Faces Of Digital Health

 South Africa is a restless country with Race and ethnicity still causing a lot of tension in the society. On the healthcare side, there are only 0.9 doctors per 1000 people in the country. Out of 59 million people, 9 million people access healthcare through private providers; the rest are in the public system. Soon, however, the system might change with the introduction of National Health Insurance, as you will hear from Sheraan Amod - CEO and founder of South Africa’s largest and fastest growing online healthcare booking platform. Over 100,000 patients and 1,500 providers connect with each other every month via RecoMed.  In this discussion, Sheraan talks about his transition into healthcare, shares his views on the development of healthcare in the country and plans for RecoMed, which allows patients to leave positive recommendations about providers on the platform. Negative reviews are sent to providers privately.    Recap: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f056-f060-digital-health-in-africa-series-

In 2016, the UK based company Babylon Health, radically transforming access to primary care in the NHS in the UK, opened a subsidiary in Rwanda. The Rwandan version ob Babylon is called Babyl, and has by today attracted over 2 out of 12 million people in Rwanda. Out of 2 million people, 700.000 consulted Babyls healthcare workers, says Patrick Singa Muhoza, Medical Director at Babylon health Rwanda. Rwanda has 12 million people and a severely understaffed healthcare system with 0.1 doctors per 1000 people. According to some locals, the problem is not only a lack of doctors but also poor knowledge, which can cause extreme differences in second opinions, among other things.   Recap: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f056-f060-digital-health-in-africa-series-tanzania-nigeria-south-africa-rwanda

As of 2016, Nigeria was Africa’s largest economy and most populous nation. By 2050, Nigeria is expected to be one of the ten largest economies in the world. Healthcare wise, the country is in dire need of reform and reinforcement in medical forces. According to the World bank, there are 0.4 doctors per 1000 people and 1.5 nurses and midwives per 1000 people. Ocoche Ubenyi is one of the country’s doctors eager to improve the situation in healthcare. He is the founder of Nimedix Ecosysyem - a blockchain project aiming to improve healthcare in Nigeria through technology and online solutions, enabling patients to own their healthcare data and share it to whom they wish in the healthcare sector. Written recap: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f056-f060-digital-health-in-africa-series-tanzania-nigeria-south-africa-rwanda

Africa has 54 countries, that differ a lot in terms of their quality of care, political situation, and innovation. This short series explores healthcare in 4 African countries: - the most populous African country Nigeria with 200 million people, presented by a medical doctor and entrepreneur Ocoche Ubenyi, CEO of Nimedix Ecosystem,- South Africa with 59 million people is presented by a serial entrepreneur Sheraan Amod, currently the CEO RecoMed - South Africa’s largest doctor’s appointment booking platform. - Rwanda - a country with 12,6 million people and less than 700 doctors is presented by Patrick Singa Muhosa, Chief Medical Officer of Babyl - the Rwandan version of the UK company Babylon, offering online or phone consultations with doctors. This first part explores Tanzania, with 58 million people. Mariatheresa Samson Kadushi is an ICT specialist and an entrepreneur, with rich experience running a tech company in Africa, while participating in country-level initiatives reforming communities; and also ass

If you go to digital health conferences, you might have noticed people wearing pink socks. Or a guy with a long beard and a kilt caught your eye. That was Nick Adkins - the Co-Founder of Pinksocks Life, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting authentic human connection around the world. Pinksocks was founded five years after Nick attended Burning man in 2010. For those who don’t know it - Burning man is a special community, which gathers once a year in the Black Rock desert in Nevada. Where there is nothing most of time in the year, 70.000 people come each August to enjoy life according to ten principles - radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, participation, immediacy, and leave no trace. Many people that have been at Burning man say, it transformed them. They consequently take some of the lessons with them to the real-default world, Nick being one of them. Nick talks about the background behind the kilt, imp

Less than 600 people traveled to space by today. What do we know about space health so far, and why does it matter for the broader population? A discussion with Ilaria Cinelli - a biomedical engineer with a structured PhD in neural engineering. While she’s not an astronaut, she is very passionate about space and has completed the Space Studies Program of the International Space University at TU Delft (The Netherlands). She is an Associate Fellow of the Aerospace Medical Association, President-Elect of the Aerospace Human Factors Association, and Member-at-Large of the Life Sciences and Biomedical Engineering Branch.

What are the basics of sleep hygiene, the importance of sleep and harm lack of sleep causes to our health? Richard Jacobs is the host of Future Tech Podcast and Future Tech Health Podcast. By now, he has interviewed 1800+ companies in artificial intelligence, stem cells, 3D printing, gene editing, bitcoin, blockchain, the microbiome, quantum computing, virtual reality and space exploration and more. He conducted over a hundred interviews about sleep with various sleep experts, which he did due to his personal problems with sleep. He later turned his knowledge in The Good Night’s Sleep Project, making custom-tailored-pillows based on an individual’s 14 personal characteristics.  The Good Night Sleep Project: https://www.goodnightssleepproject.com/ The Future Tech Health Podcast: https://www.futuretechhealth.com/

The sixth and final episode of a short series about AI in healthcare features Bart de Witte and a discussion about data privacy, the future of AI models in healthcare and the issue of a potentially dystopian future if we decide to let monetization of healthcare data get out of control. Bart is a digital health tech expert who worked as an executive director for the world largest technology vendors such as IBM and SAP. He has been intimately involved as a mentor in the formation and growth of a dozen digital health startups, and lectures at different universities in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria. Lately, he has been on a mission to harness the power of artificial intelligence to help to solve current and future inequalities in healthcare. Other episodes in the series: 1- The potential benefits for the patients in the first episode:https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f047-ai-in-healthcare-giving-patients-their-lives-back 2- AI development in radiology with Chief Medical Information Officer at

AI models in the field of stroke with Vince Madai and Michelle Livne from Charite hospital in Berlin, who work on predictive models for decision support systems for the treatment of strokes. Vince is a senior medical AI researcher at Charité with an M.D., a Ph.D. in Medical Neuroscience and an M.A. in Medical Ethics, and Michelle is a PhD machine learning engineer with extensive experience in applying predictive algorithms in healthcare. After obtaining a B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering in 2012 at the Technion Technological Institute of Israel, Haifa she concluded her Master degree in Neuroscience at Charité University Medicine in 2014. Apart from the current state of stroke treatment research and development, we talked about the state of digital health in Germany compared to Israel and ethical issues surrounding AI, such as data bias and data privacy. In healthcare challenges in data acquisition are reducing the opportunity to save lives and are opening many ethical dilemmas.    Some questions addressed: Sig

Voice applications in healthcare are used in telemedicine, for remote patient monitoring, clinical trials, and more. Bill Rogers, CEO of Orbita - a leading provider of conversational AI for healthcare - explains the current state of voice assistants in healthcare. Orbita helps healthcare organizations tap the power of voice assistants, chatbots, and other conversational AI technologies to engage patients, improve care, and reduce costs.

In 2016 FDA approved the so-called artificial pancreas - Medtronic’s MiniMed 670G system (Medtronic) a hybrid closed-looped system for glucose measurement and insulin delivery. A lot of companies are developing AI supported decision support systems for doctors and patients. This episode dives in the complexity of diabetes, how it is treated, what role does glucose have on health and how is technology improving the lives of patients with diabetes. Speaker: prof. Dr. Tadej Battelino, the head of Department of Pediatric endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at the UMC - University Children’s Hospital Ljubljana, Slovenia. Prof. Battelino is among other things co-organizer of Advanced Technologies and Treatment of Diabetes Conference - that provides a world-class platform for clinicians and scientists to present, discuss and exchange insights on the most rapidly evolving area of diabetes technology and treatments. He is also Chiel Clinical at Dreamed Diabetes - Israeli based developer of personalized diabetes man

The idea that AI will replace radiologists comes from the fact that today’s AI models models are very good at pattern recognition. But in reality, the “rich data” coming from radiologists is in the radiology reports, which are to a large extent unstructured. As elsewhere, the 80:20 rule applies here, says Woojin Kim. So the interesting thing are the NLP models mining radiology reports, he said in this interview. So what do radiologists actually do, are they going to start talking to the patients more, why they will not be obsolete anytime soon and more. Woojin Kim is the Chief Medical Information Officer at Nuance, former Chief of Radiography Modality, Director of Center for Translational Imaging Informatics, Associate Director of Imaging Informatics, and Assistant Professor of Radiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Short series about AI in healthcare: 1 - the potential impact of AI on patients When reading about how digital health and AI are improving disease management, waiting times in decision making healthcare, we don't only read about cost savings. These novelties show how patients are becoming more and more equal to healthy people and how diseases are affecting the quality of lives less and less due to less time spent in the healthcare systems, faster diagnosis, faster treatment and recovery. Of course, this is not going to happen tomorrow, but when has any progress ever happened fast, especially in healthcare? Yes, AI applications are still in the early stages of this, algorithms and studies currently based on retrospective studies. But the trend is what it's crucial - the hype is annoying, but it attracts talent. And more people means more knowledge and faster advancements. Other upcoming episodes in the series: 2- the current state of AI in radiology as explained by Woojin Kim3- the complexity of diabetes and d

No matter which country you go, the predictions about the healthcare workforce estimate that we will encounter significant shortages of doctors in the future. It’s less often heard that the prediction for shortages of nurses is much higher compared to doctors. So today, the spotlight is on them. Shawna is an entrepreNURSE with a wide range of experiences in emergency medicine, cardiac, critical care, international medical flight transport, and workplace wellness. Shawna is an important member of the Exponential Medicine Team. With her curiosity and drive towards a better health she has shaped and launched various initiatives: the EntrepreNURSE-in-Residence role in the Netherlands, an enterprise-wide digital radiology solution, an international emergency medicine training rotation between a US medical school and a New Zealand hospital system, and the Cancer XPRIZE focused on early detection. She explains what are challenges nurses are faced with in terms of working conditions and paving the way to acknowledge

South Korea is famous for many things - worldwide, the Republic of Korea has by far the highest robot density in the manufacturing industry, the third-largest market for virtual currency, behind the United States and Japan. South Korea is called the plastic surgery capital, because of the cultural beauty obsession. According to a recent Gallup poll, one in three South Korean women has undergone cosmetic surgery between the ages of 19 and 29. South Korea’s government is even trying to limit the stars’ presence. South Korea also managed to pull off what many other countries crave for: a substantial healthcare reform in early 2000s. Health care is financed through National Health Insurance covering the entire population. To establish big data in the medical field, the nation is currently gathering the medical records of about 50 million people from 39 hospitals nationwide by 2020. Alongside all the technological progress, telemedicine is illegal in South Korea. You will hear why from today’s speaker Ogan Gurel,

Singapore, also known as Asia for beginners, is a 5.6 million people country, offering an encouraging environment to tech companies and expats. The government in Singapore is promoting IT adoption and innovation in healthcare. National Electronic Health Record system was rolled out in 2011. Combine that with countrywide connectivity, mobile-first population, and a lot of openness for collaboration with the private sector, and you get a healthtech epicenter in Asia. Excluding China and India, Singapore took the lead by deal volume share in Asia in 2018 with 30%, followed by Japan with 27% and South Korea with 13%, according to Galen Growth. Tony Estrella is a startup founder, investor, corporate innovation leader, and strategic advisor, with work experiences in the US, Europe and Asia. He is partnering with Asia-focused companies who are developing solutions to change the face of cancer and human longevity with core IP stemming from AI, Genomics, Blockchain, and smart devices. He recently published a fiction n

If anyone, India is in dire need to increase access to quality care. According to WHO, the density of doctors of all types (allopathic, ayurvedic, unani and homeopathic) in 2001 was 8 doctors per 10,000 people, and the density of nurses was 6 nurses per 10.000 people. Project ECHO® is one of the players with an important role in bringing patients quality care with the help of a revolutionary medical education project. The ambition of Project ECHO is to touch the lives of 1 billion people by 2025. The project works by connecting doctors on the local level, allowing them to share and discuss their clinical cases through the lens of the latest clinical guidelines. In this podcast episode, the executive director of Project ECHO India — Sunil Anand and Kartik Dhar, Leading the ECHO Digital technical solutions development and India based product teams, talk about  the current state of healthcare in India,  government’s plans for “Modicare” - insurance coverage  of ₹500,000 (7200$) per year per family, for 500 milli

China’s population is larger than the population of the US and Europe combined. The country is becoming the leader in AI development. The enabling factor for China’s rapid advancement in AI is that Chinese Tech giants and government agencies are investing heavily the most important fuel for AI development - data infrastructures. In healthcare, for example, the company Yitu has a team of about 400 doctors, most of whom work part-time for about 10 hours a week to help label data. One-fifth of the healthcare team’s full-time employees have a medical background.  Asian countries were lagging behind in digitization in the past, which enabled them to leapfrog development with mobile phones. The consumers here use Tencent’s WeChat for shopping, paying bills and more. Understandably, Tencent’s new strides into healthcare are highly anticipated. According to Technode, Tencent is testing real-time clinic services in its WeChat wallet, and as reported by mobihealthnews, Tencent Trusted Doctor is among a number of techno

Asia is the second-largest digital health ecosystem in the world. 2018 ended with a record-breaking 6.8 billion US dollars invested. According to IBC Asia, the digital health market is expected to reach $379 billion by 2024. Asian countries are leapfrogging the west in tech adoption. Many countries are turning into cashless societies where all transactions are done through mobile phones. At the same time, the culture in Asia is very different compared to the West. For a light start, this first episode will give you a broad overview of the region, with Julien de Salaberry, CEO and Founder of Galen Growth Asia. But before that, a few interesting thoughts about China, India, Singapore, and South Korea, from speakers in the upcoming episodes. The latest Gale Growth report about H1 of 2019 in Asia: https://bit.ly/2ZbgeKf

This episode is the first part of a two-part series about healthcare in Slovenia. Given that drug prices are a consistently controversial topic in the US healthcare system, the first part of the series explains European regulation. Why are drug prices in Europe more affordable? How does drug pricing and medication management work in Europe and Slovenia? Why is it hard to imagine that an opioid crisis or widespread use of ADHD drugs would happen in this part of Europe? The speaker explaining the topics is the Head of the medication management department at the Healthcare Insurance Institute of Slovenia Jurij Fürst.