Technology That Rocks

Tech-enabled care is a major emerging theme in the 2010s and beyond. Personal health records, monitoring via wearables, medical diagnostic devices that connect to smartphones or are integrated directly into them, as well as decision support / analytics support systems that enable caregivers, as well as the patients themselves, to have an even more detailed understanding of the physiological state — are being advanced and introduced more frequently. Certainly a cross-functional, cross-domain theme that folk with a broader set of experiences will be able to contribute to.

An example of a service that goes beyond what’s available today to patients, through the use of technology - available below:

https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/comprehensive-tech-enabled-checkup-service-q-bio-scores-40m

In the face of the seemingly ever-growing set of challenges facing the global community, there are positive and encouraging news out of science & tech that give hope for a brighter future for all.

Two really exciting advances in healthcare technology, that I think are signs of monumental advances for medical care, are these following two stories that came out this January 2020:

https://www.healthimaging.com/topics/healthcare-economics/fda-clear-worlds-first-portable-mri

https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/20/machine-learning-finds-novel-antibiotic-able-to-kill-superbugs/

Great write-up that takes a more rational stance on the potential wins from broader adoption of AI / machine learning. I’ve been borrowing the term “augmented intelligence” when describing the (hyped up in recent years) acronym of “AI”. The algorithms that sift through large amounts of historical data, and then try to make suggestions on data that’s input to the model by the end-user — are most effective at suggesting the next step / action for the human — rather than replacing people’s decisions entirely. This will be especially evident in healthcare, where doctor / clinician decisions will never be replaced, but rather only augmented by output from systems.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/does-ai-have-a-place-in-medicine/