Do you email your doctor when you have a tickle in your throat? Wear a fitness tracker or use an app to monitor your sugar levels, exercise or nutrition? If so, congratulations! You are a part of the rapid growth of digital medicine.
Since you’re on the leading edge of this trend to enhance the efficiency of healthcare delivery, you might enjoy learning more about how the medical industry is transforming healthcare in this collection of podcast episodes and video. These are my top picks and just the tip of the proverbial iceberg in how modern medicine is taking today’s technology and applying it to best practices for remote patient monitoring, medical diagnosis, rural healthcare and more.
Enjoy! And let me know if you find any others worth the listen!
1. Inside Angle: 3M Health Information Systems - Telemedicine: Enhancing Access to Improve Outcomes
Access to healthcare can be a matter of life or death. For some patients, this may mean taking a day off work and driving for hours because services are not available in their hometown.
Inside Angle host Dr. Gordon Moore interviews Barb Johnston, co-founder and CEO of HealthLinkNow, about the implementation of telemedicine programs. They discuss how technology impacts telemedicine adoption and related regulations and benefits clinicians and patients in the telepsychiatry and mental health industry.
2. NPR’s The Salt: What’s On Your Plate – This Chef Lost 50 Pounds and Reversed Prediabetes With A Digital Program
This short audio clip and article dives into lifestyle and wellness apps designed to motivate users to eat healthier, exercise more and – in some cases – save them from a preventable disease, like diabetes.
Wellness apps like Omada Health rely on smartphones, e-coaching, electronic nudging and other methods to encourage users to make and, more importantly, stick to changes that can improve their health. And it’s catching on as other organizations, such as The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recognize the difference lifestyle-change programs designed to prevent diabetes are making.
3. Red Hot Healthcare: Episode 57 - Bluer Skies for Telemedicine
Last year alone, venture capitalists poured $7 billion into telemedicine. As an emerging concept, telemedicine has a long road ahead until it’s fully integrated and adopted into modern medical practices. Nathaniel Lacktman, partner and health care lawyer with Foley & Lardner LLP, discusses legal issues and hurdles surrounding telemedicine today with Red Hot Healthcare host Dr. Steve Ambrose.
Lacktman pointed to healthcare providers such as Mercy Virtual Care Center, Mayo Clinic and MDLive that are likely to lead the telemedicine race. This podcast episode is a great listen for entrepreneurs and medical professionals who are interested in learning about compliance and business considerations for the implementation of telemedicine.
4. Digital Health Today: Episode 56 – Eren Bali on Building the World’s Largest Connected Care Network
Eren Bali, CEO and co-founder of Carbon Health, is out to change our fragmented traditional healthcare system with his aim to build the world’s largest connected care network.
For Bali, it all started with his sister’s experience consolidating his mother’s health records – scattered over 20 different systems. And from that challenge, his idea to create a universal network that aggregates patient medical records was born.
Bali and Digital Health Today host Dan Kendall discuss Bali’s launch of Carbon Health, the new medical records system’s first implementation in a San Francisco primary care clinic, and how providers and patients can get on board with this model.
5. Digital Health Today: Episode 58 – Brennan Spiegel Gets Real About Virtual Reality
This episode of Digital Health Today centers on how Virtual Reality (VR) is being used to enhance patient care. Host Dan Kendall speaks with Dr. Brennan Spiegel, Director of Health Services Research at Cedars-Sinai Health System and Professor of Medicine and Public Health at UCLA, about how immersive technology like VR and Augmented Reality (AR) can improve patients’ experience as well as alleviate pain, anxiety, depression, addiction and more. In a particularly interesting segment, Dr. Spiegel calls the hospital a biopsychosocial jail cell and underscores its importance in not just treating physical ailments but, more wholistically, also addressing the psychological and social wellbeing of patients.
6. TED2017: Raj Panjabi – No one should die because they live too far from a doctor
What do you do when access to a doctor means rowing a boat for hours? Millions of people around the world lack access to health care because they live in a remote town or village.
In this TED talk, Raj Panjabi, physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and co-founder of Last Mile Health, offers a solution to the problem of healthcare access in the form of the Community Health Academy, a global platform to train and connect community health workers by leveraging devices like smartphones to bring preventative healthcare to even the most far-flung regions of the world.
Can AI predict which patients are at risk for chronic diseases using their old medical records? This episode of Health Tech Podcast dives deep into the future of healthcare with a look at the potential for AI -- “augmented intelligence” or “assistive intelligence” – to improve patient outcomes, the focus of Ankur Teredesai, a data scientist at the University of Washington and co-founder and CTO of health AI startup KenSci.
Clare McGrane, host of GeekWire’s Health Tech Podcast, speaks with numerous experts in this field. They compare precision health to a modern car constantly monitored by microprocessors. The minute something is wrong, you get a warning to take the car to a shop to resolve the issue. The same concept can be applied to humans and deliver big healthcare impacts as research in AI and machine learning continues to evolve.
8. NPR’s Shots: Can Home Health Visits Help Keep People Out Of The ER?
In Washington D.C., the city with the highest per capita 911 call volume in all of the U.S., Mary’s Center is piloting a program to provide primary care telemedicine to patients who cannot, or in some cases, do not want to visit the clinic. NPR covers the story of Medicaid patient Dennis Lebron Dolman, who is currently receiving a mix of home visits and virtual treatment.
Besides providing healthcare access to rural regions, telemedicine has the potential to reduce emergency room visits in cities as well as improve the health of patients in the long run.
Learn more at SEMICON West’s Smart MedTech TechXPOT on Digital Medicine and Remote Patient Monitoring. Hosted by NBMC on July 12, 2018, from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM, the event will feature healthcare industry leaders exploring state-of-the-art healthcare practices and the future of medical technology. Registration is now open!
Amy Ly is a Technical Programs Marketing Coordinator at SEMI.