Things & Thinks XXVIII
4 min readNov 11, 2021
2021 has been flying by so fast and I cannot believe that we are already just about a month away before this year ends! As usual, a lot of activity has picked up towards the year end, which reflects in this edition of Things & Thinks.
Research Digest
- There is a lot of interest in mHealth technology in non-communicable disease management, however a consistent limitation of these interventions is that there is a lack of data to suggest sustained engagement from patients for their usage. A recent study in JAMA Network Open provided important insights into engagement and self-management of hypertension. It showed that Greater engagement was associated with lower systolic BP over time; Greater engagement was also associated with lower risk of very high BP. The estimated probability of a very high BP was greater in the low-engagement group compared with the medium- and high- engagement groups.
- Researchers from Arizona State University wrote a fantastic perspective about digital medicine and high dimensional data. Here are some key insights-Health state data are complex owing to the variability of human signals, contextual factors, and environmental variables. As we increase the number of clinical variables we measure, there is a combinatorial explosion in the possible values that the variables can jointly take. The curse of dimensionality results in compounding negative effects on generalizability. When algorithm designers use inadequate sample sizes to train and evaluate algorithms for finding patterns in a complicated construct (e.g., human health), the large volume of the blind spot regions can lead to highly variable estimates of true model performance. The authors suggest several considerations for each step of model development and deployment to avoid the trap of dimensionality.
Digital Healthcare news
- Tech in Digital Health: Facebook (Meta?) released special fitness accessories for its VR headset; Clara Holoscan, a new platform launched by NVIDIA, will provide new computational infrastructure for medical devices and robotics. Amazon launched Alexa Smart Properties tools for healthcare and systems, which will enable several types of communications for the patients, caregivers and healthcare providers. Google launched a new mobile version of its clinician-facing search tool-Care Studio-that helps organize patients’ medical records. Microsoft announced integration of its healthcare-specific cloud offering with Cerner’s electronic health record. Google Verily’s Onduo will work with Google-owned Fitbit in a new collaboration to provide wearable devices to support users’ chronic condition management and overall health and wellness.
- Regulatory/Policy Brief: USFDA, along with Health Canada and UK MHRA, published 10 guiding principles for Good Machine Learning Practices. US FDA granted breakthrough status to Renovia’s first-line digital therapeutic treatment for chronic fecal incontinence in women. The device, which FDA has already cleared for use in urinary incontinence and pelvic floor strengthening in women
- Mergers & acquisitions: Philips acquired Cardiologs, which diagnoses atrial fibrillation and other cardiac rhythm disorders using an AI driven ECG platform. Oak Street Health acquired RubiconMD, a virtual specialty care company, for up to $190 million. 23andMe acquired prescription platform Lemonaid Health for $400M.
- Digital Medicine Society, along with several big pharma partners, will collaborate to work on a novel digital endpoint in atopic dermatitis.
- Intermountain Healthcare, Presbyterian Healthcare Services and SSM Health announced the launch of Graphite Health, a nonprofit aimed at facilitating the development and distribution of helpful digital health tools.
- On the funding side, Medable, working on decentralized clinical trials, raised ~$300 million, digital pharmacy Truepill, raised $140 million, digital musculoskeletal (MSK) health company raised a $600 million.
- The digital decentralized clinical trial solution and service market in Europe and North America (NA) is $1.79 billion (€1.54 billion) and is predicted to grow by 38.5% (CAGR) to reach $9.13 billion (€7.84 billion) by 2026.
- GE, a yesteryear giant, has announced that it will split its several business units into separate businesses. As part of this split, it will spin off the healthcare business. It’s current size is $17 billion, reporting a 6% decline in revenue to $4.3 billion in the period, compared to a year ago.
- TATA Health, the digital health arm of the Indian behemoth Tata group of companies, announced the PAN-India availability of its digital health platform InstaDoc.
📊Healthcare Chart(s) of the Month:
China’s healthcare innovation does not get as much attention as the rest of the world. However the two graphs above show the rising investment in venture funding in healthcare in China, which cane be a proxy for the innovation that’s happening there.
🔗Healthcare Tweet of the Month:
Often, we do not consider how much interest patients have in their own medical history and bringing out insights from them. This tweet gives an amazing insight-
📘Healthcare Longread of the Month:
As patients continue to adopt technology at a faster rate, caregivers and physicians will continue to get more and more informed questions from these tech-savvy ‘customers’. This article in Verge brings out a nice narrative about what kind of thoughts and questions are coming to the table and how are clinicians and caregivers responding to this need. Worth a read!
