Johns Hopkins Tech Startup, ROSE, Selected for Brigham and Women’s Hospital Pilot COVID-19 Program & More News...

Rapid Response Open Call Winner to Pilot with Brigham and Women’s Hospital 

Rose, a technology startup that provides a HIPAA-compliant mental health monitoring platform, announced a pilot program with Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) Emergency Department  to support healthcare professionals and their mental health during  COVID-19. The pilot program was facilitated through Rose’s participation in our Rapid Response Open Call, which sought provider-facing, text based platforms to help healthcare professionals self-monitor symptoms of coronavirus, report burnout, and access helpful resources. Following a 7-day application period, where Brigham and Women’s Hospital evaluated more than 80 quality submissions, Rose was selected as a semi-finalist and demoed their technology to the BWH team. 

Are you a health care provider looking to enhance your response to COVID-19? Catalyst @ Health 2.0 is continuing to hold open calls that connect providers with urgent needs to digital health solutions. APPLY here for consideration. 

AI LA, in collaboration with Catalyst @ Health 2.0 (“Catalyst”) is hosting “Digital Health During a Pandemic,” a virtual event that highlights innovative health tech responding to COVID-19 using augmented intelligence. The event aims to  highlight how the pandemic has affected health tech companies and their roadmaps for the future, ultimately providing the audience with clarity into COVID response in the field. The event will take place on August 20th from 12-2PM PT and will consist of a panel discussion, exciting Q&A and project demos with CA-based startups like Anchor Health, Syllable.ai, and Quantgene, and will be moderated by Catalyst’s co-founder, Indu Subaiya. Get your tickets today!

Innovaccer, Inc., a CA-based healthcare technology company, has launched a perioperative optimization solution for health systems. The solution will help optimize surgeries and ramp up volumes by identifying high-risk patients for pre-surgical intervention while also reducing the length of stay, readmissions, and cost, ultimately allowing hospitals to track their return on investment in real-time on a customizable dashboard.

J.P. Morgan Highlights & More News

Digital Health Experts Needed for Transnational Forum

The IDIH Project (International Digital Health Cooperation for Preventive, Integrated, Independent and Inclusive Living) is setting up an expert-driven “Digital Health Transformation Forum” with five strategic partner countries: Canada, China, Japan, South Korea and the USA. At workshops held all over the world, experts will be placed into groups that will collaborate on a roadmap for sustainable, international cooperation in digital health. The Expert Groups will undertake collaborative actions in four focus areas: preventative care, integrated care, independent and connected living, and inclusive living for the rapidly growing aging population. 

Who can apply? The IDIH Project is looking for individuals whose expertise is in alignment with the aforementioned focus areas, have a proven track record in their field, and are able to contribute towards the objectives of the expert group. Please note the candidate must be from the EU, USA, Canada, China, Japan or South Korea to be considered. 

To apply, please send your CV with a short explanation on why you are interested in becoming an Expert Group member or Chair, to experts@idih-global.eu  

Act fast—the call for experts closes on January 31st, 2020! 

Key Themes at J.P. Morgan Health Conference

Last week, health care executives, innovators, and thought leaders came together for The 38th Annual J.P. Morgan Health Conference. Christina Farr of CNBC highlighted key themes she observed from the panel discussions and guests’ conversations, such as the need for narrowing the scope of digital health’s definition. The all-encompassing term that relates to the intersection of digital health and technology often creates confusion for patients and health care providers due to its breadth. Another key topic of discussion was the surge of big tech in the health care space. Google’s Project Nightingale served as the prime example of the conflict between data-sharing and privacy. Farr also noted a lack of racial, gender and patient advocate representation, whose presence add important voices often missing from the health tech conversation.

Fitbit Could Help Track the Flu

A study published by the Scripps Research Translational Institute suggests that resting heart rate and sleep duration data collected from Fitbit devices can inform models of population-level influenza trends. Typically, Centers for Disease Control influenza-like illness (ILI) data are reported one - three weeks late, and often revised. Wearable devices provide real-time estimates of ILI markers. The study obtained over 13 million resting heart rate and sleep duration measurements that denoted periods of illness, and combined the data points with three-week lagged CDC ILI incidence data. The real-time wearables estimates improved the correlational accuracy of their models by as much as 32.9%. The study’s results point to continuous monitoring technology’s capacity to inform and support efficient responses to potential outbreaks of large-scale diseases. 

Prehab Tool and AI Win Big at the 2019 RWJF Live Pitch

Six finalists competed in an exciting live pitch for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 2019 Innovation Challenges at the 2019 Health 2.0 Annual Conference. They demoed their technologies in front of an audience of health care professionals, investors, provider organizations, and members of the media. The Home and Community Based Care Challenge sought technologies that support the advancement of at-home or community based care. The Social Determinants of Health Innovation Challenge called for solutions that increase access to services related to social determinants of health.

During the 3-day Conference, Jessica DaMassa, Executive Producer & Host of @WTF_Health, spoke with the finalists about their experience competing in the RWJF Innovation Challenges, their personal highlights, and what’s next!

Home and Community Based Care Innovation Challenge Finalists

First Place:

Ooney’s home-based web-app for older adults, Prehab Pal, delivers individualized prehabilitation to accelerate postoperative functional recovery and return to independence after surgery.

Second Place:

Wizeview uses artificial intelligence to automate and organize information collected during home visits, supporting the management of medically complex populations at the lowest cost per encounter.

Third Place:

Heal doctor house calls, paired with Heal Hub remote patient monitoring and telemedicine, offer a complete connected care solution for patients with chronic conditions.

Social Determinants of Health Innovation Challenge Finalists

First Place:

Social Impact AI Lab is a consortium of nonprofit social services agencies and technology providers with artificial intelligence solutions to address social disconnection in child welfare.

Second Place:

Community Resource Network’s Social Determinants of Health Client Profile creates a whole-person picture across physical, behavioral, and social domains to expedite help for those most at risk, fill in the gaps in care, and optimize well-being.

Third Place:

Open City Labs matches patients with community services and government benefits that address SDoH seamlessly. The platform will integrate with HIEs to automate referral, eligibility screening & benefits enrollment.

Congratulations to the six winners and thank you to all of the participants involved in both Innovation Challenges. To learn more about these efforts, you can visit the Home and Community Based Care and Social Determinants of Health Challenge websites.

Empowering People with Impaired Speech through AI

The ability to communicate and be understood is a privilege that is often taken for granted. For those who suffer from neurological conditions such as ALS, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, and Parkinson’s disease, impaired speech limits how they can express needs and engage with those around them. However, with the advancement of voice-enabled tech and artificial intelligence, Google AI seeks to empower those with speech impairments by improving a computer’s ability to understand diverse speech patterns.

Project Euphonia, part of the AI for Social Good program, uses specialized software to turn recorded voice samples into a spectrogram, or a visual representation of the sound. Common transcribed spectrograms are used to "train" the system to better recognize less common types of speech patterns. Those with severe disability or nonverbal individuals also benefit from this project given that Google’s personalized AI algorithms are simultaneously working to detect facial movements and gestures. Euphonia can then take actions such as generating spoken commands to Google Home or sending text messages. The ultimate goal of this initiative is to support people with impaired speech and empower them to communicate freely and effectively. 

Oscar Health Partners with Cardiogram to Bring Health Detection Technology to Members

Health care insurers are increasingly using wearables to engage and monitor the health and wellness of their members. For example, Aetna’s Attain and UnitedHealthcare’s Motion programs incentivizes beneficiaries to perform tasks designed to improve their health. Oscar Health’s new partnership with smartwatch app maker Cardiogram takes a different approach by improving access to care for those at risk of developing chronic conditions. Oscar Health is able to more effectively manage the health of its members through early disease detection by leveraging Cardiogram’s clinically proven artificial intelligence technology.  

Oscar beneficiaires will be able to download and use Cardiogram Care on their smartwatch for free. After uploading the necessary insurance information, each user will be monitored for signs of diabetes and atrial fibrillation. If symptoms are detected, users will need to take further tests to confirm the diagnosis. If a previously undiagnosed condition is confirmed, the app will be able to refer the user to in-network physicians. As wearables slowly become more prevalent, having a clinical workflow leveraging smart devices can have dramatic implications on how we access care in the future.

IBM Watson Health and Leading Hospitals Invest $50M to Accelerate AI Development

While artificial intelligence is a buzzword within the healthcare industry, there is a lack of real-world solutions aimed at ameliorating major public health issues. To spur the advancement of AI technology for the healthcare industry, IBM Watson Health has announced a 10-year, $50M investment in research collaborations with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. 

A key area of focus will be studying how AI can utilize electronic health records and claims data to address public health issues such as precision medicine, health equity, and patient safety. Additional research will be conducted to explore the physician and patient user experience with AI technologies. The collaboration will combine IBM Watson’s expertise in artificial intelligence with the “best health informatics researchers in the world,” in hopes of accelerating the development of real-world AI-solutions “to improve the utility of the EHR and claims data to address major public health issues.”