Faces of Digital Health

After an intense race in AI development lighted by the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, two important things happened in the last week of March 2023: Over 1000 tech workers, such as Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX, Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director at Mila, Turing Prize winner and professor at University of Montreal, Stuart Russell, Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and co-author of the standard textbook “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach",   signed a public letter that urges a pause on AI development before humanity as a society decides how humans can control the development. The first subscribers include: As the letter states, “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” A day after this letter was published, UNESCO published a press release that calls on all governments to immediately implement the global ethical framework, which 193 Member States of Unesco has unanimously adopted. As warned by Unesco, we need to address many concerning ethical issues raised by AI innovations, in particular discrimination and stereotyping, including the issue of gender inequality, but also the fight against disinformation, the right to privacy, the protection of personal data, and human and environmental rights. And the industry cannot self-regulate, states the press release. Healthcare is moving from the era of gathering data through digitalized systems, EHRs, sensors, and wearables to the era of mining that data for better patient outcomes and operational efficiency. However, in order for AI and algorithms to help improve the health of many, we should strive for algorithms to be open and transparent, says Bart De Witte, founder of HIPPO AI Foundation, a renowned expert on digital transformation in healthcare in Europe, who regularly speakers and posts about technology and innovation strategy, with a particular focus on the socioeconomic impact on healthcare. In this short discussion, recorded at the Vision Health Pioneers Demo Day on 28 March in Berlin, Bart explains: why is open and transparent AI important for the greater good in healthcare, where global medical development is going with different values and regulations about AI and data, and comments on the upcoming European Health Data Space. Enjoy the show, and if you like what you will hear, subscribe to the podcast to be notified about new episodes automatically. Also, go to fodh.substack.com to read our newsletter, which is published roughly on a monthly basis. Newsletter: fodh.substack.comTranscript: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/open-ai-bart-de-witte-gpt4 Open Letter to pause all AI development: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ Unesco Press release: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/artificial-intelligence-unesco-calls-all-governments-implement-global-ethical-framework-without

Healthcare is facing challenges on all fronts. WHO estimates a projected shortfall of 10 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Countries at all levels of socioeconomic development face, to varying degrees, difficulties in the education, employment, deployment, retention, and performance of their workforce. Several other factors, such as the aging population and the rising demand for healthcare services, put healthcare systems under pressure to change and adapt. To a degree, with the help of technology. A big topic in many systems, especially in the US, is the move of retail providers such as Amazon and pharmacies, Walgreens, and CVS into primary care. Hospitals are looking at opportunities for virtual care and turning homes into hospital-like environments supported by virtual monitoring. At this year’s NextMed Health Conference is San Diego, Rasu Shrestha - Chief Innovation & Commercialization Officer, Executive Vice President at Advocate Health - hospital system of 67 hospitals across six states – Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wisconsin, mentioned that the health system made a deal with Best Buy, the provider of consumer electronics. In this episode, we will take this news as a starting point for a broader discussion: how is healthcare transforming globally, and what does the shift towards virtual care look like in 2023? You will hear from experts from the US, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Kenya, China, and UAE who spoke or attended the NextMed Health conference. Speakers: Rasu Shrestha - Chief Innovation & Commercialization Officer, Executive Vice President at Advocate Health (USA), Ali Hashemi, investor, CEO of meta[bolic] (UAE), Bianca Rowenhorst, CIO at the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports in the Netherlands, Lucien Engelen, thought leader, who operates globally at the convergence of Innovation & Strategy for executive boards, governments, corporates (Netherlands), Michael Friebe, HealthTEC Inventor/Investor/Entrepreneur and professor (Germany), Alex Zhavorkonkov, CEO of InSilico Medicine (USA, China, Canada, UAE, Belgium, UK, and Taiwan),  Emilian Popa, CEO of Ilara Health (Kenya) Zayna Khayat, VP Client Success Teladoc Health in Canada, In house health futurist at Deloitte Canada's Life Sciences & Healthcare team and Adjunct faculty with the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management in the Health Sector Strategy stream (Canada).

One of the biggest global challenges in healthcare at the moment is the workforce crisis.Workforce shortages are not related to the number of people that get trained for healthcare professionals but the working conditions that they need to operate under. In today’s episode, we will look at a good practice related to nursing organizations in the community of the Netherlands. I spoke with Thijs de Blok, CEO of Buurtzorg International - an organization of 15.000 nurses that work in self-managing teams and provide holistic care to patients. I asked Thijs, more about the early beginnings of the organization, how it fits in the dutch healthcare system context, and what he observed in terms of care providers globally.Tune in to the episode about nurses in the US: Has The Risk of Becoming a Nurse Become Too Great in the US? https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/nurse-rebecca-love-nurse-alicewww.facesofdigitalhealth.comNewsletter: https://fodh.substack.com/

After a series of discussions about healthcare data in the US, we’re now moving to insights and good practices in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has roughly 17 million people. As you will hear, its healthcare is highly digitalized with high digital literacy. You will hear a short panel discussion that was recorded at mHealth Israel in Tel Aviv. Corne Mulders – CIO University Medical Center Utrecht Simon Vermeer – CIO Erasmus University Medical Center (Erasmus MC Rotterdam) Paul Hillman – CIO Maastricht University Medical CenterShared their views about digital health development in the Netherlands, how their institutions approach innovation, and where they see room for improvements regarding healthcare digitalization on the national level. www.facesofdigitalhealth.comNewsletter: https://fodh.substack.com/

This is the fifth and last episode of the Healthcare Data in the US series. In the first one, Arif Nathoo - CEO and co-founder of Komodo Health, described how the company is planning to capture and de-identify every encounter patients have with the US healthcare system.The second episode featured Phil Lindemann, VP of Business Intelligence at Epic, and Epic’s Clinical Informaticist Dave Little, who talked about Epic Cosmos - a database of EHR data from 178 million patients. In the third episode, Samir Unni, Business Development Lead for Healthcare at Palantir Foundry, explained the principles of Palantir in healthcare, why they support an open-data approach, how knowledge from other industries is transferred to healthcare and more. In the fourth episode, representatives of four companies working on automating care tasks, providing clinicians with clinical decision support, and creating synthetic data records, four industry experts shared their experience with building solutions on top of EHRs, challenges related to connecting to electronic health records, and the need for better interoperability APIs to really enable data to be used for health outcomes improvement.In this final episode,  Ardy Arianpour, CEO of Seqster, explains for Seqster provides its clients with an operating system for researching of clinical and tracking patient data to create new solutions. Enjoy the discussion and tune into other episodes as well. This series will be summarized in our newsletter - find it and subscribe at fodh.substack.comwww.facesofdigitalhealth.comSeqster: https://www.seqster.com/

Electronic health records and digital data gathering have now been around long enough that the focus has shifted from gathering to using the data for research, AI development, and clinical decision support systems. Various companies are trying to build solutions to help clinicians navigate care, and workflows, and have the right information in front of them to make decisions fast without losing time searching through the whole patient’s record. This is the fourth episode in the series about healthcare data management in the US. In the first episode, we heard how Komodo health collects data about various encounters people have with healthcare. In the second episode, we learn about Epic Cosmos - a research environment consisting of clinical data from the electronic medical records of 178 million patients. In the third episode, we heard how Palantir Foundry helps healthcare enterprises, regulatory agencies, and governments optimize their workforce planning and crisis response through an open-data approach and experience from other industries. Today, you’ll hear a panel discussion recorded at HLTH, in which industry experts shared their experience with building solutions on top of EHRs, challenges related to connecting to electronic health record and needs for better interoperability APIs to really enable data to be used for health outcomes improvement. Today, you will hear from: (Kathy Dalton Ford Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Project Ronin, Josh Rubel, Chief Commercial Officer for MDClone, David Lareau, CEO of Medicomp Systems, Inc. , Greg Miller, CGO of Lumeon).www.facesofdigitalhealth.comMonthly newsletter: https://fodh.substack.com/

This is the third episode in a series of discussions about healthcare data challenges and data management practices in the US. One thing is clear to everybody: regardless of the efforts, patient data is still scattered around in different organizations.In the first episode, you can listen to a discussion with the CEO and co-founder of Komodo Health, Arif Nathoo. Komodo Health currently has some part of the healthcare data of 330 million people in the US. One of the leading providers of electronic healthcare records systems in the US is EPIC. EPIC holds around a third of the US EHR market share and has some part of the medical data of 250 million patients.In the second episode, Phil Lindemann, VP of Business Intelligence at Epic, and Epic’s Clinical Informaticist Dave Little, MD explained a bit more about EPic Cosmos - a database built to enable easier clinical research. Epic Cosmos currently combines 178 million de-identified patient records from over 6.5 billion encounters, representing patients in all 50 US states.In this episode, you’ll hear from Samir Unni, Healthcare Business Development Lead at Palantir Foundry.Palantir Foundry connects the back-office software systems and analytics teams directly with caregivers. Foundry is used across the healthcare and life sciences value chain, from drug discovery and development, through to manufacturing, marketing, and sales. At the Federal level in the US Palantir is partnering with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and more. In this short discussion recorded at HLTH 2022, Samir Unni, Healthcare Business Development Lead at Palantir Foundy explained the principles of Palantir in healthcare, why they support the open-data approach, how do they choose their customers and more.www.facesofdigitalhealth.comThis discussion is part of a broader series of talks about healthcare data management in the US. An in-depth summary will be published in the monthly newsletter:fodh.substack.com

If you work in healthcare IT, you must have heard the name Epic. Epic is a renowned EHR provider, that covers around a third of the US healthcare market. In 2019, Epic launched Cosmos, a special program for data mining of patient records data gathered in Epic systems. Today, Epic Cosmos, which was built to enable easier clinical research for contributing Epic customers, contains over 178 million patient records from over 6.5 billion encounters, representing patients in all 50 states. In this episode’s discussion with Phil Lindemann, VP of Business Intelligence at Epic and Epic’s Clinical Informaticist Dave Little, MD you will hear more about the growth of data in Epic Cosmos, collaboration with external healthcare IT and app providers that can join Epic’s App Orchard ecosystem. Dave and Phil also talked about needed improvements for easier collaboration with healthcare IT vendors and innovators outside Epic, how they hope EHRs will evolve with novel technologies and AI, and more. This discussion is part of a broader series of talks about healthcare data management in the US. An in-depth summary will be published in the monthly newsletter:fodh.substack.comThe January edition offers an overview into natural language processing development in healthcare and the potential of ChatGPT in healthcare: https://fodh.substack.com/p/natural-language-processing-is-thewww.facesofdigitalhealth.comMore on Epic and Epic Cosmos:epicresearch.org cosmos.epic.com 

The words healthcare data carry many associations: from frustrations around data interoperability, outrage about the value and monetization of healthcare data, anger due to poor access to medical records by patients, and we could go on. In the next few episodes, you will hear a little bit more about healthcare data management in the US healthcare system. We’re starting with a discussion recorded at HLTH 2022, where Arif Nathoo - CEO and Co-founder of Komodo Health describes how the company plans to capture and de-identify every encounter patients have with the US healthcare system. Komodo Health is currently tracking individual encounters with the healthcare system for over 330 million patients. Companies such as Pfizer, AppliedVR, Turquoise Health, Janssen, and others, use Komnodo's de-identified patient-level data and insights to inform drug development, discovery, clinical trials, clinical research, and innovation.  Make sure to subscribe to the podcast to be notified about new episodes automatically! In the next episode, you will hear why Palantir Foundy is betting on open data standards in healthcare, what a few healthcare data management vendors think about the current state of interoperability and data governance, and more. www.facesofdigitalhealth.comNewsletter: fodh.substack.comLeave a rating or a review: lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealth

This episode is the last on in the series of three discussions about natural language processing in healthcare. In the first episode, I discussed the state of symptom checkers with Jeff Cutler, CCO of Ada Health - the leading symptom-checking provider. In the second episode, CEO of Suki, Punit Singh Soni, explained where voice technology is today in helping doctors better manage their medical records and notes taking. And today’s discussion will give you a comment and critical perspective on using ChatGPT in healthcare and other large language models such as Google’s MedPalm. OBJECTIVES OF THE DISCUSSION:  To clarify the state of natural language processing in healthcare - to which extent is this moving from research to practical use,  To create a clear, realistic picture of ChatGPT and MedPaLM implications Speakers:Alexandre Lebrun - CEO of Nabla - a french company that has created an AI-based medical assistant that makes healthcare professionals more efficient. For instance, it automates clinical documentation and patient engagement. Israel Krush, CEO of Hyro - mostly present in the US market - the world's first headache-free conversational AI, especially focused on healthcare. It’s used for automation across call centers, mobile apps, websites and SMS include physician search, scheduling, prescription refills, FAQs and more. You're doing this mostly in the US, supporting patient communications for health systems like Mercy Health, Baptist Health and Novant Health. Video recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzKTcjPX-qg&t=3sNewsletter: https://fodh.substack.com/www.facesofdigitalhealth.com