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.  

Taking Medication Adherence Technology To Task

Over the course of any given year, the average patient might see their primary care physician only a handful of times. The shortfall stems from the first phone call. Some estimates suggest it can take nearly three weeks to get in to see the doctor — or even longer if the condition requires the attention of a specialized clinician. It's not so for most pharmacies, where wait times are generally measured mostly in minutes — even moments — among the best of the best.

I’d not only call that a decided advantage on the pharmacy side of the counter, but more importantly, it's a prescription for pharmacists themselves to take more immediate, clinically oriented roles in improving medication adherence rates across the board. In my two-plus decades of industry leadership, helping companies better assimilate the benefits of business intelligence (BI) and branding leadership, I’ve directed scores of operational improvement efforts to drive bottom-line growth, while working to improve patient outcomes in the process.

There are many apps for it, but so far, not enough aptitude.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

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.  

What does personalised medicine mean for you?

Medicine has always been personal to some extent - a doctor looks for the best way to help the patient sitting in front of them.

But with advances in technology, it is becoming possible to use the most unique of characteristics - our genomes - to tailor treatments for individuals.

Genomes are made up of a complete set of our DNA, including all of our genes, and are the instruction manual on how to build and maintain the 37 trillion cells in our bodies.

Any two people share more than 99% of their DNA. It's the remaining less than 1% that makes us unique, and can affect the severity of a disease and effectiveness of treatments.

Looking at these small differences can also help us understand the best way to treat a patient for a range of diseases - from cancer and heart disease to depression.

The full BBC 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.  

Care Team Perspectives and Acceptance of Telehealth in Scaling a Home-Based Primary Care Program: Qualitative Study

Novel and sustainable approaches to optimizing home-based primary care (HBPC) programs are needed to meet the medical needs of a growing number of homebound older adults in the United States. Telehealth may be a viable option for scaling HBPC programs.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to gain insight into the perspectives of HBPC staff regarding adopting telehealth technology to increase the reach of HBPC to more homebound patients.

We collected qualitative data from HBPC staff (ie, physicians, registered nurses, nurse practitioners, care managers, social workers, and medical coordinators) at a practice in the New York metropolitan area through 16 semistructured interviews and three focus groups. Data were analyzed thematically using the template analysis approach with Self-Determination Theory concepts (ie, relatedness, competence, and autonomy) as an analytical lens.

Four broad themes—pros and cons of scaling, technology impact on staff autonomy, technology impact on competence in providing care, and technology impact on the patient-caregiver-provider relationship—and multiple second-level themes emerged from the analysis. Staff acknowledged the need to scale the program without diminishing effective patient-centered care. Participants perceived alerts generated from patients and caregivers using telehealth as potentially increasing burden and necessitating a rapid response from an already busy staff while increasing ambiguity. However, they also noted that telehealth could increase efficiency and enable more informed care provision. Telehealth could enhance the patient-provider relationship by enabling caregivers to be an integral part of the patient’s care team. Staff members raised the concern that patients or caregivers might unnecessarily overutilize the technology, and that some home visits are more appropriate in person rather than via telehealth.

These findings suggest the importance of considering the perspectives of medical professionals regarding telehealth adoption. A proactive approach exploring the benefits and concerns professionals perceive in the adoption of health technology within the HBPC program will hopefully facilitate the optimal integration of telehealth innovations.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

More Medical Mega-Breaches Thanks To Third-Party Insecurity

When you hear from a company that “the safety, security and privacy of our customers’ information is our highest priority,” you can be pretty sure that the safety, security and privacy of that data recently got compromised.

Even if the breach didn’t happen directly to that specific company. As cybersecurity experts have been preaching to organizations for years now, even if your own security is rigorous, that’s not enough. If a third party that has access to your data has weak security, you are just as insecure as it is. If it gets breached, you do too.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.