Faces Of Digital Health

An update on the current landscape of healthcare blockchain projects, when can we expect practical implications, what the role of legislation will be, and how genomics research, AI and blockchain make a good combination. Intrigued? Listen to Ray Dogum - the host of Health Unchained - podcast focused on blockchain projects and implementation in healthcare. His background is in Health Sector Management and currently is a project manager at American Well, a telehealth company in Boston.   More on blockchain in healthcare: If you’re a regular listener of this show, you’ve heard quite a few episodes on blockchain in healthcare by now - The basics of what blockchain technology is and how it could be used in healthcare, misconceptions around blockchain, and it’s actual potential around interoperability, I recorded a panel at SXSW where various speakers talked about blockchain in pharma, personal health records and identity management with blockchain.   Here are the direct links to the episodes:   Episode 14 of Me

The key topic of today’s episode is pharmacy related robots, which will be presented by Lea Dias - a pharmacist by profession, who now works predominately as an advisor for international hospitals looking to implement robotic hardware and EHR software solutions to improve patient care. She comes from Australia, so we also touched upon the latest big digital health project in Australia - the digitization of medical records of all Australians.    

In 2014, Shafi Ahmed removed a tumor from the liver and bowel of a patient in what was the first operation streamed live online using Google Glass. The procedure to remove was watched live via computer or mobile phone by 13,000 surgical students, healthcare professionals and members of the public in more than 100 countries. Two years later Shafi performed an operation on a British cancer patient using virtual reality technology, again with a large global online audience. He is undoubtedly a driver of change in healthcare with his next big project of leading the First-Ever Fully Digital Hospital in Bolivia. You heard it right, Bolivia - the South American country with 12 million people, where only 6.3% of the GDP goes to healthcare. Can a country like this become the global digital health leader?

Shawna Butler in an entrepreNURSE. She had a wide range of experiences in emergency medicine, cardiac, critical care, international medical flight transport, and workplace wellness. She is part of the Exponential Medicine where the focus is on the opportunities presented by robotics, AI, VR, machine learning, supercomputing, genetic sequencing, blockchain, 3D printing, drones. 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.  Listen also to episode 16 with Rebecca Love, the co-founder of hirenurses.com.   Recap of the topic: https://medium.com/faces-of-digital-health/f016-why-arent-nurses-included-in-innovation-process-more-2a24ffc94e68

Nurses and midwives account for nearly 50% of the health workforce. While being an important group of healthcare stakeholders, they are often overlooked, especially when talking about innovation. However, they are very innovative and creative. According to Rebecca Love, an experienced Nurse Entrepreneur, nurses do around 27 workarounds per shift. This means 27 times per day they use technology or care differently from the innovator's expectation. But to be efficient and deliver the best care possible this is a must. Questions addressed: What are the difference between doctors and nurses regarding salary and liability?How can entrepreneurship be encouraged among nurses?Where can nurses be most entrepreneurial?If nurses get a seat at the table, what power shift could that bring?Hirenurses.com is a mother-daughter company. How does that collaboration look like?

Esther Wojcicki is an accomplished journalist and a teacher with a very successful family. Her husband Stanley is Stanford University professor of physics and together three daughters: Susan (CEO of YouTube), Janet, a Fulbright-winning anthropologist, epidemiologist and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and researcher, and Anne (co-founder of 23andMe). In the short discussion during the Webit festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, Esther talked about how we learn, changes in the way we interact due to technology, the role of parents in education and of course 23andme, a little bit of politics and how the US healthcare system affects society. Esther holds an honorary doctorate from Palo Alto University (2013) and from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) 2016. Among many many other things she is the founder of the Moonshots in Education Movement (MiE). Learn more: http://www.moonshotsedu.com         

  John Nosta has been holding a strong position as the number one influencer in the digital health space for quite a few years. His career started in a research lab at Harvard Medical School, until he redirected his creative energy into marketing. About six years ago John founder of NostaLab — a think tank helping life sciences companies navigate change by addressing their problems through unconventional thinking and leveraging creativity. Before that he worked for MedTech and Pharma companies to help them communicate the right idea to the right audience. Some questions addressed:  Are we losing control over the data?What’s the potential of voice recognition software? Can we avoid data gathering today? What are companies doing wrong when communicating their vision? Can innovation be born in large clinical institutions or do they mostly work as echo chambers?  

AI is the buzzword startups are very keen on using when describing their products. For decades, movies are full of ideas on what artificial intelligence could do in a positive and negative way. What is AI, deep learning or a simple algorithm? What is the dream and what current reality around AI? How does AI look in practice? In this episode, you will hear from Sally Daub - the CEO of Enlitic talk about the market potential of AI, the current state of the market and more. Enlitic is a San Francisco based startup using deep learning to distill actionable insights from billions of clinical cases and help doctors leverage the collective intelligence of the medical community. At the moment, the use of AI is highest in the field of medical imaging and diagnostics, drug discovery and therapy planning, but Accenture predicts that by 2026 150 billion US dollars could be saved annually due to applications to robot-assisted surgery, virtual nursing assistants, followed by administrative workflow assistance, fraud detect

In this episode, two Americans share their insight in the healthcare development of the land with 1,4 billion people. Bay McLaughlin, Forbes contributor on tech in China and the co-founder of Brinc.io, part incubator, part accelerator, part investment fund with headquarters located in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou and satellite offices in mainland China, also London, Berlin, Helsinki, Amsterdam & soon in the USA. Miranda Gottlieb, Master’s student from Beijing, pursuing a career in global health policy and health security in the Asia-Pacific region. 

According to dr. Walter Greenleaf, behavioral neuroscientist and a medical technology developer working at Stanford University, interactive virtual environments significantly reduce pain from as much as 44% during the most painful procedures (ex: burn wound treatment), diverts patient attention away from perceiving and feeling pain, decreases pain-related brain-activity, reduces need for anesthesia, opioid medication. With the decrease in price, VR is getting mainstream. The technology giants such as Facebook and Samsung are making huge investments, according to Statista, 12.4 million units will be shipped worldwide in 2018, more than 5 times as much in 4 years in 2022. Listen to a conversation with dr. Walter Greenleaf, Medical Director for AppliedVR at Stanford University. He is considered a leading authority in the medical VR field with over three decades of research and development experience in the field of digital medicine and medical virtual reality technology.

Virtual reality has a long history. Its applications precede pure fun, by today, many therapies for medical purposes have been designed. Virtual reality has many medical applications, which you can learn about from two experts featured in Facs of digital health podcast. In episode 10 listen to dr. Albert “Skip” Rizzo, the Director of Medical Virtual Reality at the Institute for Creative Technologies at University of Southern California, and episode 12 features dr. Walter Greenleaf, the Medical Director for AppliedVR at Stanford University. Topics: addressed: How does VR differ from exposure therapy, is it more effective? What are the dangers of VR use on perception? How do you treat ADHD or PTSD with VR?  Will FDA regulate VR treatments? What danger do consumers currently face? 

The two largest determinants of health are the zip code and credit scores. What does that have to do with precision medicine and genetics? Big data combined with AI hold a lot of hope on prevention and more effective disease treatments. The current reality though is that large a lot of gathered data is not actionable yet. How far is precision medicine then, today? How does precision medicine based medical care look like? Tune in episode 9 of Faces of digital health with dr. Subha Madhavan. Dr. Madhavan is the Director of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at the Georgetown University Medical Center in the States. She is active in several national and international research projects, and one of her latest projects is a partnership with the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to develop evidence bases for pharmacogenomics and vaccine safety. 

A sex hunting anthropologist walks into a mortgage finance institution and out into the world to lead health initiatives globally; this is the fascinating tale of Samson Williams’ health career journey. Samson Williams is an entrepreneur and fintech guru. He has been an epidemiologist for the State of Florida, an Anthrax and WMD expert for DC Dept of Health and currently splits his time between serving on the DC Dept of Health’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), and as the Irish Ambassador for Crowdfunding to the EU and partner at Axes and Eggs, a blockchain and cryptocurrency consultancy based in Washington, DC.   Topics addresses:  How does one go from medical anthropology to a cryptocurrency mining company? How can digital health solutions help in disaster situations?  Potential of blockchain in healthcare?

This is a recording of a panel discussion on blockchain in healthcare, which took place at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, during the Future for health conference at SXSW. You will hear about some interesting ongoing blockchain projects such as the CDC attempts to use blockchain in epidemiology or the Austin program using blockchain to track medical records of chronically ill homeless people. Panelists:  Michael Dillhyon, Founder of Healthbank Samson Williams, Partner at Axes & Eggs, Board Member at DC Department of Health Eugene Borukhovich, Global Head of Digital Health Incubation & Innovation at Bayer

“Most startups are in a hurry, most of healthcare not so much. How do we deal with that?” was one of the first questions with which Rasu Shrestha, CIO at UPMC addressed his audience during the Future for health at SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. With the keynote titled “Everybody wants to innovate, nobody wants to change,” Rasu Shrestha offered his reflection on the barriers to innovation implementation. The organizer of the conference was Future for health (FTR4H), a global organization trying to bridge the robust established Medtech world with young startups. To understand FTR4H a little bit better, a short talk with the co-founder of Future for health Tom Mitchell, president of Messe Dusseldorf North America is included in the podcast. Tom talked on stage at the Future for health conference at SXSW, right before Rasu’s keynote.

In this episode, you will hear how Time Warner, a global leader in media and entertainment with businesses in television networks and film and TV entertainment, is approaching employee health. Time Warner has more than 25.000 employees around the globe, meaning that the company faces many different country-specific regulations when it comes to the health of employees, what programmes they can offer them and what kind of analysis they can do with the data of the employees. his year's big question in healthcare is - can big corporations be the disruptors of the rigid and risk-averse industry as healthcare is? Amazon partnered with JPMorgan Chase and Warren Buffett, Apple is designing medical clinics, and Uber wants to disrupt ambulances. The healthcare industry is worth close to 9 trillion dollars globally by 2020, and some say tech giants most of all wish to get a piece of this pie. However, the critical potential for the US is a decrease in cost with new solutions and the different approach companies can have

According to WHO mental health disorders are generally characterized by some combination of abnormal thoughts, emotions, behaviour and relationships with others. Examples are schizophrenia, depression, intellectual disabilities and disorders due to drug abuse. Most of these disorders can be successfully treated. This episode explores the characteristics of mental health disorders and why it is so hard to treat them. Hear from three speakers: Dean Ornish, Clinical Professor in Medicine, President and Director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute at University of California Sans Francisco talks about the critical aspect of depression, which is the changes in perception that prevent a depressed person to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The Co-founder and CEO of Psyinnovations Ritvik Singh talks about the broadness of mental health challenges and to which extent digital solutions can help address them. Richard Lee, the CEO of a startup called Bravely, believes regular 5-minute power calls with p

Moka Lantum is an expert on the African healthcare market. We discussed healthcare IT and digital health adoption in Africa. He was nominated as 2016 Top 100 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy Magazine for his work as founder of the non-profit, 2020 MicroClinic Initiative, that recycles t-shirts into baby clothes and donates them to low-income mothers to promote safe delivery and quality post-natal care in rural Kenya. He obtained his Doctor of Medicine training at Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University of Yaoundé, Cameroon; a Diploma in Nutrition and International Child Health, from Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; a Doctorate in Pharmacology, from the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York. He is a graduate of the Masters in Health Care Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, among other things.

The legendary investor Esther Dyson is not a big fan of technology. She is a proponent of big ideas, demanding projects with a long-term positive influence on society. Founders of StartupHealth Unity Stoakes and Steven Krein are serial entrepreneurs, driving positive change with innovators working on technological and other innovations in healthcare and medicine. At its inception, the idea behind StartupHealth was simple and very, very, very optimistic: to improve health and well-being of every person in the world. If that seemed like a fantasy seven years ago, the organisation came a long way by now. StartupHealth connects 200 companies, so-called transformers, listed in 10 categories or as they call them - moonshots. In this episode, Esther Dyson explains why she invested in the company in its very early days. She shares her thoughts on how she sees problems society faces when it comes to health and wellbeing. Steven and Unity talk about the past, the future and the positive attitude one needs to keep tryin

Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD is The Medical Futurist and Director of The Medical Futurist Institute analyzing how science fiction technologies can become reality in medicine and healthcare. As a geek physician with a PhD in genomics, he is also an Amazon Top 100 author. He was featured by dozens of top publications, including CNN, the World Health Organization, National Geographic, Forbes, TIME magazine, BBC, and the New York Times.  He has more than 100 GB of data about his health and fitness and made different lifestyle changes based on the analysis of the data. Wondering how long he predicts he will live?  You can find, listen and subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or Podbean, or use the RSS feed.