Author: Matthew Arnold, Principal Analyst
- Virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, paired with voice-activated Internet of Things platforms like Amazon’s Echo, could be game-changers for management of chronic diseases, and developers are already working on applications that could boost adherence and help patients navigate complex treatment regimes.
- Google’s not napping on the AI front – they’re positioning Google Assistant (paired with Google Home) as a “Star Trek” computer-like tool that would follow you from device to device, dishing out good advice backed by predictive analytics and taking care of tasks like booking tickets or hailing a cab based on voice commands. With 3 million Echo users, Google Home has some ground to make up.
- Five big AI players – IBM, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft – are banding together to form a kind of quasi-trade group-slash-PR effort dubbed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. Sounds like it will be tasked with reassuring consumers and lawmakers alike that AI and cognitive computing are totally safe and not at all creepy.
- Speaking of Watson, IBM demoed its in-development voice-activated cognitive advertising offering at an advertising conference last week, thereby previewing “a new era in digital advertising, where personalized interactions become the norm.”
- Microsoft is working on its own AI offering, including “using health insights to help the Cortana assistant notice that a user tends to binge on junk food when traveling and might miss a gym appointment while on the road.” An exec says Natural Language Processing-driven apps will give way to bots using AI and search, and the company is putting around 500 computer scientists and engineers toward accelerating AI development. I would seem Google concurs with this view, and Tweet-happy tech guru Marc Andreesen says AI is the Next Big Thing.
- Another Microsoft exec says it’s time for companies to start thinking about optimizing their digital assets for NLP – already, one in four Bing mobile searches (and 5% of Bing searches overall) are conducted by voice.
- Meanwhile, Apple is working “to turn HealthKit into a tool that improves diagnoses” by addressing interoperability and quickly analyzing mountains of medical data to provide personalized health advice and diagnostic guidance.
- Medtronic got FDA clearance for its “artificial pancreas,” a closed-loop BG monitoring and insulin delivery system, and launched a beta test of its Sugar.IQ with Watson app, a “first of its kind cognitive app that helps detect important patterns and trends for people with diabetes.” Medtronic and IBM are piloting the app with 100 users of Medtronic’s MiniMed Connect mobile accessory.
- Verily has reportedly developed a “wearable microscope” that tracks fluorescent biomarkers under the skin – a device with applications for monitoring of cancer and drug delivery.
- They’ve also filed a patent for an implantable chip that would analyze fluids in the skin – possibly part of their new JV with Sanofi.
- And they’re working on a health tracker watch which includes ECG and heart rate sensors and might measure stress, in addition to the standard accelerometer and gyroscope.
- Elsewhere on the smartwatch front, Aetna is giving employees participating in its wellness reimbursement program Apple Watches that will dispense medication reminders and health advice. And Dr. Oz is investing in a heart-monitoring smartwatch from an ex-Practice Fusion chief.
- Back in September, AthenaHealth’s Jonathan Bush penned a remarkable opinion piece arguing that EHRs are an impediment to patient care because they were designed to “satisfy government regulations rather than the needs of providers and patients.” A physician riffs off of Bush’s rant to spotlight a short-term gap-stop: medical scribes. And The Washington Post checks in on a practice in Palo Alto that’s using medical scribes in India to take dictation virtually, based on input from the physician’s Google Glass. “Roughly 500 doctors in 27 states” are using Google Glass to broadcast consults to scribes abroad, the paper writes, and the service costs doctors anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000 a month.
- To facilitate telemedicine, a crop of home diagnostic devices – “part Start Trek Tricorder, part Harry Potter Extendable Ear” – has hit the market in recent months, allowing doctors to look in a patient’s ear canal or listen to their lungs remotely.
- Following in the footsteps of Sanofi and Pfizer, FDA and Astellas are among the healthcare players taking a page from tech and using innovation challenges to goose digital innovation.
- The Wall Street Journal looks at increasing use of wellness coaches by health systems and employers to prompt behavior change around lifestyle factors like diet and exercise. You could see some high-end patient support programs incorporating coaching as a value-add.
- They also have a fascinating interview with HHS CTO and crazy smart person Susannah Fox about “creating a culture of innovation in healthcare,” which is really all about patient centricity and letting patients lead. A taste: “Creating space for innovation often means welcoming people way down deep in a hierarchy who may not have power but know what problems need to be solved. In health care, that describes patients and caregivers. At HHS, those are the front-line employees.”
- Having gotten their foot in the door with treatment of acute minor ailments like burns, wounds and fevers, retail pharmacy clinics staffed by NPs are now looking to broaden their menu of services into primary care and disease management.
- The Affordable Care Act’s individual insurance marketplaces are in trouble. How they’re patched up – or not – depends bigly on which way the political winds blow Nov. 8. Hillary Clinton has rebooted the “public option” beloved by lefties, while Donald Trump has promised to tear them down and start anew. Adding insult to injury, Bill Clinton took a seeming swipe at the ACA while on the stump for his wife, calling the program – or the broader American healthcare system, depending on which spin doctor you talk to – “the craziest thing in the world.”
- What’s the value of a year of human life in America? The FDA and CMS have priced it out to about $300,000 – roughly the price of Sarepta’s controversial new Duchenne’s drug.
- A Kaiser Family Foundation survey finds a sharp drop in the percentage of respondents who had seen or heard Rx drug ads – to 70%, versus last year’s 82% -- perhaps reflecting changing media consumption habits, particularly among younger people. Less surprisingly in this year of Turing and EpiPen, industry reputation continues to trend down and ire about drug prices is on the rise.
- Predictive analytics demands vast amounts of data, and hospitals and providers are increasingly going beyond medical data to include behavioral, consumer and financial clues to improve their forecasting abilities.
- Meanwhile, an alarming study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found surprisingly low uptake of leukemia drugs among Medicare patients in the first six months after diagnosis, and researchers think high upfront costs are to blame.
- Sharecare is building a healthcare VR mini-empire – they just made their 11th acquisition. They’re focused on “building a comprehensive patient engagement engine,” and they want to be the only health app on your phone.
- Breast cancer patients are socializing research with mail-in spit kits for gene testing and check-ins with researchers on social media.
- Here’s a fascinating deep dive (and companion browser extension!) on all the data that Facebook uses to profile you for advertisers.
- Meanwhile, Facebook and other big players in the social space would like you to stop calling them social media companies – in part, because they don’t think it reflects their massive gravitational pull on the media landscape and they want to jolt advertisers out of checkbox thinking around “social.” Facebook may have a point, there. Consider their largely-below-the-radar but inarguably yuuge impact on politics and the ecosystem of opportunistic banners, part advocacy groups, part news aggregators-and-publishers, that have cropped up to serve partisans red meat on Facebook.
- In Facebook marketing news, a Novartis/American Heart Association disease awareness campaign for heart failure featured a Facebook chat with celebrity spoke Queen Latifah, and Cigna’s recent TV doctor ad campaign is generating tons of engagement on the insurer’s Facebook page.
- Heard of the burgeoning market for NASH treatments? You will soon. It stands for Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis, a metabolic disorder resulting from obesity which afflicts 10 to 15 million Americans, and there are more than 20 treatments in Phase II development.
