The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Update ⋅ Paul Sonnier ⋅ Mar 13, 2018 ⋅ #317

I made this announcement to 61,742 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. I also send out a weekly Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter, which you can sign up for and receive for free, here.

The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Update ⋅ Paul Sonnier ⋅ Mar 13, 2018 ⋅ #317

Dear Group,

I hope to see many of you at the XPOMET Convention in Leipzig, Germany on the 21st of this month. I’ll be delivering the opening keynote of the 3-day conference extravaganza. More details can be found below in the ‘Featured Events’ section. After the event I’ll be making my first-ever trip to Paris, France.

The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter for Mar 12.

Per my tweet, featured people/companies/orgs include @23andMe @US_FDA @HHSGov @SecAzar @dnmendelson @DeptVetAffairs @VeteransHealth @SecShulkin @Apple @fitbit @Bose & many more!

Subscribe here.

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 @Paul_Sonnier for all the news I share each day.

SERVICES
I’m available to deliver my keynote address at conferences and corporate events. I also offer event and entity advertising in my group announcements, 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.

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The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter for Mar 12

A CBS News article with the headline “Trump administration taking new tack on digital-age health care approach” takes a look at how Alex Azar — the new Secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) — plans to roll out President Trump’s digital health agenda.

While the piece highlights a “smartphone app that lets Medicare patients access their claims information” and “wider access to websites that reliably compare cost and quality of medical tests,” one of the biggest technology issues Azar plans to tackle is health record interoperability, saying: “Patients ought to have control of their records in a useful format, period.” Dan Mendelson, CEO of Avalere Health, is optimistic that this can be achieved in a three-year period thanks to groundwork done by the Bush and Obama administrations.

Following Senior Adviser to President Trump Jared Kushner’s speech at the annual HIMSS conference, the White House published a document entitled: “The Trump Administration’s Plan to Put You in Charge of Your Health Information,” which states that “The Trump Administration views interoperability as a top priority for the Federal government.” Kushner is also quoted as saying: “I could not understand why medical records from the Department of Defense could not be seamlessly transferred to the Veterans’ Administration.” Unfortunately, there are some big bumps in the roll out the U.S. military’s new $4.3 billion Cerner medical record system for active duty military and veterans in the VA Health system, as you can read in the ‘Healthcare’ section below.

A big win for 23andMe and consumers’ access to their personal genetic information was achieved last week when the FDA approved the first-ever direct-to-consumer (DTC) test for breast cancer risk, which will be sold by the company. It bears noting that the test does not provide a complete view of a person’s risk, as can be learned in this article by Lydia Ramsey in Business Insider: Genetic experts have a message for anyone thinking of taking 23andMe’s new breast cancer test.

LIVING AND SOCIETY

Airline British Airways is expanding its self-service biometric boarding gate trials in the United States. The system eliminates the need for a boarding pass and passport when boarding a plane. Passengers look into a camera and once their biometric identity is validated against their passport, visa, or immigration photos they can then walk onto the plane. At LAX, the system can process 400 people in 22 minutes, which is under half the normal amount of time.

People are attacking driverless cars, primarily in San Francisco. Of the six crash reports filed in California so far in 2018, two involved a person attacking a robot car, both in San Francisco. In one incident, a GM driverless car (with a non-driving driver in the car) was “waiting at a green light for pedestrians to cross when a shouting man ran across the street against the do-not-walk signal and struck its bumper and hatch, damaging a taillight.” In another incident, “an autonomous vehicle with human driving had stopped behind a taxi when the taxi driver got out and slapped the front passenger-side window.” Oh, the horror.

Artificial intelligence (AI) designed toidentify gang crimes has ignited an ethical firestorm, as it could be incorrect in its assessments and impact people’s lives as a result. The system identifies a crime as gang-related based on four pieces of information: the primary weapon, the number of suspects, the neighborhood, and the location.

Amazon is working on a fix (or may have already fixed) a creepy laugh coming from its Alexa smart speakers. Users had reported hearing strange, unprompted laughter that started without Alexa being prompted to wake.

Google is reportedly using its AI technology to help with drone warfare as part of a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense’s algorithmic warfare initiative. According to a Google spokesperson: “The technology flags images for human review, and is for non-offensive uses only. Military use of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns. We’re actively discussing this important topic internally and with others as we continue to develop policies and safeguards around the development and use of our machine learning technologies.”

In an episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver takes a humorous look at Cryptocurrencies. He explains them and blockchain, which of course has applications in just about every sector of the economy, including healthcare and genomics.

An app called Eterly leverages information obtained from wearables (e.g. steps, heart rate, and sleep) and chatbot conversations to understand how long you will live. Similar to how cryptocurrencies can be mined, users are able to mine tokens by achieving their health and fitness goals.

HEALTHCARE

The U.S. military’s new $4.3 billion Cerner medical record system for active duty military and veterans in the VA Health system has reportedly utterly failed to deliver what President Donald Trump described as “faster, better, and far better quality care.” One doctor stated that: “We took a broken system and just broke it completely,” And some clinicians at one hospital quit because they were described as being “terrified they would hurt patients, or even kill them.” Other reported issues included inaccurate prescription requests from the pharmacy and referrals not going through.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Health has launched a beta API platform for developers to build digital health apps for vets. The new system — part of the VA’s Lighthouse Lab — was announced by VA Secretary David Shulkin, MD, at the HIMSS18 conference in Las Vegas. According to Shulkin, “Lighthouse represents VA’s commitment to providing a digital experience in line with what veterans are getting from the private sector by rapidly bringing cutting-edge solutions into VA that can help us accommodate our veterans’ unique needs.”

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Carla Small, Daniel Nigrin, Kevin Churchwell, and John Brownstein take a look at the digital health applications of voice-powered AI assistants like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana in their article: What Will Health Care Look Like Once Smart Speakers Are Everywhere?

WEARABLE TECH

According to IDC’s latest market share figures, Fitbit is no longer the world’s top wearable maker and the title now belongs to Apple, which grew its market share from 14.4% to 21% between Q4 of 2016 and 2017.

Bose announced plans to make new AR glasses on a platform that’s all about audio, not video. The company also announced a $50 million venture fund to support what it calls the first “audio augmented platform” adding that: “Unlike other augmented reality products and platforms, Bose AR doesn’t change what you see, but knows what you’re looking at — without an integrated lens or phone camera. And rather than superimposing visual objects on the real world, Bose AR adds an audible layer of information and experiences, making every day better, easier, more meaningful, and more productive.”

GENOMICS

Developers of gene-edited farm animals want the U.S. Food and Drug Administration out of the way. As Antonio Regalado writes in MIT Tech Review, companies like Recombinetics are using the technology “to create farm animals with useful properties. Gene editing, unlike its controversial cousin, transgenic modification, tweaks an organism’s DNA but doesn’t introduce any from other species.” The issue for these companies now is that the FDA regulates gene editing in animals like a new drug. This is unlike the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees gene-edited plants and allows them to be grown and sold without additional regulations.

FUNDING

ReWalk Robotics has raised $20 Million to fund its expansion into the Chinese market. The company produces wearable exoskeletons to assist people in walking again after they’ve suffered debilitating injuries or strokes. Chairman Jeff Dykan indicates that the company is also planning to begin clinical trials in the U.S. for a new system. Hong Kong-based Timwell Co. Ltd. was the investor and, subject to the approval of ReWalk’s shareholders, will own a 35% stake in the company.

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FEATURED EVENTS

XPOMET Convention 2018
March 21-23 in Leipzig, Germany
The Convention for Innovation and High-Tech in Medicine

Digital Health World Congress 2018
May 8-9 in London, UK
The leading technology digital healthcare conference in London, UK and Europe.

Mobile in Clinical Trials Europe
May 15-16 in London, UK

 

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.

Copyright © 2018 Paul Sonnier, Story of Digital Health

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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