The Digital Health Update by Paul Sonnier ⋅ Oct 14, 2016 ⋅ #243

I made this announcement to 51,045 members of the Digital Health group on LinkedIn. If you’re on LinkedIn, please do join the group, which allows you to opt in to receiving these announcements in addition to connecting with thousands of other global stakeholders in digital health. Note that I will continue to update this announcement up until sending out the final version via LinkedIn.

The Digital Health Update by Paul Sonnier ⋅ Oct 14, 2016 ⋅ #243

Dear Group,

I’m delighted to present Sage Publications’ new DIGITAL HEALTH journal, which is the only international, fully interdisciplinary publication focused on this rapidly emerging field. DIGITAL HEALTH provides a unique and dynamic forum to facilitate dialogue between relevant stakeholders and, for those writing papers on digital health, you can get your work in front of a global audience. For a limited time you can take advantage of the introductory waived article processing charge (APC). For questions or inquiries about submitting, please send an email to the journal’s joint editors-in-chief: Theodoros N. Arvanitis from the University of Warwick, and John A. Powell from the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester. And for the extensive list of great articles already published, you can explore the DIGITAL HEALTH journal website.

Confirming the obvious, a new study by Microsoft and Stanford University researchers confirms that playing Pokémon Go makes you live longer. The caveat is that players must keep up the level of increased activity indefinitely. Another obvious point here is that this activity doesn’t have to be via game play: people who maintain an increased level of activity in any other way—including simply walking more each day without playing the game—will realize the benefits. With 25 million people playing the game regularly, the researchers indicated that the extra 192 steps daily per user could produce vast improvements in public health.

In the latest ‘hot’ group discussion, Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind’s article in Harvard Business Review (HBR) “Robots Will Replace Doctors, Lawyers, and Other Professionals” is resurfacing a persistent and provocative theory. The key here is that ‘replace’ does not mean that all doctors go away, but that there will be new roles plus less demands placed on their time for things that AI and other digital-based tools can do, often better and cheaper.

Illustrating my point perfectly, digital health AI and deep learning chatbots are cropping up around the globe. Chinese search engine company Baidu has launched ‘Melody’, an app that collects medical information from people and passes it along to doctors in a form that makes it easier to use for diagnostic purposes plus facilitates appointment scheduling. The solution effectively reduces the amount of time patients and doctors have to spend exchanging basic information. In my process engineering days at Boeing, this is called ‘muda‘, a Japanese word meaning “futility; uselessness; wastefulness”, and should be eliminated to make a process—medicine, in this case—as lean and efficient as possible. Baidu’s chief scientist Andrew Ng  states that “It’s not our role to diagnose—it’s the doctors’ role to diagnose. We try to assist the doctors”.

In the UK, an app by Babylon is featured in an article entitled “Can Smartphone Apps Really Replace GP Appointments?” Babylon offers a symptom checker plus asks questions and give users the opportunity to schedule appointments, including virtual visits.

Your.MD is another UK-based company in this category. Their app provides a map linking probabilities between symptoms and conditions plus their chatbot uses machine-learning algorithms and natural-language processing to understand and engage users.

When it comes to FDA regulation, Bradley Merrill Thompson, head of the CDS Coalition, shared his thoughts in a VentureBeat op-ed “The FDA’s 5-year delay on automated medicine must end.” As Brad puts it, “just as cars are beginning to drive themselves, healthcare decision-making is facing its own automation ramp up. Soon, patients will be able to enter their current symptoms through a portal, with the help of an intelligent agent, and get an accurate diagnosis or prescription without involving a human doctor. A child with asthma will have body sensors continuously monitoring respiration to direct when the child needs to take medicine. The technology is moving quickly, which begs the question: Is FDA ready?” Brad goes on to point out that the FDA, which operates under a Congressional statute enacted in 1976, sees anything new as risky. For instance, a pacemaker, which requires years of expensive validation to achieve FDA clearance, is used as the baseline for new software systems that don’t pose nearly the same amount of risk. Unfortunately, FDA guidance on clinical decision-support software (CDS), which the agency has been working on for five years, has still not been released.

Follow me on Twitter @Paul_Sonnier for all the news I share each day.

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Paul Sonnier
Social Entrepreneur ⋅ Ecosystem Strategist ⋅ Keynote Speaker
Founder, Digital Health group on LinkedIn ⋅ 50,000+ members
Creator, Story of Digital Health
Instagram @StoryofDigitalHealth
Twitter @Paul_Sonnier
San Diego, CA, USA

 

 

 

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