Another digital health company is finding some market traction and some new funding in the home monitoring business.
Healthsense makes a remote monitoring system for people with chronic diseases. The systems are sold to healthcare providers who need to keep track of the health of these patients and intervene if they detect that something’s going wrong. If they can detect it early, the thinking goes, they can keep the patient healthy and avoid expensive hospital re-admissions.
While the step counters and run tracker apps of the world get most of the attention, a growing number of apps in the marketplace are serving serious clinical needs.
One is AliveCor‘s AliveECG app, which will soon run an algorithm that detects atrial fibrillation (AF), a serious type of heart arrhythmia that’s often a precursor to stroke. For people with a history or heart trouble, or atrial fibrillation specifically, the app and the algorithm could provide a life-saving early warning system.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most commonly diagnosed — and misdiagnosed — behavioral disorder in children in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unfortunately, there are currently no reliable physiological markers to diagnose ADHD. Doctors generally diagnose the disorder by recording a medical and social history of the patient and the family, discussing possible symptoms and observing the patient’s behavior. But an incorrect evaluation can lead to overmedication, which has parents everywhere concerned.
A helmet-like Israeli brain monitor that works without penetrating the skull has the potential to spot problems early, giving doctors a chance to step in with treatment programs to help patients cope with disorders like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ADHD.
ElMindA received FDA clearance in early August for use of its brain activity monitoring system in assessing brain function in patients. ElMindA’s BNA Analysis System uses sensors that measure and analyze neural activity during specific brain processes, presenting information about brain activity and measuring it against a database of over 7,000 brain functions to see how a patient’s condition stacks up. BNA stands for Brain Network Activation.
An Israeli company is one of the first in the world to market with a T-shirt that can read a patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, cardiac irregularities, and other vital signs that could be the key to preventing heart attacks. Speed is the key — data is generated in real time and reaches t
HealthWatch debuted its hWear line of 15-lead ECG-sensing garments at the recent annual meeting of the American Telemedicine Association. It allows doctors and medical workers to keep track of a heart condition remotely, without having to hook the patient up to a heart-measuring device in a doctor’s office.
It has been nearly nine decades since Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of Penicillin at his Paddington laboratory in 1928, and today well over a hundred different types of antibiotics exist for numerous bacterial infections. A growing concern in modern medicine, however, is the ability of pathogenic bacteria to evolve strategies for overcoming antibiotic treatments. Many antibiotics such as ampicillin and erythromycin, for example, which used to kill off whole bacterial populations with great efficacy, are now capable of much less due to this alarming phenomenon of bacterial tolerance.
Apart from using search technology, the platform also acts as an indexed, curated reference.
One Codex, which is currently in open beta, can search its growing database of 30,000 bacteria, viruses and fungi in real time and identify data sets in minutes (millions of DNA base pairs per second).
Currently, the most commonly used tool for genome searching is by using an algorithm called BLAST, Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, which compares primary biological sequence information.
“While there are a lot of “it depends” … the number we’re comfortable with is somewhere in the 1000 to 1500 [times faster] plus range,” he said.
igital health companies are focusing on using new technologies to fix places in the health-care delivery system that are wasteful, inefficient, or slow.
Geneva Healthcare has found one of the slow spots: the emergency room. The San Diego-based company has raised a $1.83 million funding round from a group of angel investors. Geneva makes a software platform that imports data from the cardiac devices (like pacemakers or defibrillators) of lots of different manufacturers, and this can help speed up visits in the ER.
Health tech provider Acupera today announced it has raised $4 million in new financing.
Acupera’s system mines data from electronic health records, medical claims, and lab results to provide clinical information to doctors and nurses so that they can provide appropriate care to patients based on their individual needs.
“Acupera offers population health technology that fits seamlessly into existing workflows, supporting doctors and nurses, while improving the way that healthcare organizations care for the entirety of their patient populations,” Acupera CEO Dr. Ronald Razmi said in the statement.
eVisits are expected to save $5B this year over the cost of traditional in-office physician visits.
With an aging Baby Boomer population and broadband bandwidth improved a hundredfold from a decade ago, telemedicine is exploding as a convenient and less costly alternative to the traditional visit to the doctors' office.
This year in the U.S. and Canada, 75 million of 600 million appointments with general practitioners will involve electronic visits, or eVisits, according to new research from Deloitte.
