The Digital Health Update by Paul Sonnier ⋅ Oct 28, 2016 ⋅ #245

I will be making this announcement to 51,000+ 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 28, 2016 ⋅ #245

Dear Group,

Add another industry convergence in digital health: banking and healthcare. Capital One—the massive American bank holding company specializing in credit cards, home loans, auto loans, banking, and savings products—is partnering with Gem, PokitDok, Viewpost, and Clear Graph to bring blockchain to healthcare starting in 2017. For those unfamiliar with blockchain, it is a distributed database that maintains a continuously-growing list of records called blocks secured from tampering and revision. Each block contains a timestamp and a link to a previous block. The blockchain is a technology that underlies bitcoin—conceived in 2008 and first implemented in 2009—where it serves as the public ledger for all transactions. In the bitcoin case, every compatible client is able to connect to the network, send new transactions to it, verify transactions, and take part in the competition to create new blocks. Citibank et al are using bitcoin as the basis for medical claims service.

Hacked webcams (now being recalled) and routers were used last week to execute a large-scale Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack (DDoS) that brought down websites like Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, The New York Times, Pinterest, and PayPal. Fortunately there were no reports of health or medical issues resulting from the attack, some group members may recall a 2014 DDoS attack on Boston Children’s Hospital, which which sent waves of traffic towards its servers, forcing it offline for a week and causing $300,000 in damage. The medical field is taking note, as according to Forrester Research, ransomware in medical devices like insulin pumps and pacemakers is the single biggest cyber security threat for 2016. And last year the FDA issued a letter warning hospitals and patients that a pump commonly used to ration out proper dosing of medicine in IVs could be vulnerable to attack. With modern connected automobiles also being vulnerable, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) just released voluntary guidelines for automakers on car cybersecurity including specifying that a car’s computer shouldn’t put the driver at risk to fend off an intruder.

In digital health investing news, Braintree founder Bryan Johnson announced an investment of $100 million in his new company Kernel, which aims to unlock the power of the human brain by building hardware and software to augment human intelligence. The cash infusion will be used to increase the size of his team, shore up IP, and pursue animal and human testing trials for a neural prosthetic device that may be implanted beneath the skull and used to reduce cognitive deficiencies for sufferers of conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia. As Bryan elaborates in his personal post, “We’re starting to identify the mechanisms underlying neural code and make them programmable. Our biology and genetics have become increasingly programmable; our neural code is next in line. Programming our neural code will enable us to author ourselves and our existence in ways that were previously unimaginable.”

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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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from Paul Sonnier – Story of Digital Health http://storyofdigitalhealth.com/digital-health-update-paul-sonnier-oct-28-2016-245/
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