Digital Health Unfiltered

Sudipto and Nick catch up with sleep nerd Drew Copeland. We cover the latest in consumer sleep technology, talk about his process for separating hype from evidence, and when to steer people toward medical-grade diagnostics. Important Links: https://sleepbetter.nyc/about-us Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Medication adherence used to be a significant aspect of digital health - there were always new pitches for apps and devices to review. Sudipto and Nick look at what happened to some of those companies, and why this sector has cooled off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two of the biggest companies on the planet have made some moves in healthcare this week - Apple released an information paper summarizing some of their accomplishments in health, fitness, medicine and research. And Amazon bought One Medical. Can tech giants save US Healthcare? Nick and Sudipto analyze, speculate, and issue some bold predictions. Important Links: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Health-Report-July-2022.pdf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deepesh Chandra is Chief Analytics Officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health, and a driving force behind their new Accrete digital health ecosystem. Nick and Sudipto learned Deepesh's views of the state of the digital health industry in the US today, and how Accrete will help advance innovation and partnerships with health tech startups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Vijay Yanamadala is the new CMO of Sword. Nick and Sudipto discuss Sword's approach to chronic pain - from sensors and remote monitoring, to coaching and mental health care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kereeti Pisapati returns to the pod to discuss Oracle's purchase of Cerner and what that means for the EHR industry. We'll also talk about voice and cloud tech, and Google's plans for FitBit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are the essential ingredients in a successful program for remote patient monitoring? Darryl Hollar joins Nick and Sudipto to discuss "the 4 D's of RPM". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's a lot of buzz around Synthetic Data - but is the hype for real? Nick and Sudipto talk about the problems that synthetic data aims to solve in health IT, and whether generating a plausible fake population is as easy as vendors make it seem.

Tune in as Sudipto and Nick talk to Northwell's new Ambulatory CMIO (and old friend) Dr. Sophia Saleem. Can digital health improve patient care and engagement while simultaneously making clinician's lives easier? If anyone can thread this needle, it's Sophia.

After more than a year of rumors and development, vaccine passports are entering the mainstream. Sudipto and Nick look at the technology underlying the latest approach to control COVID.

Kereeti Pisapati joins Nick and Sudipto to talk about Zus and the future of EHRs, and also compare notes on Teledoc and American Well's latest strategic moves.

Our guest Elise Kohl Grant shares her perspective on digital mental health - the vendor landscape, the human element, who should pay, and where the industry is heading.

Sudipto and Nick dive deep into sleep technology - the latest moves from the tech giants, the evidence to date, and where we think this sleeper industry is headed. Important links: https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/fcc-gives-amazon-greenlight-use-radar-monitoring-sleep

Jessica Damassa joins Sudipto and Nick to discuss the wild world of funding health IT startups. Important Links: https://rockhealth.com/reports/q1-2021-funding-report-digital-health-is-all-grown-up/

Natalya Sholomyansky joins Nick and Sudipto to talk about her work bringing interpreter services to telemedicine encounters, at her institution. Important Links: https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/mount-sinai-eases-translation-200-languages-through-its-epic-telehealth-platform

House calls, Hospital at Home, and taking health tech to the patient ... it's easy to get lost in the tech and business models, but the human element and home visits are playing a critical role in our digital health future. Sudipto and Nick review the history, and speculate on what models will scale.

21st Century Cures Act is already making waves. But the most impactful change is yet to come: the API provisions go live next year. Will this put patients in the driver's seat for sharing data, and jumpstart health entrepreneurship? Nick and Sudipto make the case.

Remote Patient Monitoring is here - and it is proving its value in some settings. But whether RPM takes off will depend on reimbursement - not just how much, but how easy for providers and care teams to bill. Nick and Sudipto discuss the barriers to scaling RPM, the winners and losers thus far - and whether RPM blows up like telemedicine did.

So you've finally contracted with a talented vendor making a high-tech new health gadget, and their device has gone through security review. Now you're ready for the hard part: training staff to enroll patients, monitor feeds, answer questions and perform maintenance.  Darryl, Tiffany and Natalya join Sudipto to discuss why implementation is always the hardest part of IT Digital Health. 

The audio and video from telehealth visits isn't recorded, let alone processed and analyzed. But new companies claim they can help with documenting & coding of virtual visits. And sentiment analysis may uncover useful data about patient and physician attitudes, satisfaction, and risk.  Raj, Darryl and Sudipto join Nick to discuss this technology, and whether we're likely to see it implemented in the future. 

Elon Musk's Neuralink technology can do some impressive things, and seems like a real boon to researchers. But Musk's predictions about treating brain disorders may just be hype. Tiffany, Nick, Natalya and Sudipto take a deeper look at brain implants today, and explore the medical (and consumer) future for wireless brain tech. 

With more people receiving virtual care (telemedicine), it makes sense to leverage advanced voice analysis techniques to diagnose diseases - from pulmonary hypertension to dementia to COVID-19.  In this episode, Nick & Sudipto discuss the technology behind disease detection via voice, and how that tech could be integrated into telehealth workflows. 

Most people still imagine telemedicine as a 2-way video conversation between a doctor and patient. But "asynchronous" care has also grown, offers some advantages, and may be better positioned to scale up during a pandemic.  Darryl, Raj, Sudipto and Nick discuss these two models of telehealth, and how patients may digitally reach out to their clinicians in the future.  

Epic plus Microsoft. Cerner with Amazon. Meditech and Google. Major EHR vendors are pairing off with big tech companies - for their cloud capabilities, and maybe more.  Sudipto and Tiffany join Nick to discuss this trend - what EHR vendors are hoping to gain from these new relationships, and what patients and providers can expect in terms of "smart" new features and improved productivity. 

Health outcomes in the US for people of color were already worse before COVID-19; the pandemic laid bare further disparities, with higher infection rates and mortality in this population.  But COVID also prompted broad usage of telemedicine, and maybe, new opportunities to address healthcare disparities. Natalya, Darryl and Ricardo join Nick to discuss the technology's potential, and pitfalls, as digital health is deployed to improve health access, quality and ultimately, outcomes. 

Electronic Health Records and clinical decision support has remained remarkably simple for decades; there's great potential (and need) for AI to guide clinicians on tougher questions of patient care. But these advanced techniques have their own limitations - sometimes quite insidious - that can lead to bad decisions and worse care. Nick, Sudipto and Darryl discuss the problem of bias in AI, and new ways to hopefully address it. 

Medication adherence is a growing part of digital health, aiming to promote patients actually taking their prescribed medications. With stakeholders including app and device developers, to Pharma, Insurance and hospital systems, there's increasing pressure to produce evidence that the tools work.  Natalya talks with Nick, Tiffany and Sudipto about the literature, and the gang shares their perspectives on what works in the realm of med adherence. 

We're big believers in the potential for technology to reshape healthcare delivery, and we've come across great digital health companies that really impress us. But sometimes, the timing just isn't right, or something just prevents a partnership from taking off.  In this episode Nick is joined by Darryl and Natalya - we each review a startup we loved, and think about what might have been. 

How should a patient get notified about a test result? How should a patient ask a question about those results? We know communication is critical to the doctor-patient interaction, but in digital health it's not as simple as it should be. The gang explores the complexity of digital health communication, and thinks about solutions. 

Welcome to Digital Health Unfiltered!  In our first episode, we dive into the world of remote patient monitoring, and specifically, what tech support needs to accomplish, when patients-generated health data isn't flowing to the care team.  WIll the patients be able to go to a Genius Bar in their local clinic for tech support? Will a Geek Squad van pull up outside a patient's home to troubleshoot the connection? Or are we just hoping the IT Help Desk will be able to file a ticket?  In this episode, Nick is joined by Sudipto, Natalya, Darryl, Ricardo and Raj.