Faces of Digital Health

SPECIAL APPEAL:Dear listeners, as the war in Ukraine continues, the need for medical help is increasing. If you’re a clinician or a telehealth provider, please get in touch with Health Tech Without Borders. Health Tech Without Borders is organising a "Ukraine Telehealth Relief" initiative to provide free of charge telehealth and remote consultations to the people of Ukraine. So if you’re a clinician or telemedicine provider, please contact Health Tech Without Borders: https://www.healthtechwithoutborders.org/ukraine-telehealth-relief If you’re a medical device manufacturer or have the ability to donate medical equipment, EIT Health is facilitating the supply of medical equipment to Ukraine. EIT Health has partnered with the Polish Medical Mission, a leading humanitarian organisation working with healthcare professionals on the border of Ukraine. If you are an organisation with the ability to donate and ship any of the medical equipment please complete the form on EIT Health’s website: https://eithealth.eu/ukraine-appeal/In this episode, you’re going to hear about metaverse and healthcare, which conditions need to be fulfilled for health tech to succeed, you will also get a glimpse into how Canada’s Primary Care Chronic Disease Surveillance System was built. And much more. I spoke with Karim Karshavjee, Family Physician with over 25 years of experience designing, developing, and implementing Electronic Health Records/Electronic Medical Records and helping clinicians use them effectively. He is also the Program Director of the Masters of Health Informatics program at the University of Toronto. Enjoy the show and if you haven’t yet, subscribe to the show to be notified about new episodes automatically. 

When one starts to wonder about why data-sharing is still more or less cumbersome in healthcare, you quickly get to the challenges with interoperability siloed data and of course, data standards. Sharing of data has improved with the introduction of the messaging standard called FHIR. But throughout the years, debates about open standards and open ecosystems have started to become louder. In this episode, you’re going to hear a little bit more about that and the openEHR standard specification. I was joined by Hanna Pohjonen, eHealth management consultant and founder at Rosaldo Oy. Hanna has worked across the world, as a consultant in various regional and national eHealth projects in 31 different countries across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. She consults on healthcare information systems and IT architectures, vendor-neutral archiving, data sharing, and more. In her past, she also represented Finland in eHealth matters in the European Commission. In this discussion, you will hear a little bit more about healthcare digitalization in the Nordics, the complexity, and challenges with national and regional eHealth projects and openEHR, what exactly it is, and where it is used.Visit the website: www.facesofidigitalhealth.com Leave a rating or a review: lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealthTo read a bit more about the history of the show: A reflection after 100 episodes: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-did-i-get-100-digital-health-podcast-episodes-tjasa-zajc-1f/?trackingId=J%2BV0zLmqRSSEgTaklgTkUg%3D%3D ****Sponsor mentioned in the episode*****Master E-networking live course on Maven. In ten days, you’ll digitalize and build your network. You will learn how to maximize the value of any event you’re attending: Go to Masterenetworking.com Use the code: FACESOFDIGITALHEALTH10

Many software solutions for healthcare could be described as lacking empathy. Too often, solutions are addressing products viability and feasibility, but put desirability in the second place of priorities, says Tim Peck is Executive Portfolio Director of Health at IDEO. He is an entrepreneur and a Harvard-trained Emergency Medicine physician, who has been practicing human-centered design for over a decade. He spent 3 months in a nursing home to grasp the reality and problems of this kind of environment before he built Call9 - a health technology company that provided telemedicine for nursing home residents. In this discussion, we talked about design in healthcare. What is human.centered design? How to ask questions in your user research? What are the main mistakes innovators make?   More episodes and recaps: www.facesofdigitalhealth.comLeave a rating or a review: www.lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealth ****Sponsor mentioned in the episode***Master E-networking live course on Maven. In ten days, you’ll digitalize and build your network. You will learn how to maximize the value of any event you’re attending: Go to Masterenetworking.com Use the code: FACESOFDIGITALHEALTH10

Voice tech is one of the tech areas with high potential to optimize healthcare processes for providers and ease chronic disease in management for patients. In reality: How far are we from futuristic ideas where everything would be operated with the help of voice? How do innovators reduce the risk of misunderstandings in designing voice technologies? What does the development of human-like bots look like?Tune in to the discussion with Julia Hoxha co-founder and CEO of Zana - a healthcare startup that helps organisations to build artificially intelligent voice and chatbot solutions. Julia’s background is in computer science with a heavy focus in machine learning and particularly in conversational AI, which is also the core technology of Zana. We discussed the latest trends in the use of voice in healthcare and how far beyond scheduling appointments with the help of Alexa have we come by 2022. This episode is supported by EiT Health Germany, which is one of eight Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) currently funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). EiT Health Germany connects 150 renowned partners from industry, research and education from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The unique network helps initiate outstanding innovations in the health sector. If you're a startup working in the field of digital health or biotech and don't know EiT Health Germany yet, I would encourage you to visit eit-health.de, where you will find more about innovation, acceleration, and education programs. The application deadline for many of these programs is 14th March, so do check them:  Startups meet healthcare providers: https://eithealth.eu/programmes/start-ups-meet-healthcare-providers/  All 2022 opportunities: https://eit-health.de/en/accelerator-2/ Learn more about Zana:https://zana.com/ Past EIT Health Germany series episodes: EIT Health Germany Series 2/12: Improving Medication Prescribing With Digital Twins (ExactCure): https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/eit-health-germany-medication-prescribing-digital-twins-exactcure EiT Health Germany Series 1/12: Changing The Paradigm in the Fight Against Antimicrobial Resistance (Alexander Belcredi): https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/phagomed-biontech-antimicrobial-resistance Also visit: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com

This is the second episode about digital health transformation in the Middle East. I spoke with Michele Tarnow, a healthcare leader experienced in managing across multi-national geographies, organization boundaries, and matrix organizations. Michelle has been living in UAE since 2016 and shared her insights into how are countries in the Middle East approaching digitalization of healthcare, how does cultural diversity amplify innovation and how is Alliance Care Technologies, the company she is the CEO of, using best available technologies to optimize care and offer clinicians tools for better care, without turning them into data clerks.Enjoy the show and also tune in to the previous episode with a perspective of Zaid Tabet - healthcare executive who has been living in the Middle East for a decade and worked with government and private organizations to advance healthcare operations, processes, policies and regulations to promote digital healthcare adoption and use.Enjoy the show and go to www.facesofdigitalhealth.com to browse through other episodes as well. 

In the next two episodes, we’ll dive into healthcare development a digitalization in the Middle East. You’re going to hear from two speakers based in Dubai. The speaker of today’s episode is Ziad Tabet, Chief Customer Officer at Alliance Care Technologies. Ziad is a healthcare veteran with three decades of experience spanning many aspects of the healthcare space. He has extensive experience in operations and financial management of hospital systems, healthcare start-ups, sales and business development, account management, creating and bringing infrastructure and teams from idea to reality. Ziad has been living in UAE for over ten years, first in Abu Dhabi now in Dubai. In this discussion, he shared his experience in the region, commented on opportunities and mindset around digitalization.www.facesofdigitalhealth.comwww.lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealth

Unsafe medication practices and medication errors are a leading cause of injury and avoidable harm in health care systems across the world. Exactcure is a digital health startup from France addressing the challenge of preventing the negative effects of medications. The company is building a digital twin simulator, that shows the effects and interactions of drugs in the body of an individual. They take into account any data the patient can provide, from basic personal characteristics such as age, gender, kidney status, genotype, if a person smokes or not, or any other individual parameter that has a proven influence on a specific medication. I spoke with Fabien Astic, Chief Business Development Officer at ExactCure, and Margaux Kerhousse, Business Developer at ExactCure, about the company’s journey, partnerships, and how their solution could fit into the existing prescribing workflows. This is the second out of 12 episodes supported by EIT Health Germany. EIT Health Germany is one of eight Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) currently funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). EIT Health Germany connects 150 renowned partners from industry, research, and education from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. If you're a startup working in the field of digital health or biotech and don't know EiT Health Germany yet, eit-health.de, where you will find more about innovation, acceleration, and education programs. Exactcure participated in several EIT Health Germany programs. Among others you will hear about is the Startups meet Healthcare Providers programs, which aims to bridge the gap between startups and clinicians. This can help shorten the time it takes for innovators to start testing their solutions in practice. To learn more about this program, go to the link in the show notes. Many application deadlines close in March, so do check out the links for opportunities right for you: All EIT Health Germany 2022 opportunities: https://eit-health.de/en/accelerator-2/ Startups meet healthcare providers: https://eithealth.eu/programmes/start-ups-meet-healthcare-providers/  www.facesofdigitalhealth.comRecap of the episode: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/eit-health-germany-medication-prescribing-digital-twins-exactcureLeave a rating or review: www.lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealth

If you took part in the Clubhouse frenzy last year, you probably came across the Digital Health Channel and MedNet club. Digital Health Channel which currently has 6400 members, was among the key digital health topics related hubs on Clubhouse with an active schedule of discussions each week. It was founded by MD Jhonatan Bringas and healthcare expert Amit Goldman. MD Diana van Stijn who was often a speaker in the channel too, founded MedNet, a club targeted at medical professionals. While the married couple Diana Van Stijn and Jhonatan Bringas are not active on Clubhouse anymore, they are continuing their pursuit of bridging the gap between medical practice and innovation. They work with Medscape and occasionally facilitate digital health-related discussions. They’re the co-founders of Lapsi health, a digital health startup that was first looking at a digital therapeutic solution for asthma in children but is now pivoting in the space of digital biomarkers. Most of the time, however, Diana works as a clinical resident at Amsterdam UMC Hospital and Jhonathan as the digital health consultant and lecturer. In today's short discussion you’re going to hear a bit more about their journey, perspective on digital therapeutics, and bridging the gap between academia and the industry to accelerate healthcare innovation.More on the website:www.facesofdigitalhealth.com 

The positive potentials of AI in healthcare are breathtaking. From smoother processes to more accurate care with fewer medical errors. But if we learned anything from the last 15 years of living with social media, it is that the development of algorithms without proper regulation can have negative impacts on society. In healthcare, AI development is still in the early stages. Many regulation-related questions still need to be addressed. It is not easy to create regulation, because it needs to take into account all sorts of aspects: safety, trust, values of the environment it is designed for. In today’s episode, you’ll hear a discussion with Bart de Witte - Founder of Hippo AI foundation - a non-profit organization that fights for making medical knowledge openly available and AI-based healthcare a common good. This is a diametrically opposing approach to the direction of current medical AI developments — the majority of which focus on the privatization of medical knowledge. Bart and I discussed what exactly does it mean to have open AI models, how can we create an environment to support that, the state of AI regulation in Europe, and more. Learn more about the Hippo AI Foundation: https://www.hippoai.org/The European artificial intelligence strategy: implications and challenges for digital health: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30112-6/fulltext www.facesofdigitalhealth.com

Antimicrobial resistance is a global problem related to the overuse of antibiotics and the lack of development of new ones. Many solutions are entering the market to address the issue: software solutions to identify, track and predict antibiotic-resistant infections and help prescribers with more accurate prescribing of antibiotics. Antibiotics are not appealing to the pharmaceutical industry from a business perspective. The reason is that new antibiotics are intended for a fraction of all patients. So if you develop a drug that’s meant to be used as the last resort for clinicians after they've tried all other options, clinicians would more often than not try to avoid using these new antibiotics if not absolutely necessary. Among the problems with antibiotics is the fact that many are very broad-spectrum, used to kill several different bacteria. So in this episode, we’re going to change the paradigm of antimicrobial treatments: what if you could target harmful bacteria more precisely? You’ll hear from Alexander Belcredi, co-founder and Co-CEO of the biotech startup PhagoMed, which was acquired by BioNTech and renamed BioNTech R&D Austria in October 2021. Phagomed has been researching the field of antimicrobials and also developed an innovative treatment for bacterial vaginosis. In today’s discussion, you’ll hear about the challenges with the development of antimicrobial therapies, and also learn more about Phagomed’s journey before the acquisition.  This episode is supported by EiT Health Germany, which is one of eight Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) currently funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). EiT Health Germany connects 150 renowned partners from industry, research and education from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The unique network helps initiate outstanding innovations in the health sector. If you're a startup working in the field of digital health or biotech and don't know EiT Health Germany yet, I would encourage you to visit eit-health.de, where you will find more about innovation, acceleration, and education programs.Learn more: EiT Catapult Program: https://eit-health.de/en/eit-health-catapult-2021/ EiT Health Germany: https://eit-health.de/en/  More about antimicrobial resistance: How Can We Optimize the Use of Antibiotics? (Oliver Schacht, OpGen): https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f130-how-can-we-optimize-the-use-of-antibiotics-oliver-schacht-opgen?rq=antibiotic  US Clinicians: Reflect on how this Podcast applies to your day-to-day and earn AMA PRA Category 1 CMEs here: https://earnc.me/UpR9lQ