Digital Health bits | May 22nd 2021
Note: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer
#DigitalHealth #Innovation #AI #DigitalTherapeutics #TeleHealth #TeleMedicine
Osler Technology launches 'Netflix-styled' healthcare education app
Osler Technology, an Australian developer of online healthcare portfolios and learning applications, has unveiled a new education platform for healthcare professionals.
High-quality educational materials in the healthcare field are hard to find and poorly funded, particularly in online learning, says Dr Todd Fraser, chief medical officer at Osler Technology.
"Many people are creating the same content over and over, but it is sub-scale and underfunded. We believe that providing excellent educational materials appeals, and as we continue to grow, we can attract the funding to provide these resources broadly," Fraser told MobiHealthNews.
Fraser also notes that online education is usually delivered with "little attention" to user experience. He went on to say that the app is designed "in a manner reminiscent of Netflix – immediately intuitive to navigate, customisable to your own needs (if you’re an emergency nurse, you see emergency nursing material), fast, sleek and visually appealing."
"This is what the consumer market expects – every app they interact with in their personal lives works this way, but none of them does in their professional lives," he added.
According to Fraser, the app provides fresh, comprehensive and verifiable learning materials that are presented in a standardised way. The materials are designed for varying stages of expertise, from basic to advanced. He also shared that "learners can take a clear record with them wherever they go, so that training is continuous, not reinvented each time they move."
Digital Health Literacy Considerations for RPM in Senior Care
As remote patient monitoring (RPM) gains a toehold in the healthcare industry, it will be essential for medical professionals to address the digital health literacy issues that could come with it, especially when using RPM for senior care.
After all, if there is one thing the pandemic underscored, it is the steep digital divide in healthcare. The influx of telehealth and remote patient monitoring use for chronic care management underscored who does and who does not have the ability to engage with digital technologies.
Recent data from Insights by Xtelligent Healthcare Media, for example, showed digital health literacy as one of the biggest barriers to patient engagement for senior populations. Thirty-seven percent of respondents strongly agreed that senior patients don’t fully understand telehealth, and 31 percent agreed.
Nineteen and 42 percent of respondents said the same about remote patient monitoring, respectively, the report showed.
But those concerns about digital health literacy aside, providers are still confident about the promise of remote patient monitoring, even in senior populations. One owner of a network of skilled nursing facilities and an assisted living facility explained during Insights’ qualitative follow-up that RPM is, in fact, quite feasible, so long as providers note three key points:
- Patients understand the technology
- Patients have adequate bandwidth
- Patients are not intimidated by the technology
How Australia's aged care sector can improve digital health adoption at home
The Global Centre for Modern Ageing, a non-profit research group based in Australia, has published a report that shares the concerns and thoughts of the country's older population in implementing and integrating health technologies in their homes.
Prepared in partnership with Google Chrome Enterprise, the report titled "Inspiring new models of care: Digital health in the home," details the challenges and opportunities for the country's healthcare industry.
It ultimately suggested that coordinated effort is needed to reskill the industry's workforce, validate and shed light upon the most suitable technology, and design models of care that will not compromise quality care provision.
Google AI tool can help patients identify skin conditions
Google has unveiled a tool that uses artificial intelligence to help spot skin, hair and nail conditions, based on images uploaded by patients.
A trial of the "dermatology assist tool", unveiled at the tech giant's annual developer conference, Google IO, should launch later this year, it said.
The app has been awarded a CE mark for use as a medical tool in Europe.
A cancer expert said AI advances could enable doctors to provide more tailored treatment to patients.
The AI can recognise 288 skin conditions but is not designed to be a substitute for medical diagnosis and treatment, the firm said.
It has taken three years to develop, and has been trained on a dataset of 65,000 images of diagnosed conditions, as well as millions of images showing marks people were concerned about, and thousands of pictures of healthy skin, in all shades and tones.
As well as using images, the app also requires patients to answer a series of questions online.
It is based on previous tools developed by Google for learning to spot the symptoms of certain cancers and tuberculosis.
Currently none of these tools is approved as an alternative to human diagnosis.
Google says there are some 10 billion searches for skin, hair and nail issues on its search engine every year.
AI-enabled EKGs find difference between numerical age and biological age significantly affects health, longevity
You might be older ― or younger ― than you think. A new study found that differences between a person's age in years and his or her biological age, as predicted by an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled EKG, can provide measurable insights into health and longevity.
The AI model accurately predicted the age of most subjects, with a mean age gap of 0.88 years between EKG age and actual age. However, a number of subjects had a gap that was much larger, either seemingly much older or much younger by EKG age.
The likelihood to die during follow-up was much higher among those seemingly older by EKG age, compared to those whose EKG age was the same as their chronologic or actual age. The association was even stronger when predicting death caused by heart disease. Conversely, those who had a lesser age gap ― considered younger by EKG ― had decreased risk.
"Our results validate and expand on our prior observations that EKG age using AI may detect accelerated aging by proving that those with older-than-expected age by EKG die sooner, particularly from heart disease. We know that mortality rate is one of the best ways to measure biological age, and our model proved that," says Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, M.D., chair of the Division of Preventive Cardiology at Mayo Clinic. Dr. Lopez-Jimenez is senior author of the study.
Mental health chatbots might do better when they don’t try to act human
Digital mental health platforms have seen something of a renaissance during the Covid-19 pandemic, as in-person appointments have been relegated to the digital sphere. For those who cannot access therapy from a human clinician, mental health chatbot platforms are an increasingly popular digital alternative.
Critics of these platforms have repeatedly questioned their efficacy, due to the lack of face-to-face connection between patient and clinician. However, a study examining the effectiveness of artificially intelligent (AI) chatbot mental health platform Woebot has suggested that users actually form a similar bond with the chatbot to that which they would form with a real-life therapist.
The researchers – most of whom, it should be noted, are employees of the app’s developer Woebot Health – have theorised that this is due to the fact that Woebot acknowledges it’s not a human, instead of trying to seem like a real person.
They wrote: “Interacting with humanoid AI identities can result in individuals falling prey to the ‘uncanny valley,’ which is the sense of unease and ‘creepiness’ that is created when something that is artificial tries to appear humanlike.
“Contrary to Turing’s Imitation Game, wherein an AI must successfully pretend to be human in order to pass the test, Woebot was designed to adopt the opposite strategy – transparently presenting itself as an archetypal robot with robotic ‘friends’ and habits.”
AI-powered chatbot Wysa brings in $5.5M to focus on employee mental health
Investments in digital mental health startups are booming driven by demand for behavioral health services due to pandemic-induced isolation, anxiety and burnout.
Wysa, an artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot, plans to put $5.5 million in Series A funding to work to focus on employee mental health.
The round was led by W Health Ventures, a Boston-based digital health investor with participation from Google Assistant Investments, which focuses on the future of digital assistants, and existing investors pi Ventures and Kae Capital. The startup will also use the capital to scale up its sales team and therapist network.
Launched in 2016, the Boston-based startup offers a conversational mental health platform that's available both to individuals and through employer benefits programs. Wysa helps in dealing with stress, depression, and anxiety with the help of an "emotionally intelligent" bot, which uses evidence-based cognitive-behavioral techniques (CBT), meditation, breathing and mindfulness exercises, as well as micro-actions to help users build mental resilience skills, according to the company.
New app revolutionizes health system in Togo
In Togo, access to health care remains precarious. In addition to most health care centers being remote, most patients have to obtain new health records for each new consultation.
These situations do not allow health professionals to have continuous follow-up and insight into the health history of patients.
In order to remedy these shortcomings, in 2015, Kofivi Agbetiafa developed an application known as 'Dokita Eyes', that allows health professionals to keep an eye on their patients at all times, wherever they are.
Patients are required to fill in their personal details online using any phone and later doctors will key in all health-related complications of the patients. Thi later acts as a reference point to many doctors.
"The application itself is like a health book. It is simply a health book that we have digitized. A physical health book that everyone knows today. The book has been digitized and we have done it in such a way that there are many related services linked to this same solution. For example, with this application, you can order medicines, which is not possible with physical booklets," Koffivi Agbetiafa, the promoter Dokita Eyes told Africanews.
The application that does not necessarily require the patient to have a smartphone, Dokita Eyes is a real innovative solution, especially for rural populations and disadvantaged groups.
The patient's digital health record can be created via the phone of a relative or health worker. Then, using a QR code like this one, the patient can have access to his health booklet containing all the information of his previous consultations to which his doctor is automatically entitled to thanks to the alerts.
This has revolutionized the health system in Togo and more than 80,000 people have subscribed to the application in +the entire country.
Note: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer