The non-profit's annual list of technology concerns in healthcare begins with a perennial threat, and includes a couple of dangers bumped up the list by the pandemic
The threat of cybersecurity attacks is still the top technological threat to healthcare organizations, according to the ECRI Institute. But a problem caused by the two-year-old pandemic isn’t that far behind.
The Pennsylvania-based non-profit, which analyzes the safety, quality and cost-effectiveness of care across the healthcare spectrum, says the threat of unauthorized online access or a data breach is as high as ever, due in large part to the sophistication of the attackers and the growing value of medical data.
“The question is not whether a given facility will be attacked, but when,” Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD, the ECRIs’ president and chief executive officer, says in a press release accompanying the Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2022. “Responding to these risks requires not only a robust security program to prevent attacks from reaching critical devices and systems, but also a plan for maintaining patient care when they do.”
Schabacker notes that health systems are placing more and more faith on connected technology and integrated data systems, expanding the potential for hackers to find a vulnerability. That could lead to rescheduled healthcare appointments or medical procedures, the diversion of emergency resources or even the closure of departments of organizations.
Other threats include hacked digital health devices or platforms that fail to do what they’re supposed to do, potentially putting patients at risk or allowing access into one’s home through compromised smart devices.
Second on the list of hazards is a relatively new threat: supply chain shortfalls. While the danger of running out of critical supplies has always been there, the pandemic has pushed that concern up a few notches, as evidenced by the first-ever blood crisis announced by the Red Cross. And with organizations struggling to keep up, they’re likely reducing their emergency stockpiles to inadequate levels, which is another threat on the ECRI’s list.
Telehealth is also on the list, coming in at No. 5. While advocates have long maintained that virtual care can be as effective or even better than in-person care, the risk of incomplete or incorrect care is there when that care is delivered by providers who aren’t taking the right steps to assure safety and accuracy. And that threat is heightened by the fact that so many healthcare organizations quickly jumped on the telehealth bandwagon during the pandemic.
Finally, the ECRI notes that unreliable broadband connectivity can create Wi-Fi dropouts and dead zones, which cause disruptions in care, perhaps even deaths. While the threat is evident in any wired hospital or clinic, it’s particularly evident in telehealth programs that rely on broadband to connect care providers in distant, often remote places.
The ECRIs’ Top 10 list of threats is as follows:
Cybersecurity Attacks, which can disrupt healthcare delivery, impacting patient safety;
Supply Chain Shortfalls, which pose risks to patient care;
Damaged Infusion Pumps, which can cause medication errors;
InadequateEmergency Stockpiles, which could disrupt patient care during a public health emergency;
Telehealth, especially workflow and human factors shortcomings, which can cause poor outcomes;
Failure to Adhere toSyringe PumpBest Practices, which can lead to dangerous medication delivery errors;
AI-Based Reconstruction, which can distort images, threatening diagnostic outcomes;
Poor Duodenoscope ReprocessingErgonomics and Workflows, which put healthcare workers and patients at risk;
Disposable Gowns with insufficient barrier protection, which can put wearers at risk; and
Wi-Fi Dropoutsand Dead Zones, which can lead to patient care delays, injuries, and deaths.
Hearst Health is partnering with the UCLA Center for SMART Health to reinvent the seven-year-old prize as an award for innovative programs that use technologies like AI and digital health to affect health outcomes.
The UCLA Center for SMART Health and Hearst Health are partnering to reinvent the Hearst Health Prize, giving it more of an emphasis on digital health and data science.
The program was launched in 2015 by Hearst Health, a San Francisco-based care guidance network that includes First Databank, Zynx Health, MCG, Homecare Homebase and MHK. For the past five years, the $100,000 prize has been awarded to population health programs.
The new partnership aims to turn the focus on healthcare organizations that are use data science, such as AI and digital health, to improve health outcomes. And it points to a growing interest in the development of technologies that pull in data from both inside and outside the healthcare ecosystem to forecast and affect clinical outcomes and improve health and wellness.
“The application of AI and data science to healthcare has reached a state of maturity where it is important to investigate the approaches that are most impactful in generating health outcomes,” Alex Bui, PhD, a co-director at the Center for SMART Health, said in a press release. “Our collaboration on the Hearst Health Prize will help disseminate best practices for the benefit of everyone.”
“With the increasing activity in healthcare related to artificial intelligence and other data science solutions, everyone working in healthcare should understand what programs and approaches result in better health for patients,” added Arash Naeim, MD, PhD, also a co-director of UCLA Center for SMART Health.
The UCLA Center for SMART Health, which launched in 2016, is one of several organizations riding the wave of connected health innovation earlier this decade. The center “is dedicated to the research, evaluation, and application of digital health technologies and data-driven analyses that advance human health by predicting and reducing risk, improving decision-making, and optimizing the spectrum of clinical care activities.”
The partnership, financial details of which were not announced, will award its first Hearst health Prize through the UCLA Center for Digital Health in 2022.
“Our award provides a national platform to showcase how data science is making a difference in the lives of patients,” Hearst Health President Gregory Dorn, MD, MPH, said in the press release. “The engineering and healthcare expertise that Alex and Arash have aligned at the UCLA Center for SMART Health makes them ideal partners for this next generation of the Hearst Health Prize in data sciences.”
The $9.8 million Neuromod Prize is aimed at scientists, researchers and clinicians who are studying how to improve clinical outcomes through targeted treatments that adjust nerve activity to improve organ function.
The National Institutes of Health is looking for innovative treatments for stimulating the peripheral nervous system to treat diseases and improve health.
The Neuromod Prize is a $9.8 million competition aimed at scientists, researchers and clinicians who are studying how to improve clinical outcomes through neuromodulation therapies, or targeted treatments that adjust nerve activity to improve organ function. The challenge is part of the NIH’s Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) program.
“We’re asking potential solvers to use the foundational knowledge and technologies that have come out of our SPARC program and take it to the next level with their innovative concepts and ideas,” James M. Anderson, MD, PhD, director of the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, which oversees the NIH Common Fund, said in a press release. “This competition is an exciting opportunity to come up with tangible plans for harnessing the power of the body’s electrical system to help transform treatments for millions of people living with chronic or acute illnesses.”
According to the NIH, recent innovations in technology and an improved understanding of the relationship between the nervous system and organs and tissues have led to new treatments for a variety of health concerns. These treatments can target specific organs and functions or specific groups of organs and functions.
The competition is broken up into three phases, with only the first phase open at this time.
In phase 1, “participants will submit concept papers describing their proposed therapeutic approaches and their plans for conducting proof-of-concept studies, rationales for therapeutic use, and expectations for clinical impact.” A virtual information session is scheduled for February 7, and submissions are due by April 28.
A panel of judges will select as many as eight quarterfinalists to receive a share of the $800,000 prize pool and move on to the second phase, in which they’ll develop preclinical studies. That phase, worth up to $4 million, will take place later in 2022.
Semifinalist winners from phase 2 will move on to the third phase, with a $5 million prize, which is expected to launch in 2023. In that phase, participants will move from preclinical trials into advanced translational and clinical studies and regulatory approvals.
Black and underserved populations would rather use the telephone than an mHealth app in a remote patient monitoring program, according to researchers
A new study finds that Black and underserved populations would prefer to use the telephone to connect with care providers in a remote patient monitoring program.
The research by BJC HealthCare and the Washington University School of Medicine’s Healthcare Innovation Lab underscores the value of multiple, even personalized, communication channels between patients and health systems, and the challenges of finding a reliable way of engaging with populations dealing with the social determinants of health.
That will be important as more and more healthcare organizations launch RPM programs to monitor patients at home, particularly as they seek to improve outcomes in areas such as chronic care management, post-discharge care and behavioral healthcare.
Led by Bradley A. Fritz, MD, MSc, a member of the St. Louis-based health system’s Department of Anesthesiology, the research team tracked roughly 7,600 participants in a RPM program for COVID-19 treatment. They found that Black enrollees preferred using the telephone over an mHealth app by a margin of 68% to 44%, as did those from less disadvantaged neighborhood vs. those in better-off areas (59% to 43%). Conversely, retention rates were about the same between Black and white populations.
“Although we do not know what would have happened if the telephone arm had been unavailable, its presence appears to have bridged an engagement gap for Black patients,” the researchers said in a study published online by Springer. “Failure to bridge this gap might have worsened disparities between Black patients and other patients that already exist due to structural injustices (e.g., housing discrimination, limited public transportation) that limit access to primary care, nutritious food, and exercise.”
“We did not ask patients why they chose one program arm over the other, so we do not know if limited access to smart devices, limited internet connectivity, data privacy concerns, or other factors impacted their choices,” they added. “Distrust in healthcare organizations that have mistreated Black patients in the past may contribute to the engagement gap.”
“Our findings suggest that home monitoring programs may need to offer non-app-based options for participation to ensure they reach all groups of patients,” Fritz and his colleagues concluded.
The researchers also wondered whether the social isolation brought about by the pandemic played a part in the choice of communication platforms. They noted that several participants listed the ability to talk to someone on the phone as the best part of their experience.
The study points to the importance of planning an RPM program that encourages patient engagement, especially if it targets underserved populations or addresses barriers to accessing care. A program won’t work if it doesn’t pay attention to the patient.
The University of Rochester Medical Center will soon be deploying AI-enhanced devices to help clinicians improve point-of-care management
The University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) will be deploying AI-enhanced mobile ultrasound devices later this year to help clinicians improve point-of-care treatment.
The upstate New York health system is partnering with Connecticut-based Butterfly Network on the program, which seeks to improve clinical decision support (CDS) and eliminate time spent sending patients off for imaging by giving clinicians the tools they need to do the work themselves.
URMC will begin training staff on how to use the handheld digital health devices this summer, with plans to roll them out to primary care providers, home care nurses, and second- and third-year medical students in the fall. Officials are also planning to include the devices in research projects and enterprise-wide strategies.
"Oftentimes, practitioners call upon imaging modalities to confirm a hypothetical diagnosis and treatment plan," says Michael F. Rotondo, URMC's CEO and vice dean for clinical affairs at the university's School of Medicine and Dentistry. "With Butterfly, care teams can introduce point-of-care ultrasound as part of the initial assessment. A small, stapler-sized imaging probe paired with a smart phone becomes an advanced bed-side imaging tool. Care teams can use this information to confirm or exclude their diagnosis improving the overall care."
The project points to a growing interest among healthcare organizations in digital health tools and platforms that give front-line care providers on-demand access to CDS resources, so they can make better decisions at the point of care instead of scheduling tests and unnecessarily extending the time between examination and diagnosis (as well as diagnosis and treatment).
Portable Point Of Care Ultrasound (PPOCUS) "is undergoing a revolution similar to what computing technology experienced in the 20th century, an acceleration in the development of portable, efficient, and affordable systems," wrote Patrick Lindsay, MB, BS; Lauren Gibson, MD; Edward A. Bittner, MD, PhD; Marvin G. Chang, MD, PhD, all of Massachusetts General Hospital, in a 2020 research article in the newsletter of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation.
"Ultrasound technology has evolved to the point that portable ultrasound devices can now fit seamlessly in a clinician's back scrub pocket at a price point as low as $2,000 USD," they wrote. "Furthermore, the imaging capabilities far exceed many of the best ultrasound machines of decades ago."
It also hits upon a lesser-known aspect to the digital health movement. While the nation is enamored with technology that allows people to access healthcare from their homes, cars, workplace, and other locations, they're paying less attention to the tools and platforms being developed for use in the health system.
In places like URMC, which serves a wide swath of rural New York, those devices and services can literally be lifesaving, especially if access to care is limited and it takes days or weeks to gather all the information necessary for an accurate diagnosis.
"While highly valuable, traditional ultrasound equipment can be rather unwieldy," says Rotondo. "It's cart-based and requires training whereas this much smaller bedside tool is highly portable and AI-empowered, to support caregivers of all kinds, including paramedics, nurses, physicians, and home healthcare workers. Our vision is that this will greatly aid in early detection and diagnosis and will accelerate treatment."
"Our intent is for Butterfly to integrate fully with our existing enterprise systems, workflows, and EMR vs. operating as a capability in a silo," he adds. "This is different and exciting; we're approaching imaging from an enterprise-wide lens—integrating it, optimizing it, and scaling it to improve care delivery across the institution."
The differences between digital health adoption outside the health system and within the health system are clear. Whereas consumer-facing technology focuses more on engagement and ease of use, tools and platforms for in-patient use must meet strict protocols associated with clinical care, particularly with regards to accuracy and reliability. Clinicians have long been wary of consumer-facing technology because they don't trust the data, and they're even more critical of technology they're using inside the four walls of the hospital.
Mobile clinical-grade devices, meanwhile, were in many cases first developed for uses outside the hospital setting, such as remote locations, disaster sites, and underdeveloped countries, where they could bring clinical services to first responders or medical workers. With the onset of the pandemic and the need to reduce contact between infected patients and care providers, those devices are now moving into the healthcare setting.
They're also being enhanced with AI technology.
"AI is a tool to support informed decision-making," says Rotondo. "The physician or care worker is ultimately charged with using her judgment before issuing any diagnosis and developing a plan. A diagnosis always needs to be done with judgment and consideration of likely alternate possibilities. In many cases, particularly in the early stages, it's tough to know exactly what's going on with a patient. In these cases, the best you can do is suggest a probable diagnosis and plan of action that might involve further tests or simply keeping an eye on the patient's progress."
Digital health advocates say AI has the potential to help clinicians make those decisions better and more quickly by automating the numbers-crunching and connecting the dots.
"The combination of cloud-based computing with advanced artificial intelligence has unearthed unprecedented opportunities for healthcare, and we believe the potential for AI in medical diagnostics is in its early phases," says Todd Fruchterman, MD, Butterfly Health's president and CEO. "We believe the combination of bedside imaging, powered by AI can help solve the problem of inadequately informed medical decisions. This is what we're passionate about. As with all applications of technology in healthcare, it needs to be done thoughtfully."
Researchers at Kyoto University have developed a mask filter that, when exposed to ultraviolet light, shows whether the user has been infected with the virus.
Researchers in Japan are developing a facemask that would glow under ultraviolet light when contaminated with COVID-19.
The project at Kyoto University comes on the heels of news about a Northwestern University program that’s attaching sensors to facemasks to track respiration and heart rate and the mask’s fit. And it points to the urgency in digital health circles to develop new ways of detecting the coronavirus and helping those at most risk of being infected.
At Kyoto University, researchers have created a removable filter made from ostrich antibodies that detects the coronavirus after being sprayed with a chemical and exposed to ultraviolet light. The filters were tested in a clinical trial with participants who wore masks for eight hours.
"If virus infection can be detected by putting a mouth filter carrying an ostrich antibody in a 'disposable mask' that is used every day in the world, non-symptomatic infected people such as super spreaders can be voluntarily treated at an early stage," Yasuhiro Tsukamoto, leader of the Kyoto University research group, told the dezeen news site. "It is a handy and inexpensive device that prevents the invasion of the Covid-19 virus into the human body.”
Tsukamoto said he came up with the idea of using ostrich antibodies after doing research on the bird’s immune system.
"Ostriches rarely die from filth, minor injuries, or illnesses, and live for 60 years," he said. "I realized that the secret of longevity is that it is resistant to infectious diseases with its amazing immunity and resilience, so I started researching ostrich antibodies in earnest."
Tsukamoto and his research team have applied for a patent for the mask and hope to make them available later this year. They’re also hoping to refine the process so that the filters can be analyzed by light emitted from a smartphone.
Long-term, they hope to develop masks that use this process to detect other viruses, such as the flu.
Kaiser Permanente has joined Graphite Health, a non-profit formed by several large health systems to create an interoperable digital health platform and bring new products and services to scale.
Kaiser Permanente has joined several other large healthcare organizations in a collaborative aimed at creating an interoperable digital health platform for developing and scaling innovative tools and services.
Graphite Health operates as a non-profit, according to officials, with a board of executives comprised of representatives from Kaiser Pemanente, Intermountain Healthcare, Presbyterian Healthcare Services and SSM Health. Members help guide the company’s direction and will receive products designed for and by them along with the resources to use them.
“We know that by working together to address interoperability at scale, we can create more convenience, better quality care, and lower costs,” Ries Robinson, MD, former vice president and chief innovation officer at Presbyterian and Graphite Health’s new CEO, said in a press release. “As Kaiser Permanente is nationally known for their innovative approach, we look forward to working closely with them to digitally transform and improve health care, and ultimately, to help patients and members across the country live better, healthier lives.”
The company, launched roughly four months ago, is modeled after Civica Rx, a non-profit developer of generic medications formed in 2018 by a number of healthcare organizations (including SSM Health and Kaiser Permanente) and philanthropies aimed at reducing drug costs and drug shortages. That company now partners with more than 55 health systems, the US Department of Defense, and 18 Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, plans to bring more than 100 medications to market by 2023 and is building its own manufacturing facility in Virginia.
The initiative targets the fast growing digital health industry, which includes mHealth apps and devices, connected health sensors and wearables, telehealth platforms and digital therapeutics. Interest in the field has taken off with the pandemic, which forced many health systems to shift from in-person to virtual care and is now playing a part in many post-pandemic strategies.
“Graphite Health is tackling some of the most pressing issues in health care today, making it easier to adopt digital health tools with a focus on trust and transparency,” Kaiser Permanente chair and CEO Greg A. Adams said in the press release. “By joining Graphite Health now, we are excited to help shape the future of digital health transformation, and to improve patient and member experience at Kaiser Permanente and beyond.”
Company officials said they expect to add more healthcare organizations and philanthropies in the future, and are looking to partner with technology innovators.
Dubbed the 'FaceBit,' the quarter-sized sensor array attaches to any mask and tracks the wearer's respiration and heart rate, as well as the mask's fit.
Researchers at Northwester University have developed a digital health attachment for a facemask, which they’ve dubbed the FaceBit.
The quarter-sized, battery-powered sensor attaches to any N95, cloth or surgical mask with a magnet, and can monitor a user’s respiration rate, heart rate and time wearing the mask, as well as how well the mask fits. The data is transferred to an mHealth app, which allows the wearer to monitor his or her health in real time and receive alerts when the monitors sense something amiss.
The project, funded by a National Science Foundation Grant for Rapid Response Research, was recently detailed in the journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
“We wanted to design an intelligent face mask for health care professionals that does not need to be inconveniently plugged in during the middle of a shift,” Josiah Hester, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science who led the device development team, said in a news story published by the university. “We augmented the battery’s energy with energy harvesting from various sources, which means that you can wear the mask for a week or two without having to charge or replace the battery.”
Hester and his colleagues say the FaceBit gathers physiological data to “help wearers better understand their own bodies in order to make beneficial health decisions.” And by monitoring breathing and heart rate, the mask can also detect stress and alert the wearer. That information could also be collected by health system administrators to study staff stress.
The researchers also consulted with healthcare providers in designing the sensor array, finding through surveys that doctors and nurses were most concerned about the mask’s fit. Clinicians periodically go through a 20-minute “fit test” to determine whether a mask fits properly.
“If you wear a mask for 12 hours or longer, sometimes your face can become numb,” Hester said in the news story. “You might not even realize that your mask is loose because you cannot feel it or you are too burnt out to notice. We can approximate the fit-testing process by measuring mask resistance. If we see a sudden dip in resistance, that indicates a leak has formed, and we can alert the wearer.”
Hester said he hops to someday develop a battery-free mask, perhaps by harvesting thermal or kinetic energy to power the sensors.
“FaceBit provides a first step toward practical on-face sensing and inference, and provides a sustainable, convenient, comfortable option for general health monitoring for COVID-19 frontline workers and beyond,” Hester said. “I’m really excited to hand this off to the research community to see what they can do with it.”
The pandemic has pushed more care online, which in turn has also pushed clinicians back into the EHR, often after hours. That might be a problem.
A new study finds that the shift to virtual care during the pandemic has driven clinicians back to the EHR – with good and bad results.
As reported in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, clinician time spent in the EHR had dropped prior to 2020, but it jumped right back up as COVID-19 took hold, especially after normal business hours. Researchers linked that increase to more time spent reviewing clinical notes and answering messages from colleagues and patients.
Researchers led by A. Jay Holmgren, of the University of California San Francisco’s Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research said the increase was due in large part to the shift from in-person to virtual care, which pushed clinicians away from their patients and onto computers.
“The pandemic-driven shifts toward virtual treatment, and the corresponding change in patient expectations and awareness of communication tools such as secure messaging via the EHR, have substantially altered the nature of ambulatory care,” Holmgren and his colleagues wrote. “Further, as telehealth and the pandemic incentivized patients to become familiar with the use of online portals to access their health information and connect with clinicians, the time required for those clinicians to manage the care of their patients through the EHR increased.”
“The long-term shift to a mix of face-to-face and virtual care, as ambulatory patient volume returned in the second half of 2020, may have exacerbated these issues as clinicians delivered care across multiple modalities in a single day,” they added. “Given that many of these changes, such as increased patient familiarity with asynchronous messaging, may persist beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical to evaluate how they have impacted clinician work.”
The study adds a new wrinkle to the idea that the pandemic has helped thrust virtual care into the spotlight and given healthcare organizations more proof that they need to shift to a hybrid platform that mixes in-person care and digital health. It suggests that while telehealth and other digital health tools and channels may improve access to care, health system leaders need to understand how that shift affects clinician workloads, which could negatively impact care and increase stress.
The challenge will lie in mapping out hybrid care strategies that reduce that workload burden while still improving care outcomes, perhaps by shifting responsibilities to other members of the care team or integrating AI tools to automate some tasks. In simpler terms, they need to make the EHR easier to use – a task that has plagued the industry long before COVID-19 arrived.
“Although near-universal adoption of EHRs was an important enabler of the shift to telemedicine, increased reliance on EHRs may exacerbate existing issues of low job satisfaction and poor well-being amongst clinicians,” the study pointed out. “Many clinicians spend a significant amount of time working in the EHR, and clinicians in the United States already face a greater EHR burden than their international peers. Total time spent working in the EHR, ‘after-hours’ time working outside of scheduled clinic hours, and responding to In-Basket messages without protected time or reimbursement for messages have been associated with a variety of negative impacts, including burnout, which can translate into higher costs and lower-quality care. Further, if the increased EHR burden is driven by activities such as messaging with patients, these new demands on clinician time may be concentrated on tasks that are outside of the bounds of the traditional ‘visit’ and are currently nonreimbursable for most clinicians.”
The researchers noted that policy makers should take these findings into account when developing coverage guidelines for virtual care. Current reimbursement guidelines don’t take into account the fact that patients are shifting to messaging platforms because they’re more convenient, thus adding to the clinician’s in-box. In addition, those guidelines have traditionally focused on documentation work, rather than the communicating with patients.
“This increase [in EHR use] was driven by time spent in Clinical Review and In-Basket messaging, with clinicians receiving 157% of their prepandemic baseline messages from patients,” the study concluded. “These patient messages represented a significant demand on clinician time, with each requiring an additional 2.3 [minutes] of daily EHR work on average. Policymakers and health system leaders looking to create sustainable workflows incorporating telemedicine in the post-pandemic period should be aware of these new demands on clinician time not only to avoid clinician burnout but also to accommodate rethinking the model of ambulatory medicine as patient expectations for care expand beyond the scope of the traditional face-to-face visit.”
Joining Holmgren in the study were N. Lance Downing and Christopher Sharp of Stanford University, Mitchell Tang of Harvard University, Robert S. Huckman of Harvard Business School and Christopher Longhurst of UC San Diego Health.
Researchers from Penn Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing are joining forces on an NIH-funded project to improve care management at home for seniors and people living with Alzheimer's disease.
Researchers at Penn Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing are launching a study that will test the value of AI and remote patient monitoring technologies to improve care management for seniors and those living with Alzheimer’s disease.
“Aging in place is a priority for most older Americans,” George Demiris, PhD, FACMI, a professor at both Penn Nursing’s Department of Behavioral Health Sciences and Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and one of the project’s leaders, said in a press release. “This goal can be challenged by chronic illness including Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias. We need innovative solutions that will help us detect risks, address disparities, support decision making and improve access to care.”
“The overarching goal of our Collaboratory is to facilitate the development and dissemination of such tools to help aging Americans live safely, in optimal health, and remain socially engaged,” he added. “To achieve this, we will develop and implement a national pilot project funding program for the development and evaluation of cutting-edge technology.”
That cutting-edge technology will include artificial intelligence platforms that draw and analyze data from digital health tools and the electronic health record, as well as remote patient monitoring and other technology that allow patients and their care providers to track health and wellness at home and incorporate on-demand communication and treatment.
The collaborative will “identify, develop, evaluate, commercialize, and disseminate innovative technology” that might be used to help seniors and those living with Alzheimer’s stay at home, rather than in an assisted living facility, and stay in touch with caregivers. It plans to launch several funded pilot projects.
“Penn is uniquely poised to serve as a research and innovation accelerator based on our expertise in geriatric medicine, aging, Alzheimer’s disease and biomedical informatics,” added Jason Karlawash, MD, co-director of the Penn Memory Center, associate director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Perelman and a professor of medicine, medical ethics and health policy and neurology, in the press release. “We aim to advance the development of effective solutions that will be used in the real world and ultimately improve the lives of older adults’ and their caregivers.”
