Tag Archives: Technology
Telemedicine: USC Keck Medicine “TeleCARE” App For Smartphones (Video)
This training guide provides instructions on how to install Keck Medicine of USC’s TeleCARE platform on your Android phone.
Technology: SCIENTISTS DEVELOP SMARTPHONE APP TO DETECT “DIABETES” (UCSF)
Overall, the algorithm correctly identified the presence of diabetes in up to 81 percent of patients in two separate datasets. When the algorithm was tested in an additional dataset of patients enrolled from in-person clinics, it correctly identified 82 percent of patients with diabetes.
In the Nature Medicine study, UCSF researchers obtained nearly 3 million PPG recordings from 53,870 patients in the Health eHeart Study who used the Azumio Instant Heart Rate app on the iPhone and reported having been diagnosed with diabetes by a health care provider. This data was used to both develop and validate a deep-learning algorithm to detect the presence of diabetes using smartphone-measured PPG signals.
Among the patients that the algorithm predicted did not have diabetes, 92 to 97 percent indeed did not have the disease across the validation datasets. When this PPG-derived prediction was combined with other easily obtainable patient information, such as age, gender, body mass index and race/ethnicity, predictive performance improved further.
NEW MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY: UC DAVIS SCIENTISTS INVENT WORLD’S FIRST TOTAL-BODY PET SCANNER (VIDEO)
UC Davis Health scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi spent 15 years developing the world’s first total-body PET scanner, called EXPLORER. This imaging machine scans a patient’s entire body at one time, delivering breathtaking image quality that improves patient diagnoses and disease research.
UC Davis Cultivating Health blog: https://health.ucdavis.edu/cultivatin…
INNOVATION: PHILIPS “VIRTUAL CARE STATION”
Philips Virtual Care Station, inspired by the VA’s ATLAS program, is a community-based telehealth solution designed to expand access to high-quality care by connecting patients and providers remotely through a secure, clinical-grade environment.
DIABETES MANAGEMENT: “SMART INSULIN PUMPS”
Technology is finally innovating diabetes management. With the advancement in technologies like continuous glucose monitors, traditional insulin pumps are evolving into smarter devices that can automate insulin delivery.
Medtronic and Tandem Diabetes are the only two companies to offer hybrid closed loop systems. A community of diabetics are also hacking pumps to do the same thing. CNBC’s Erin Black just switched from the hacked system to Tandem’s Control-IQ and takes a look at how insulin pumps are getting smarter.
TELEMEDICINE: “HEAL PASS” – PHYSICIAN “HOUSE CALLS” FOR FIXED MONTHLY FEE
By providing house calls and telemedicine from physicians at a fixed monthly fee with no copays, no deductibles, and no insurance required, Heal Pass is making affordable healthcare possible for the estimated 27 million Americans who recently lost their health insurance along with their jobs because of COVID-19.
- Heal patients can register now for the new service starting at $49 per month.
- Adults can add members of their household to their Heal Pass account for an additional $10 per person each month and may register up to six people to the account.
- Patients spend an average of $800 out of pocket each year, in addition to $2,000 for an emergency room visit.
- With Heal Pass, a family of four would receive up to 36 total appointments at an average cost of less than $27.
- Individual patients can save up to $1,100 per year and the average family can save up to $2,200 per year.
Uninsured individuals and their families are fearful of getting sick and accumulating high medical bills during this time of economic uncertainty.
Heal Pass is not health insurance, but it is health assurance, giving the uninsured the comfort of knowing they can get the care they need at a fixed, low fee with no surprise bills or out of pocket costs.
The new program allows up to eight house calls or telemedicine appointments per member each year in addition to an annual physical, helping with patients’ most common needs, including primary care, preventive care, non-emergency urgent care and chronic disease management.
It also includes free next day delivery of medications prescribed by a Heal doctor. Heal doctors are highly qualified and deliver house calls and care in a way that keeps patients safe from COVID-19 exposure as the country sees a pronounced second spike with 58,618 cases per day on average over the last seven days.
COMMENTARY
Telemedicine and Covid 19 are fermenting together and creating some new ideas for medical care.
Safety is a concern, and what could be better than your own home, using telemedicine, or a futuristic telemedicine booth located at convenient locations for the busy traveler?
Convenience is another attraction, with a PREPAID aliquot of healthcare; this idea was featured by Forward Health, reviewed a couple of weeks ago, which offered a package of remote monitors and 24/7 access for $149 per month.
Now, Heal pass offers 24/7 access they call “house calls” for $49. a month, with a blizzard of statistics on what you will save. We will see.
You usually get what you pay for.
The Onmed station sounds doable, and has the advantage of self-contained units that may be available to you at the right place and time. You could conceivably even wind up with a prescription as you exit the booth.
—Dr. C.
INNOVATIONS: “ONMED STATION” – SELF-CONTAINED, HI-TECH TELEMEDICAL UNIT
The OnMed® station is the only self-contained medical unit in the world currently using patented technologies to directly connect patients with doctors, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists for both consultative needs and on-site prescriptions.
The OnMed station utilizes advanced technology, including thermal imaging and facial recognition, to provide patients with a safe, private, and secure consultation with a licensed clinician. An ultra-high definition camera ensures the patient and clinician experience a real-time eye to eye connection. These same high-definition cameras also make it possible for the clinician to look down a patient’s throat or even examine a tiny skin lesion in detail.
If necessary, not only can the clinician provide a script, but the station itself can safely dispense hundreds of common prescription medications with the approval of a clinician or pharmacist through a secure, robotically automated vault.
TELEMEDICINE: SENTARA HEALTHCARE IN VIRGINIA OVERSEES 132 CRITICAL PATIENTS WITH ITS “E-ICU”
From ‘Government Technology’ (June 29, 2020):
The hospital system — the first in the country — wired bedside video cameras and microphones on a secure network in 2000 so a medical team could monitor patients at multiple hospitals’ intensive care units from one command center around the clock.
When Sentara Healthcare first launched its “eICU,” the plan was to provide an extra set of eyes on critical patients, especially overnight when staffing was down to a skeleton crew.
Before the coronavirus arrived in Virginia, the average number of telemedicine visits within Sentara Medical Group was about 20 a day. Now, it is more than 2,000 a day, according to the company. Between March and June 21, its clinicians had 314,000 total patient visits, with about 51 percent of them happening virtually.
COMMENTARY
Telemedicine has been slowly developing for 10 or 20 years. The models have been developing according to the requirements of their local areas.
Dartmouth deals with a rural area and has sophisticated aid to it’s associated hospitals and transportation systems to bring Stabilized patients to the main hospital.
Sentara deals with a more urban area and has a central brain aiding the peripheral hospitals in the delivery of treatment locally.
The Tele intensive care unit system of Santara features a central ” Mission Control” With patients in multiple peripheral Intensive care units connected by telemetry. This efficient system allows the peripheral ICUs to operate at a higher level with less staff.
Such telemetry could allow convalescent hospitals and even nursing homes to improve medical care.
With such excellent models one can hope that American medicine will rapidly improve in the post Covid era, riding the wave of telehealth advances.
—Dr. C.
NEW TECHNOLOGY: SMART BANDAGES – “A HEALING REVOLUTION” (TUFTS VIDEO)
On the 100th anniversary of the Band-Aid, Tufts engineer Sameer Sonkusale is working to make “smart” bandages.
COMMENTARY
The Tuft’s video talks about transforming the Band-Aid into a detector that can warn of infection, or even exude the proper antibiotic. This would certainly be Applicable to Convalescent homes where people can’t monitor their own healing.
I am Looking forward to the time when the bandage will provide a matrix for the body’s regenerative cells to spread out and cover the wound more rapidly. Possibly someday the regenerative cells themselves can be applied.
Doctors Without Waiting Rooms 