GAFAMS, STARTUPS & INNOVATION IN HEALTHCARE by PHARMAGEEK

• The world's largest technology companies have all hired well-known cardiologists.
• Heart disease and high blood pressure affect a large number of people, are well-understood, and there's evidence that consumer products can help.

 

Big Silicon Valley companies have often competed for talent with specialized skills, like expertise in artificial intelligence or trendy new programming languages.

 

Now they're competing for heart doctors.

 

Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon have all hired well-known cardiologists.

 

This might just be a coincidence. Cardiologists tend to be well educated and hard working, and big tech companies have a track record of recruiting such people.

 

 

Via nrip

Information technology has allowed much of our economy to automate processes. We have seen transformations of the airline, banking, brokerage, entertainment, lodging, music, printing, publishing, shipping and taxi industries through the availability of massive volumes of real-time price and service data. Across America, consumer-facing retail service continues to shift to a virtual environment.

 

Healthcare is the exception. Many health information technology (health IT) products initially focused on billing.

The misalignment between billing support and the sense that these tools do not materially automate clinician work to build in efficiencies or improve workflows adds to an overall frustration with the increasing amount of time providers spend at their screens.

 

Automation is hard because it tends to require interfaces of various types – both to other machines (Internet of Things) and to humans.

 

Often automation proposals involve solutions that focus on highly structured data. But, someone or something has to put energy (physician salary, for example) into organizing much of this information, assuming it is even knowable.

 

The underlying disease or patient behavior (e.g., smoking) is also often not knowable. And, automation relying on machine to machine interfaces regularly runs into a lack of application programming interfaces (APIs) supporting complex clinical data flows.

 

I posted this week old piece now and now when it was published as #NHITWeek is this week. A lot of posts this week deal with possibilities and problems with healthcare focussed automation. 

 

The original unedited piece can be read at https://www.himss.org/news/healthcare-automation-transforming-medicine

Via nrip

Deep learning is helping to make prosthetic arms behave more naturally.

 

 

Each year, more than 150,000 people have a limb amputated after an accident or for various medical reasons. Most people are then fitted with a prosthetic device that can recognize a limited number of signals to control a hand or foot, for example.

But Infinite Biomedical Technologies, a Baltimore startup company and another firm are taking advantage of better signal processing, pattern recognition software and other engineering advances to build new prosthetic controllers that might give amputees an easier life.

 

The key is boosting the amount of data the prosthetic arm can receive, and helping it interpret that information. “The goal for most patients is to get more than two functions, say open or close, or a wrist turn. Pattern recognition allows us to do that,” says Rahul Kaliki, CEO of Infinite. “We are now capturing more activity across the limb.”

 

Kaliki’s team of 14 employees are building the electronics that go inside other companies’ prosthetic arms. Infinite’s electronic control system, called Sense, records data from up to eight electrodes on his upper arm. Through many hours of training on the company’s tablet app, the device can detect the intent encoded in Rubin’s nerve signals when he moves his upper arm in a certain way. Sense then instructs his prosthetic hand to assume the appropriate grip.

 

read the original unedited story at  at https://www.wired.com/story/bionic-limbs-learn-to-open-a-beer/

 

 

 

Via nrip