Ned Anderson: The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter — Oct 15, 2018

The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter — Oct 15, 2018 — No. 108

EBD Group has partnered with Demy-Colton to produce a new, three-part report providing insights into digital medicine, which is a subset of digital health encompassing products with potential for disease management. The first report is out now and analyzes the rapidly changing regulatory environment for digital medicine and what’s on the horizon for 2019. Particular emphasis is placed on how the FDA is forging into new territory and folding digital medicine into the regulatory process. You can download and read ‘Digital Medicine 2018 Report: Part 1- Innovation Supported by Regulation’ here.

My newsletter for Oct 15, 2018 is viewable here and inline text below, without images.
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JOIN THE 65,000+ MEMBER DIGITAL HEALTH GROUP ON LINKEDIN!
If you’re on LinkedIn, please do join the Digital Health group, which I founded in 2009. The group serves to advance knowledge and build relationships between people interested in the convergence of the digital and genomic revolutions with health, healthcare, living, and society.

READ MY BOOK
My book, “The Fourth Wave: Digital Health” is available in digital and paperback at Amazon.com, here. You can also learn more about the book, here.

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER
Follow me on Twitter @Paul_Sonnier for all the news I share each day.

MY SERVICES
I’m available to deliver my keynote address at conferences and corporate events. I also offer event and entity advertising in my 64,000+ member Digital Health LinkedIn group, newsletter, and on my website. Advertising with me puts your event, content, product, and/or service in front of tens of thousands of global readers each week. I’m also available for strategic consulting. Contact me for my media kit, standard plans, and pricing.

GLOBAL EVENT LIST
This is a crowdsourced list of global conferences and events focused on or relevant to digital health.

FEATURED EVENTS
CNS Summit – Nov 1-4, 2018 in Boca Raton, Florida, USA.

Digital Health World Congress 2018 Winter Edition, Nov 28-29 in London, UK

Digital Medicine and Medtech Showcase, Jan 8-9, 2019 in San Francisco, CA

EVENT PROMOTION
Please contact me for options on event promotion, including having your event featured at the top of this list, featured in my weekly Digital Health group announcements, newsletter, and on Twitter.

SUBMITTING AN EVENT
Please provide the event name, date(s), event website link (direct and not a shortened url), one-paragraph event description, the venue name, and location (city and country). Not all events are relevant to digital health and webinars are typically not allowed, but you can ask me about promotion options.

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The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter for Oct 15

Three Democratic senators haveexpressed concerns about the FDA’s effort to relax regulations on digital health applications via the agency’s newDigital Health Software Precertification (Pre-Cert) Program (first outlined in the agency’s Digital Health Innovation Action Plan). In a letter to the FDA, the senators stated that: “It is essential that changes to FDA’s regulatory framework are done in compliance with the current statutory framework and do not compromise public safety”. The FDA is working with companies including Apple, Fitbit, Johnson & Johnson, Pear Therapeutics, Phosphorus, Roche, Samsung, Tidepool, and Verily on the Pre-Cert Program to “help inform the development of a regulatory model to assess the safety and effectiveness of software technologies without inhibiting patient access to these technologies.”

FDA spokesperson Stephanie Caccomo reportedly indicated that the agency will explore implementing the program within the FDA’s current legal authorities, adding that: “We have been transparent about our proposed working model for the program, including seeking public feedback, and will be publishing the next iteration in December”.

INTERNET CENSORSHIP

This past week, Facebook purged more than 800 U.S publishers and accounts for “flooding users with politically oriented content that violated the company’s spam policies”. Pages banned by both Facebook and Twitter included The Free Thought Project (over 3 million followers), The Anti-Media (over 2 million followers), Police the Police (nearly 2 million followers), and Filming Cops (1.5 million followers).

One of the impacted journalists, Rachel Blevins, a correspondent for RT America, tweeted: “Facebook took down my page with nearly 70,000 followers, labeling it as “spam,” when I have spent 4 years working to build that page up and using it to post the articles I wrote and videos of my reporting. This is so incredibly wrong and is affecting hundreds of similar pages.”

In response to Facebook’s actions, Abby Martins, host of The Empire Files, tweeted: “Of 800 pages Facebook banned, several were police accountability orgs w/millions of followers, like Cop Block & Police the Police. If this is about clickbait, why are Buzzfeed & Huff Po still up? The govt-tech purge of dissidents continues at a rapid pace w/ disturbing silence.”

In terms of the political ramifications, Max Blumenthal, editor of the Grayzone Project and a contributor for Truthdig tweeted: “Ahead of the midterms, Facebook purged 800 politically oriented pages on the grounds of spamming and “inauthentic messaging.” But Rachel’s account is real & has done none of this. Maybe she just strayed outside FB’s arbitrary political boundaries.”

Journalist Caitlin Johnstone (who was recently removed from Twitter and then quickly reinstated) writes that ” Internet Censorship Just Took An Unprecedented Leap Forward, And Hardly Anyone Noticed“. According to Johnstone: “Any time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you’ll always get some guy in your face who’s read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows everything, saying things like “Facebook is a private company! It can do whatever it wants!” Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How “private” is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government. Speaking of the Atlantic Council, it recently published a very interesting 21-page document about a US military conference detailing, in present tense, how Silicon Valley tech giants are being used to nullify the threat that the new media landscape poses to the US power establishment.”

Coincidentally, LinkedIn—which is owned by Microsoft—recently removed the group announcement feature. My Digital Health group on LinkedIn includes over 65,000 members. Many other groups (there are over 2 million of them) have a significantly greater number of members; some with over a million. It certainly seems like there is a concerted effort taking place by corporations to stifle independent voices.

And while unrelated to censorship, this past week Microsoft employees signed a letter calling on the company’s leadership to cancel a bid to provide cloud computing services for the U.S. military’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI). According to John Gibson, chief management officer for the U.S. Department of Defense, the JEDI, program is “truly about increasing the lethality of our department”. Google—which experienced anemployee revolt over its participation in the US military’s MAVEN program—has already pulled out of the JEDI bidding war, reportedly claiming that it could not be sure it would not conflict with its AI principles.

PARTNERING

Otsuka and Proteus Digital Health have expanded their collaboration to advance digital medicines for mental health. As part of the deal, Otsuka made $88 million in equity and other payments to Proteus.

Resolve Digital Health (a Canada-based developer of cannabis formulations, brands and smart devices) and Vapor Room (a San Francisco-based therapeutic cannabis dispensary) are partnering to establish a complementary retail partnership which incorporates the benefits of Vapor Room’s home delivery license in California.

Butterfly Network and Bridge to Health shared a video of the Butterfly mobile ultrasound in action in Africa: “We just had a baby that came in with a cough and fever. We didn’t see anything on the ultrasound scans. Typically, we’d prescribe antibiotics. But now, we don’t have to. The project is already working.” (tweet) “The Butterfly iQ devices are truly incredible — portable, reliable, rechargeable, and perfect for our training program in rural Uganda.” (tweet)

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Paul Sonnier
Author ⋅ Speaker ⋅ Technologist ⋅ Social Entrepreneur
Book: The Fourth Wave: Digital Health
Founder, Digital Health group on LinkedIn
Creator, Story of Digital Health
Twitter: @Paul_Sonnier
San Diego, CA, USA

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