Faces Of Digital Health

This is the first episode in the series of discussions about healthcare and digital health in the APAC Region. In this episode Farid Bidgoli, General Manager for Roche in Thailand and neighboring countries. Farid talked about the healthcare system situation in Thailand, the state of digital health technologies, what kind of solutions Roche is keeping an eye on and more.  The upcoming episodes feature: Ruby Wang, health and life science consultant, former Head of Health for the UK Government in China at the British Embassy in Beijing about the Chinese market.  We will be diving into Vietnam with Beth Ann Lopez, a Co-founder and CEO at Docosan, a healthcare marketplace that aims to make it effortless to access healthcare and help find a doctor who is available in Vietnam. Website: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com Newsletter: https://fodh.substack.com/

After an intense race in AI development lighted by the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, two important things happened in the last week of March 2023: Over 1000 tech workers, such as Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX, Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director at Mila, Turing Prize winner and professor at University of Montreal, Stuart Russell, Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and co-author of the standard textbook “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach",   signed a public letter that urges a pause on AI development before humanity as a society decides how humans can control the development. The first subscribers include:  As the letter states, “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”  A day after this letter was published, UNESCO published a press release that calls on all governments to immedia

Healthcare is facing challenges on all fronts. WHO estimates a projected shortfall of 10 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Countries at all levels of socioeconomic development face, to varying degrees, difficulties in the education, employment, deployment, retention, and performance of their workforce. Several other factors, such as the aging population and the rising demand for healthcare services, put healthcare systems under pressure to change and adapt. To a degree, with the help of technology. A big topic in many systems, especially in the US, is the move of retail providers such as Amazon and pharmacies, Walgreens, and CVS into primary care. Hospitals are looking at opportunities for virtual care and turning homes into hospital-like environments supported by virtual monitoring.  At this year’s NextMed Health Conference is San Diego, Rasu Shrestha - Chief Innovation & Commercialization Officer, Executive Vice President at Advocate Health - hospital system o

One of the biggest global challenges in healthcare at the moment is the workforce crisis. Workforce shortages are not related to the number of people that get trained for healthcare professionals but the working conditions that they need to operate under.  In today’s episode, we will look at a good practice related to nursing organizations in the community of the Netherlands. I spoke with Thijs de Blok, CEO of Buurtzorg International - an organization of 15.000 nurses that work in self-managing teams and provide holistic care to patients. I asked Thijs, more about the early beginnings of the organization, how it fits in the dutch healthcare system context, and what he observed in terms of care providers globally. Tune in to the episode about nurses in the US: Has The Risk of Becoming a Nurse Become Too Great in the US? https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/nurse-rebecca-love-nurse-alice www.facesofdigitalhealth.com Newsletter: https://fodh.substack.com/

After a series of discussions about healthcare data in the US, we’re now moving to insights and good practices in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has roughly 17 million people. As you will hear, its healthcare is highly digitalized with high digital literacy. You will hear a short panel discussion that was recorded at mHealth Israel in Tel Aviv.  Corne Mulders – CIO University Medical Center Utrecht  Simon Vermeer – CIO Erasmus University Medical Center (Erasmus MC Rotterdam)  Paul Hillman – CIO Maastricht University Medical Center Shared their views about digital health development in the Netherlands, how their institutions approach innovation, and where they see room for improvements regarding healthcare digitalization on the national level.  www.facesofdigitalhealth.com Newsletter: https://fodh.substack.com/

This is the fifth and last episode of the Healthcare Data in the US series. In the first one, Arif Nathoo - CEO and co-founder of Komodo Health, described how the company is planning to capture and de-identify every encounter patients have with the US healthcare system. The second episode featured Phil Lindemann, VP of Business Intelligence at Epic, and Epic’s Clinical Informaticist Dave Little, who talked about Epic Cosmos - a database of EHR data from 178 million patients. In the third episode, Samir Unni, Business Development Lead for Healthcare at Palantir Foundry, explained the principles of Palantir in healthcare, why they support an open-data approach, how knowledge from other industries is transferred to healthcare and more.  In the fourth episode, representatives of four companies working on automating care tasks, providing clinicians with clinical decision support, and creating synthetic data records, four industry experts shared their experience with building solutions on top of EHRs, challenges re

Electronic health records and digital data gathering have now been around long enough that the focus has shifted from gathering to using the data for research, AI development, and clinical decision support systems. Various companies are trying to build solutions to help clinicians navigate care, and workflows, and have the right information in front of them to make decisions fast without losing time searching through the whole patient’s record. This is the fourth episode in the series about healthcare data management in the US. In the first episode, we heard how Komodo health collects data about various encounters people have with healthcare. In the second episode, we learn about Epic Cosmos - a research environment consisting of clinical data from the electronic medical records of 178 million patients. In the third episode, we heard how Palantir Foundry helps healthcare enterprises, regulatory agencies, and governments optimize their workforce planning and crisis response through an open-data approach and ex

This is the third episode in a series of discussions about healthcare data challenges and data management practices in the US. One thing is clear to everybody: regardless of the efforts, patient data is still scattered around in different organizations. In the first episode, you can listen to a discussion with the CEO and co-founder of Komodo Health, Arif Nathoo. Komodo Health currently has some part of the healthcare data of 330 million people in the US. One of the leading providers of electronic healthcare records systems in the US is EPIC. EPIC holds around a third of the US EHR market share and has some part of the medical data of 250 million patients. In the second episode, Phil Lindemann, VP of Business Intelligence at Epic, and Epic’s Clinical Informaticist Dave Little, MD explained a bit more about EPic Cosmos - a database built to enable easier clinical research. Epic Cosmos currently combines 178 million de-identified patient records from over 6.5 billion encounters, representing patients in all 50

If you work in healthcare IT, you must have heard the name Epic. Epic is a renowned EHR provider, that covers around a third of the US healthcare market. In 2019, Epic launched Cosmos, a special program for data mining of patient records data gathered in Epic systems. Today, Epic Cosmos, which was built to enable easier clinical research for contributing Epic customers, contains over 178 million patient records from over 6.5 billion encounters, representing patients in all 50 states. In this episode’s discussion with Phil Lindemann, VP of Business Intelligence at Epic and Epic’s Clinical Informaticist Dave Little, MD you will hear more about the growth of data in Epic Cosmos, collaboration with external healthcare IT and app providers that can join Epic’s App Orchard ecosystem. Dave and Phil also talked about needed improvements for easier collaboration with healthcare IT vendors and innovators outside Epic, how they hope EHRs will evolve with novel technologies and AI, and more.  This discussion is part of a

The words healthcare data carry many associations: from frustrations around data interoperability, outrage about the value and monetization of healthcare data, anger due to poor access to medical records by patients, and we could go on.  In the next few episodes, you will hear a little bit more about healthcare data management in the US healthcare system. We’re starting with a discussion recorded at HLTH 2022, where Arif Nathoo - CEO and Co-founder of Komodo Health describes how the company plans to capture and de-identify every encounter patients have with the US healthcare system. Komodo Health is currently tracking individual encounters with the healthcare system for over 330 million patients. Companies such as Pfizer, AppliedVR, Turquoise Health, Janssen, and others, use Komnodo's de-identified patient-level data and insights to inform drug development, discovery, clinical trials, clinical research, and innovation.    Make sure to subscribe to the podcast to be notified about new episodes automatically!

This episode is the last on in the series of three discussions about natural language processing in healthcare. In the first episode, I discussed the state of symptom checkers with Jeff Cutler, CCO of Ada Health - the leading symptom-checking provider. In the second episode, CEO of Suki, Punit Singh Soni, explained where voice technology is today in helping doctors better manage their medical records and notes taking. And today’s discussion will give you a comment and critical perspective on using ChatGPT in healthcare and other large language models such as Google’s MedPalm.  OBJECTIVES OF THE DISCUSSION:  To clarify the state of natural language processing in healthcare - to which extent is this moving from research to practical use,  To create a clear, realistic picture of ChatGPT and MedPaLM implications Speakers: Alexandre Lebrun - CEO of Nabla - a french company that has created an AI-based medical assistant that makes healthcare professionals more efficient. For instance, it automates clinical doc

The promise of voice is great: doctors speak to their patients, while their words get correctly transcribed, interpreted and recorded in a structured way in a clinical system. No more long hours spent on typing clinical notes on the computer. While this may seem futuristic, it’s actually already in use in some places. At HLTH in November, I spoke with Punit Singh Sonu, CEO of Suki, which provides doctors with an AI-powered voice assistant for healthcare designed to save doctors time and energy. We discussed how Suki works, how it translates text to structured data, and how clinically risky is to rely on AI to interpret medication names which can very quickly sound alike correctly.  The biggest issue, says Punit Singh Sonu, is not specialty phrases, it’s regular English. “The problem typically happens not in medical terminology. It happens in regular English. I'll give you a very funny example. The doctor would just say “bilateral knee,” and it would actually understand it as “beyonce knowles”. Regular English

ChatGPT has been entertaining and amazing the world in the last month, and there’s no shortage of ideas and new inspiration about what AI could do for healthcare. In a short series of three episodes, we will touch upon this topic from three angles: will first take a look at the state of symptom checkers and their accuracy today, the development and state of voice tech and natural language processing for structuring data, and end with a comment on ChatGPT, chatbots and Google’s recently released paper on MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online.  Today you’ll hear from a discussion with Jeff Cutler - Chief Commercial Officer of Ada Health, whom I spoke with at HLTH.  Ada is the world's most popular symptom assessment app, with 10 million users and 25 million completed assessments. Every three seconds, someone turns

 We tend to be very good at overestimating what can happen in a year and underestimating what can happen in a decade. At the last mHealth Israel Conference in Tel Aviv,  Mark Coticchia, who is the Innovation, Technology Commercialization, and Venture Development Leader at Baptist Health Innovations, shared his prediction about healthcare systems and healthcare delivery in the US in 2033. Transcript: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/mark-coticchia-baptist-health Leave a rating or review: www.lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealth Monthly newsletter: https://fodh.substack.com/

This episode is the second about the evolution of mental health companies. In the previous episode, you could listen to Katie Di Perna Cook - SVP of Partnerships at Headspace Health, and today, we’re continuing the topic with Luke Hejl, CEO of TimelyMD, the leading virtual health and well-being solution for college students, CCO of Iris Telehealth, a leading provider of telepsychiatry services for health systems and community health centers across the U.S.. Luke and Michael talked about the state of mental health in the younger population and how the two companies look at digital innovation and digital therapeutics in the mental health space. 9 out of 10 students said they’re dealing with anxiety, said Luke Hejl, and as mentioned by Michael Maus, 1 out of 4 people that need mental health services actually look for them. So three out of four people needing them do not get help.   Iris Telehealth: https://iristelehealth.com/ TimelyMD: https://timely.md/ Subscribe to the newsletter: https://fodh.substack.com/

The pandemic has significantly increased the need for mental healthcare and destigmatized discussing well-being and mental health issues in everyday conversation. Unfortunately, the number of quality providers of mental health services is still much lower than the demand, and the number of people that are seeking help is rising.  At HLTH or Health conference, which took place in November in Las Vegas, I spoke with representatives of 3 mental health-focused companies based in the US. TimelyMD is the ninth-fastest growing health services company in the US, according to Inc., and focuses on the mental health of students,, Iris Telehealth is a leading provider of telepsychiatry services for health systems and community health centers across the U.S. and Headspace Health -the largest digital mental health provider in the world - it is reaching 100 million people in 190 countries across the world.  In this episode, we’ll dive into a discussion with Katie DiPerna Cook - SVP of Partnerships - Headspace Health. The co

If someone told you to get an eye exam, would you associate that with a virtual reality headset? It might be where ophthalmology diagnostics will end up in the near future. Compared to the existing diagnostics tools, a VR approach is much more portable and hence accessible. The Swiss company PeriVision is using AI and VR to enable more efficient workflows and deeper clinical insights to manage eye diseases better. I spoke with the co-founder and CEO of Perivision, Patrick Kessel. Prior to joining PeriVision, Patrick advised Medtech, biopharma, and insurance clients on business development, go-to-market strategy, digitization, and operations optimization at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). We discussed how VR and AI help in eye care, what the competition is in the field, and how did the company evolve. Perivison won EIT Health’s Wild Card program in 2021 and received 1.5 million euros for its further development. Patrick shared his reflection on the wild card program and which startups the program is most su

Last year, one of the key buzzwords in healthcare was virtual care; in 2020 it was probably telemedicine. In 2019 it was AI, in 2017 and 2018, it was blockchain in interoperability. There are many others of course, and many of these terms are still popular today. It seems, though, that the one term that got pushed most in the background, is blockchain. And that’s a good thing, says John Bass, Founder & CEO of Hashed Industries (dba Hashed Health), a healthcare-focused venture studio. John is an internationally recognized author and speaker on value-based care, blockchain, and decentralized healthcare technology. He is the co-author of the HIMSS-published book “Blockchain in Healthcare: Innovations that Empower Patients, Connect Professionals and Improve Care." This short discussion was recorded at HLTH 2022 conference in Las Vegas. John talks about: where is blockchain in 2022, what can we expect in the future, how it relate to web3, and what could NFT - nonfungible tokens do for healthcare. Transcript: www.

The European Health Data Space is supposed to be implemented in a bit more than two years, by 2025. Two goals are at the forefront: to create the infrastructure for a European health data pool for researchers and innovators, and secondly, to enable patients to pick up their medications outside their home country and give doctors across Europe access to their patient information, if in need of medical care while abroad in Europe. On 18 November, EIT Health Germany-Switzerland and EIT Health Spain organized a joint symposium titled Right to privacy vs. duty to protect lives: Health Data Management in Focus. Speakers discussed patients’ perspectives on Health Data use and the EHDS, balancing health data privacy and AI development, ongoing approaches for data solutions, and more. I managed to speak with Nick Schneider, Head of division 511 on new technologies and data use at the Germany Federal Ministry of Health to discuss:  Where is EHDS at the moment Will it be implemented by 2025 What are still the biggest

Nurses play a key role in patient care, but their contribution to patient outcomes is often undervalued and underappreciated. It took a pandemic to create a major shift in their job opportunities and power to negotiate. Many nurses left the profession entirely, others switched to better-paid travel or agency jobs. The pandemic is settling down so the question debated in today’s episode, is what is the position the nurses are in today? You will hear from: Rebecca Love, Thought Leader on Nurse Innovation & Entrepreneurship, experienced nurse executive and entrepreneur, and Chief Clinical Officer of IntelyCare, Alice Benjamin, nurse, author, and health advocate is affectionately known as America's favorite nurse. Rebecca and Alice talked about the position of nurses, healthcare technologies that are not designed to make the work of nurses easier, recent criminal cases against nurses in the US, and what needs to change so that being a nurse will be an attractive job opportunity. Let’s dive in, and if you wil