Physicians of all ages and medical subspecialties from across the globe are utilizing tools to discuss potential diagnoses and obtain second opinions. That’s the takeaway from researchers at the Scripps Research Translational Institute who took a closer look at online crowdsourced consult platforms. Their conclusion is that these platforms, which include social media networks like SERMO, Medscape and HealthTap, are giving providers quick access to information that’s helping them reduce serious, costly and potentially deadly medical errors. The study, focusing on an analysis of more than 37,000 active users on the MedScape Consult network between 2015 and 2017, appears in a recent issue of NPJ Digital Medicine. The research points to the value of a mobile health resource for clinical decision support, giving providers a real-time portal for physician-to-physician engagement. Billed as a source for “the second to hundredth opinion in medicine,” these portals allow providers to gather best practices and apply them quickly, reducing the chances of a clinical error. The study also points to the changing nature of clinical decision support.The study noted that providers can’t necessarily rely on informal face-to-face consults with colleagues – commonly known as curbside consults – because they’re “frequently inaccurate and incomplete.” Yet they can’t just call up a nearby specialist at a moment’s notice. The study found that : "At a time when we’re turning to artificial intelligence to help improve diagnostic accuracy, there’s still plenty of room for tapping into human intelligence via such medical consulting platforms, Artificial intelligence has been advocated as the definitive pathway for reducing misdiagnosis, But the study's findings suggest the potential for collective human intelligence, which is algorithm-free and performed rapidly on a voluntary basis, to emerge as a competitive or complementary strategy."
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Deep mind will use data available to it via a new partnership with Jikei University Hospital in Japan to refine its artificially intelligent (AI) breast cancer detection algorithms. Google AI subsidiary DeepMind has partnered with Jikei University Hospital in Japan to analyze mammagrophy scans from 30,000 women. DeepMind is furthering its cancer research efforts with a newly announced partnership. The London-based Google subsidiary said it has been given access to mammograms from roughly 30,000 women that were taken at Jikei University Hospital in Tokyo, Japan between 2007 and 2018. Deep mind will use that data to refine its artificially intelligent (AI) breast cancer detection algorithms. Over the course of the next five years, DeepMind researchers will review the 30,000 images, along with 3,500 images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and historical mammograms provided by the U.K.’s Optimam (an image database of over 80,000 scans extracted from the NHS’ National Breast Screening System), to investigate whether its AI systems can accurately spot signs of cancerous tissue.
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“Universal EHR” structures, in which every citizen’s electronic health record is connected to a single national system, are tied to higher trust in the healthcare system and higher value for patients, Unified electronic records have also prompted national governments to address issues of privacy and security, data integrity, and health information exchange that are left up to the private sector in other countries – with varying degrees of success. Half of the 16 countries included in the index have universal EHRs, while the other half have let a combination of free market forces and regulatory guidance dictate the course of health IT adoption. The eight countries with universal EHRs saw an average overall “Value Measure” of 47.29, the report says. The Value Measure is a combined score based on access to care, patient satisfaction, and an efficiency ratio score. Now, Healthcare providers in the United States generally don’t harbor very warm feelings for their electronic health records (EHRs). Despite efforts from vendors and regulators to improve the experience of interacting with these foundational health IT systems, dissatisfaction and frustration with usability issues and fragmented information are still causing users’ blood to boil. It may seem counterintuitive, therefore, to suggest that expanding the industry’s reliance on EHRs is actually the key to making EHR use less stressful and more useful – but that is exactly what the 2018 Future Health Index, commissioned by Philips, seems to indicate.
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Microsoft says care coordination and secure messaging tools are coming to its Teams platform Microsoft is holding its Ignite conference this week, and the company teased a forthcoming care coordination tool that is in early stages of development – as well two secure messaging features it's creating as part of an effort to tailor Teams for specific industries. "As an example of how Teams can enable secure workflows for regulated industries, we're delivering a new care coordination solution, now available in private preview, that gives healthcare teams a secure hub for coordinating care across multiple patients," Ron Markezich, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, wrote on the company's blog. "It provides for integration with electronic health record systems and enables care providers to communicate about patient care in real-time within Teams' secure platform.” Markezich said Microsoft is also releasing two new secure message capabilities for Teams: one for for image annotation and the other for priority notifications. While the image function is already generally available, the priority notifications feature is scheduled to be available for companies that use the commercial version of Teams by year's end. "These capabilities support HIPAA compliance and enable doctors, nurses, and other clinicians to communicate about patients while avoiding the privacy risks that arise when healthcare professionals use consumer chat apps," Markezich added. Microsoft said the new care coordination tools will integrate with EHR systems so clinicians and caregivers can communicate via the Teams platform. Considering that the average hospital has 16 different EMR vendors across all its affiliated practices, that integration won't be as easy as it might sound. That said, the tech is in "private preview" mode, so it's a bit early to tell what shape it will take by the time it reaches the open market. read the original story at https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/microsoft-says-care-coordination-and-secure-messaging-tools-are-coming-its-teams-platform
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National coordinator Donald Rucker said the agency is researching open APIs, such as those used by Facebook and Twitter, to advance health information sharing. ONC is looking to modern computing tactics — notably open application programming interfaces that Silicon Valley companies such as Facebook and Twitter commonly deploy — to advance EHR interoperability. The questions ONC is grappling with now, in fact, are a clear definition of interoperability, improving EMR usability and a better understanding of information blocking. To that end, ONC is researching the best approach and that includes looking at existing and developing specifications such as FHIR or RESTful APIs such as JSON. “There’s a lot of interest in the FHIR standard, it’s a modern API, and we’re hoping there’s coalescence around that because the large vendors have already done some work with the SMART project,” he said. But Rucker also noted that ONC must consider the API needs of hospitals and innovators as well. more at http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/onc-leaders-see-silicon-valley-future-ehr-interoperability ;
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IBM Watson Health is teaming with the American Diabetes Association to apply cognitive computing to the ADA's 66 years worth of research and data. The results will be used to help entrepreneurs, developers, healthcare providers, and patients learn more about diabetes, prevention, complications, and care In 2012, according to the ADA, 29 million people were living with the disease, and another 86 million were diagnosed with a condition known as prediabetes. To address the challenge, IBM Watson Health and the ADA are collaborating to apply Watson cognitive computing to the organization's massive library of information and data. Through this effort, IBM and ADA hope to empower entrepreneurs, developers, healthcare providers, and patients to gain knowledge that can improve outcomes and even prevent the condition's onset. First, IBM's AI platform will ingest all the medical journals, medical text books, Pub Med, and other diabetes literature and resources available, including all the content from the ADA's Diabetes Information Center. Second, Watson will ingest the ADA's diabetes data sets. Watson will be trained to understand the diabetes data to identify potential risk factors and create evidence-based insights that can be applied to health decisions. IBM also is collaborating with the Health Maintenance Organization Maccabi Healthcare services to build a predictive machine learning model to help identify early risks for diabetic retinopathy, the top cause of blindness for those with diabetes.
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HealthTap published a survey of the top physician-rated apps for both iOS and Android, and breaks it down into 30 separate categories.
HealthTap founder and CEO Ron Gutman said the company's goal is to give clinicians and consumers a guide to choosing apps that have been approved by doctors, rather than resorting to the user ratings found in app stores (HealthTap's AppRx app, by the way, has a healthy 4.72 star rating in the Apple App Store, he said). The apps are judged on three standards – ease of use, effectiveness and medical accuracy, validity and soundness. They're not given a number rating, but are ranked solely based on how many doctors would recommend them.
Top 10 Health and Medical Apps for Android 1. Weight Watchers Mobile (Weight Watchers International) 2. White Noise Lite (TMSoft) 3. Lose It! (FitNow) 4. First Aid (American Red Cross) 5. RunKeeper – GPS Track Run Walk (FitnessKeeper) 6. Emergency First Aid/Treatment (Phoneflips) 7. Instant Heart Rate (Azumio) 8. Fooducate – Healthy Food Diet (Fooducate) 9. Glucose Buddy – Diabetes Log (Azumio) 10. Pocket First Aid & CPR (Jive Media)
Top Health and Medical Apps for iOS 1. Calorie Counter and Diet Tracker (MyFitnessPal.com) 2. Weight Watchers Mobile (Weight Watchers International) 3. Lose It! (FitNow) 4. White Noise Lite (TMSoft) 5. First Aid (American Red Cross) 6. Runkeeper (FitnessKeeper) 7. Stroke Riskometer (Autel) 8. Emergency First Aid & Treatment Guide (Phoneflips) 9. Instant Heart Rate (Azumio) 10. Fooducate (Foducate)
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The whole context of health data sharing became evident and the need stronger than ever before amid the covid19 pandemic. Here daily updates of epidemiological data for control and decision-making by governments and health system were required.
The use of apps within healthcare (mHealth) is now a reality, and the number of mobile apps created has been increasing.
MHealth apps have been implemented for training, information sharing, risk assessment, self-management of symptoms, contact tracing, home monitoring, and decision making. They are considered valuable tools for citizens, health professionals, and decision-makers in facing critical challenges imposed by the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance and usefulness of digital health strategies and has allowed the insertion of these solutions into health care systems in the long term