As Deep Learning Comes For Medicine How Do We Work Around Its Brittleness?

Deep learning is revolutionizing medicine. Algorithms are increasingly doing everything from triaging medical imagery to predicting treatment outcomes. Yet as hospitals undergo the same AI revolution affecting other fields, the dangers of AI bias and errors and the life-or-death consequences of medicine lends unique risk to these experiments, suggesting caution.

One of the fastest-growing uses of AI in medicine today is the analysis of medical imagery. Human analysis of imagery is slow, difficult to scale and error-prone. Replacing or augmenting human analysis with algorithmic analysis could even eventually allow medical imaging devices to diagnose patients in real-time as they are being imaged and direct technicians to collect additional imagery to narrow the diagnosis while the patient is still lying the imaging system.

The problem is that today’s correlative deep learning systems require vast amounts of extremely diverse training imagery, which can be hard to acquire in hospital settings where there may be more uniformity in patient conditions, demographics and imaging systems. Most dangerously, AI algorithms can easily learn characteristics unrelated to the actual disease itself, lending to false positives and negatives that can cause adverse patient outcomes or even death.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

How Millennial Doctors Are Transforming Medicine

Changing healthcare models, groundbreaking advancements in the health technology sector, and shifting standards of patient care—they’re all contributing to a new era of medicine. But arguably one of the biggest changes will be the faces that greet us at a clinic or hospital.

Today’s infographic from Publicis Health illustrates the emerging generation of millennial doctors, and why they’re on the cusp of transforming the healthcare industry.

The full Visual Capitalist article and Publicis Health infographic can be viewed at this link.  

How Blockchain And AI Can Help Master Data Management

Master data is easily one of the most critical assets that a business possesses. With continuous digitization and the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, the value of master data and the importance of master data management are only going to grow. Before we proceed into the importance of master data management, let’s understand what master data is.

Gartner defines master data as “...the consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describes the core entities of the enterprise including customers, prospects, citizens, suppliers, sites, hierarchies and chart of accounts.”

Essentially, master data refers to all the static information that is used to identify the critical elements of a business. This can include the names of products, people (customers, suppliers, employees, leads, etc.), special equipment and tools, facilities, etc. Master data is different from transactional data such as invoice numbers, invoice amounts, dates, process parameters, etc. The purpose of master data is more about identifying and less about measuring.

The full Forbes article can be read at this link.  

MetLife Plans To Disrupt $2.7 Trillion Life Insurance Industry Using Ethereum Blockchain

When a family loses a loved one, it faces a litany of immediate tasks such as planning the funeral and placing an obituary in the local newspaper. All of this must be done while the bereaved is processing the emotional components of the individual’s passing. Amidst all of the raw feelings and deluge of family, it is natural for more mundane tasks such as filing a life insurance claim to fall by the wayside. Sometimes the family may not even know that the deceased has a life insurance policy.

This opaqueness does not serve the claimants or insurers well, and leading global insurer MetLife is utilizing the live public Ethereum blockchain to add transparency and efficiency to the claims process. In what is believed to be the first pilot program in the world focused on the life insurance industry, MetLife’s Singapore-based incubator LumenLab is collaborating with Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) and NTUC Income (Income) on a platform of smart contracts known as ‘Lifechain’ to help loved ones quickly determine if the deceased was protected with a policy and automatically file a claim.

If successful, this program has the potential to transform the insurance industry as a whole, creating new markets, products, and the ability to serve a more diverse set of customers at lower price points.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

The Tech World's Quest to Accelerate A Cure For Cancer

I have had the privilege of covering the tech market for the past 38 years. During this time, I have observed that there is one major theme I have seen over and over again when it comes to the goals of many tech innovators. They believe and have faith that the technology they create can change the world. I have frequently heard tech executives say how they think their inventions or technology are world-changing devices or services.

However, I have been wondering if Silicon Valley, with its innovative thinkers and problem-solving skills, took a stronger aim at some of the huge problems we have in healthcare and especially in finding cures for diseases like cancer, diabetes, and other major illnesses, how this could impact the fight against life-threatening problems.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Evaluating the predictability of medical conditions from social media posts

We studied whether medical conditions across 21 broad categories were predictable from social media content across approximately 20 million words written by 999 consenting patients. Facebook language significantly improved upon the prediction accuracy of demographic variables for 18 of the 21 disease categories; it was particularly effective at predicting diabetes and mental health conditions including anxiety, depression and psychoses. Social media data are a quantifiable link into the otherwise elusive daily lives of patients, providing an avenue for study and assessment of behavioral and environmental disease risk factors. Analogous to the genome, social media data linked to medical diagnoses can be banked with patients’ consent, and an encoding of social media language can be used as markers of disease risk, serve as a screening tool, and elucidate disease epidemiology. In what we believe to be the first report linking electronic medical record data with social media data from consenting patients, we identified that patients’ Facebook status updates can predict many health conditions, suggesting opportunities to use social media data to determine disease onset or exacerbation and to conduct social media-based health interventions.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Blockchain In Healthcare: How It Could Make Digital Healthcare Safer And More Innovative

Digital healthcare trends are largely driven by the need for better patient care, faster and more accurate analysis, and on-demand access to medical data. The pace of innovation in digital healthcare began gaining momentum with artificial intelligence (AI), and it is set to further accelerate as the industry turns to blockchain technology.

Blockchain technology is being leveraged to remodel the collaborative exchange of vital research and useful healthcare data, thereby enabling key stakeholders such as clinical researchers, doctors, pharmacists, and other healthcare providers to gain secure, faster, simplified and reliable access to electronic medical information. The industry already has a similar platform called the health information exchange (HIE). Many healthcare technology vendors -- including my company, a medical data and image management cloud-based service -- can integrate with HIE systems.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Approaches for Departments, Schools, and Health Systems to Better Implement Technologies Used for Clinical Care and Education: Best Practices

New technologies create opportunities and challenges that significantly impact education, health care, and business. Leaders in academic health centers and departments of psychiatry already exploring TP (telepsychiatry) or TBH (telebehavioral health) must also consider integrating social media, mobile health, apps, and other emerging technologies related to clinical care, training, faculty development, and administrative missions. Successful implementation of technology requires hands-on leadership, needs assessments, participation by all levels of the organization, and continuous quality/performance improvement to support a positive e-culture. Additional research is needed to develop consensus regarding priorities, prototypes, standardization, and best implementation strategies.

Best Practices

• Assessing Readiness for Change - Institutions have to assess readiness to change at the participant, program, and organizational levels.  Programs need good communication, collaboration, and teamwork.
• Create/Hardwire the Culture - For health care, technology use requires clinical skills, technical support, and team workflow adjustment—so planning and evaluation must cover these landscapes.
• Write Policies and Procedures - The overall administrative approach should attend to process, procedures, policy, and evaluation in order to plan, implement, and manage a program. Input from all levels of the organization—including clinician, manager, and technology stakeholders—should help ensure fidelity to the plan, reduce uncertainty, and improve effectiveness.
• Establish the Curriculum and Competencies - Clinical and administrative-based issues related to care include documentation, EHR, medico-legal, billing, cultural, confidentiality, and privacy.  Implementing an e-culture and teaching associated competencies successfully will likely require a mixture of methods to increase learners’ skill level over time.
• Train Learners and Faculty - All programs will best serve their trainees’ professional development needs by identifying faculty thought leaders or champions of these increasingly important modalities. They can link to others through national educational organizations.
• Evaluate/Manage Change - Change requires leadership and management approaches for technology across multiple clinical, academic, and administrative missions. Change may be facilitated by use of opinion-leader visits and discussions, survey instruments, focus groups, site visits, in-person and on-line courses, and external consultants. Inevitable, foreseen, and unforeseen negative consequences of such disruptions require skillful management.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

A Review on Strategies to Manage Physician Burnout

Physician burnout is an emerging condition that can adversely affect the performance of modern-day medicine. Its three domains are emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a sense of reduced accomplishment among physicians, with the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) being the gold standard questionnaire used to scale physician burnout. This concern not only impacts physicians but the entire healthcare system in general. There is growing awareness regarding the mental health of physicians and the consequences faced by the healthcare system as a result of burnout. According to a recent study, more than 50% of physicians reported suffering from at least one burnout symptom. In this review article, we aim to identify the causes leading to burnout, its impact on physicians, and hospital management as well as interventions to reduce this work-related syndrome. Some contributing factors leading to burnout are poor working conditions with long work shifts, stressful on-call duties, lack of appreciation, and poor social interactions. Burnout can lead to adverse consequences, such as depression, substance use, and suicidal ideation in physicians and residents. This can result in poor patient care increasing total length of stay, re-admissions, and major medical errors. Due to increased scrutiny of patient and healthcare costs, along with increased lawsuits as a result of major medical errors, it is crucial for both the hospital management and physicians to recognize and address burnout among physicians. Comprehensive professional training such as Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), stress-reducing activities such as mindfulness and group activities, and strict implementation of work-hour limitations recommended by Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) for residents are a few methods that may help to manage burnout and increase productivity in hospitals.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Factors Determining Patients’ Choice Between Mobile Health and Telemedicine: Predictive Analytics Assessment

The solution to the growing problem of rural residents lacking health care access may be found in the use of telemedicine and mobile health (mHealth). Using mHealth or telemedicine allows patients from rural or remote areas to have better access to health care.

The objective of this study was to understand factors influencing the choice of communication medium for receiving care, through the analysis of mHealth versus telemedicine encounters with a virtual urgent clinic.

We conducted a postdeployment evaluation of a new virtual health care service, Virtual Urgent Clinic, which uses mHealth and telemedicine modalities to provide patient care. We used a multinomial logistic model to test the significance and predictive power of a set of features in determining patients’ preferred method of telecare encounters—a nominal outcome variable of two levels (mHealth and telemedicine).

Postdeployment, 1403 encounters were recorded, of which 1228 (87.53%) were completed with mHealth and 175 (12.47%) were telemedicine encounters. Patients’ sex (P=.004) and setting (P<.001) were the most predictive determinants of their preferred method of telecare delivery, with significantly small P values of less than .01. Pearson chi-square test returned a strong indication of dependency between chief concern and encounter mediums, with an extremely small P<.001. Of the 169 mHealth patients who responded to the survey, 154 (91.1%) were satisfied by their encounter, compared with 31 of 35 (89%) telemedicine patients.

We studied factors influencing patients’ choice of communication medium, either mHealth or telemedicine, for a virtual care clinic. Sex and geographic location, as well as their chief concern, were strong predictors of patients’ choice of communication medium for their urgent care needs. This study suggests providing the option of mHealth or telemedicine to patients, and suggesting which medium would be a better fit for the patient based on their characteristics.

The full article can be downloaded below.