Smartwatches Are Changing the Purpose of the EKG

Think of the stereotypical representations of medicine, as they might appear on a television show: the crisp white coat, of course, and the stethoscope dangling at the ready. Syringes and intravenous lines, maybe. An X-ray or CT scan slammed theatrically into a light box.

But any medical scene is incomplete without an electrocardiogram (EKG) machine running in the background, its jagged line tracing across the screen reassuringly, or alarming to cue a dramatic threat. The EKG is the backbeat of many hospital scenes on television. Important medical things are happening here, it says.

To tap into that potent association, many private medical practices, urgent care clinics, community hospitals, technology companies, and health-care product designers use EKG imagery in their advertising. Most of those images bear little resemblance to actual EKG tracings. The spikes and bumps generated for signs or emblems (like the logo of the daytime talk show The Doctors, for example) mostly amount to arbitrary peaks and valleys. They do not reflect the output of a human heart, healthy or diseased.

But accuracy might be less important than allegory. Like the white coat or the caduceus, the EKG has become talismanic, more valuable for the symbolism it provides than any diagnostic information it can convey. Now that EKGs are making their way into smartwatches, their symbolic purpose could risk overtaking their medical one.

The full Atlantic article can be viewed at this link.  

Accenture 2019 Digital Health Consumer Survey

Healthcare consumers today are changing, and their expectations for convenience, affordability and quality are redefining how they engage at each stage of care.  Younger consumers are not satisfied with healthcare's status quo and consumers of all generations are more willing to try non-traditional services.  The providers and payers who heed the shifts and deliver what patients are looking for will be the ones to earn loyalty, navigate disruption and be strongly positioned as the future of healthcare consumerism unfolds.  

The full Accenture survey results can be downloaded below.  

Would you be happy to see your doctor online?

Would you be happy to see your doctor online? Growing numbers of patients seem to be attracted by the convenience. And doctors are also finding it useful as health services come under pressure from growing and ageing populations.

The full BBC article can be viewed at this link.  

Telemedicine’s challenge: Getting patients to click the app

Walmart workers can now see a doctor for only $4. The catch? It has to be a virtual visit.

The retail giant recently rolled back the $40 price on telemedicine, becoming the latest big company to nudge employees toward a high-tech way to get diagnosed and treated remotely.

But patients have been slow to embrace virtual care. Eighty percent of mid-size and large U.S. companies offered telemedicine services to their workers last year, up from 18 percent in 2014, according to the consultant Mercer. Only 8 percent of eligible employees used telemedicine at least once in 2017, most recent figures show.

“There’s an awful lot of effort right now focused on educating the consumer that there’s a better way,” said Jason Gorevic, CEO of telemedicine provider Teladoc Health.

Widespread smartphone use, looser regulations and employer enthusiasm are helping to expand access to telemedicine, where patients interact with doctors and nurses from afar, often through a secure video connection. Supporters say virtual visits make it easier for patients to see a therapist or quickly find help for ailments that aren’t emergencies. But many still fall back to going to the doctor’s office when they’re sick.

The full Associated Press article can be viewed at this link.  

Achieve Privacy-Preserving Priority Classification on Patient Health Data in Remote eHealthcare System

The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has attracted considerable attention and become a promising approach to provide a 24-hour on-the-go healthcare service for users. However, it still faces many challenges on privacy of users’ sensitive personal information, confidentiality of healthcare center’s disease models. For this reason, many privacy-preserving schemes have been proposed in recent years. However, the efficiency and accuracy of those privacy-preserving schemes become a big issue to be solved. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving priority classification scheme, named PPC, for classifying patients’ encrypted data at the WBAN-gateway in a remote eHealthcare system. Specifically, to reduce the system latency, we design a non-interactive privacy-preserving priority classification algorithm, which allows the WBAN-gateway to conduct the privacy-preserving priority classification for the received users’ medical packets by itself and relay these packets according to their priorities (criticalities). Detailed security analysis shows that the PPC scheme can achieve the priority classification and packets relay without disclosing the privacy of the users’ personal information and confidentiality of the healthcare center’s disease models. In addition, the extensive experiments with an android app and two java server programs demonstrate its efficiency in terms of computational costs and communication overheads.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Top Five Digital Health Technologies in 2019

Digital technologies are constantly evolving and finding new applications in healthcare, even while the industry is struggling with adoption and ‘digital transformation’. Each year new applications emerge, but the underlying technologies driving them remain the same. For 2019, we asked companies around the world one basic question: “Please indicate the key technology which you believe will have the most profound impact on the healthcare industry during 2019?” The results are not very surprising:

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.   

How Is Telepsychiatry Revolutionizing Care

Psychiatry is the branch of healthcare devoted to the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of mental disorders, related to mood, behaviour, cognition and perceptions. The psychiatric care pathway begins with a case history and/or mental status examination, which leads to a preliminary diagnosis. The next step of the psychiatric care pathway is to confirm the diagnosis using psychological tests and neuroimaging techniques. Mental disorders often fall within a spectrum, and the current definitions used for diagnosis comes form Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 2013. The treatment phase is often a prescription of psychotherapy combined with psychiatric medication. The dosage is updated at regular intervals. However, there are still significant socio-economic barriers to delivering this care pathway to patients. This includes the stigma around mental health which discourages individuals from seeking help, cost of psychiatric care (including lost work hours, childcare, or transportation) and access to competent psychiatric clinics.

Telepsychiatry promises to solve these real-world barriers without further adding a cost of care for the patients. For example, telemedicine can make care accessible to individuals who may not feel comfortable visiting a psychiatrist’s office. Studies show that because of the stigma, patients are more inclined to open up while they’re communicating electronically rather than face-to-face. Telepsychiatry also reduces the cost of care for individuals, since patients don’t lose work hours for transportation or childcare associated with visiting a specialist’s office. Since telepsychiatry platforms are mostly covered by insurance, it also costs the same amount as a conventional doctor’s visit. Another significant impact of telepsychiatry is that can deliver care in remote locations. Rural areas are often understaffed with specialists, and telepsychiatry makes it easier to intervene faster in crisis situations.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

2019 HEALTHCARE TRENDS FORECAST: THE BEGINNING OF A CONSUMER-DRIVEN REFORMATION 

The well-known proverb “may you live in interesting times” is considered by many to be a blessing, yet others believe it is actually an ancient curse. People’s interpretation tends to correspond with their own appetite for change, as well as their comfort (or lack of) in the face of ambiguity. Regardless of the adage’s origin and intent, many would agree that these are interesting times for healthcare. In fact, at HIMSS we believe healthcare is currently undergoing a period of reformation on a scope and scale that is unmatched.

A perfect storm of factors – including the shift toward value-based care, rising costs, health system consolidation, the approaching silver tsunami, regulatory pressures, increased consumerization, major technology players entering the market and the ever-expanding potential of digital health tools – are coalescing and fundamentally disrupting business models. Traditional healthcare institutions are in reactive mode. Upstarts are finding that healthcare is not as easily disrupted as industries like retail. For nearly everyone, there are more questions than answers.

At HIMSS, we believe it is our responsibility to help the industry make sense of these changes and tap into the promise and potential of information and technology. With that premise, we are introducing an annual forecast report. Bringing together insights from leadership across HIMSS and our subsidiaries, we’re aiming to shine a light around the corner and help illuminate the path to clinical and financial health.

Read on for our predictions for the industry in 2019.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Integrating Clinical and Mental Health: Challenges and Opportunities

Nearly 45 million American adults suffered from some form of mental illness in 2016. Although there is little change in the estimates of those with mental illness over the last few years, rates of death due to drugs, alcohol, and suicide are increasing. In 2016, about 45,000 Americans age 10 and over died by suicide. Twenty-five states experienced at least a 30 percent increase in suicide rates between 2014 and 2016.

The national opioid crisis has resulted in significant attention to federal policy associated with substance use disorder (SUD). Mental illness along with SUD comprise a broad category of illness commonly referred to as “behavioral health.” In 2016, 44.7 million American adults experienced a mental illness, 20.1 million experienced a SUD, and 8.2 million experienced both—and these numbers are likely underestimated due to lack of identification and issues of stigma. Collectively, more than 1 million people have died from drugs, alcohol, and suicide over the past decade. If these trends continue, the death rate could grow to claim 2 million more lives by 2025.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the barriers to the integration of clinical health care and mental health services, and to identify policy options for consideration in advancing integration of services. In 2018, the Bipartisan Policy Center hosted a series of public and private discussions on this topic. As part of this research, BPC consulted patient advocates; clinical and behavioral health care providers; federal, state, and county agency officials and staff; insurers; academics; and other experts. The goal was to identify barriers to integration caused by federal policy, to identify policy options to mitigate or remove those barriers, and, through policy changes, to advance evidence-based treatment for mental health in the United States.

The full paper can be downloaded below.  

Why Your Next Doctor Visit Could Be Over The Phone

Fever, sore throat, cough, chills…The last thing anyone with these symptoms wants to do is get out of bed and sit in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. That is if there's even an appointment available.

With telemedicine, healthcare providers can accommodate routine visits virtually. This provides patients with a more convenient way to access care, while reserving in-person appointments for more complex health issues. Other common applications of telemedicine include remote follow-up, treating patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, as well as expanded care for patients in remote or rural locations. Couple virtual visits with the latest wearable health devices such as heart monitors, blood and glucose sensors, and activity trackers, and providers can remotely monitor at-risk patients who require additional care — while also freeing them from frequent in-person visits.

Despite years of buzz and technological advancement, however, telemedicine, or telehealth, has failed to achieve widespread adoption. In fact, most medical consumers aren’t even aware telemedicine is an option — never mind having actually participated in a remote visit with their physician. In concept, telemedicine seems like an ideal solution for many of the current challenges facing healthcare. Patients receive convenient treatment and providers have more time to focus on patients who really need it. So why is adoption lagging? 

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.