Across the rich world around half of covid-19 deaths have been in care homes. Countries need to radically rethink how they care for their elderly—and some innovative solutions are on offer.
Tag Archives: Healthcare
World Health: U.S. Spends Twice As Much, Driven By Inpatient/Outpatient Cost
Health Technology: “The Science Behind Artificial Blood” (WSJ Video)
The coronavirus pandemic led to shortages in the blood supply across the U.S. Scientists around the world are working on a potential solution. The Future of Everything looks at the process of making artificial blood.
Illustration: Timothy Wong
Infographic: Reframing Care For Non-Traumatic Musculoskeletal Pain
Health: Scientists Develop Simple Smartphone App To Detect “Diabetes” With Up To 80% Accuracy (UCSF)
Overall, the algorithm correctly identified the presence of diabetes in up to 81 percent of patients in two separate datasets. When the algorithm was tested in an additional dataset of patients enrolled from in-person clinics, it correctly identified 82 percent of patients with diabetes.
In the Nature Medicine study, UCSF researchers obtained nearly 3 million PPG recordings from 53,870 patients in the Health eHeart Study who used the Azumio Instant Heart Rate app on the iPhone and reported having been diagnosed with diabetes by a health care provider. This data was used to both develop and validate a deep-learning algorithm to detect the presence of diabetes using smartphone-measured PPG signals.
Among the patients that the algorithm predicted did not have diabetes, 92 to 97 percent indeed did not have the disease across the validation datasets. When this PPG-derived prediction was combined with other easily obtainable patient information, such as age, gender, body mass index and race/ethnicity, predictive performance improved further.
Telehealth: Older Adults’ “Telemedicine Visits” Rise From 4% To 26% In 2020
From 2019 to 2020, there was a substantial increase in the proportion of older adults who reported that their health care providers offered telehealth visits. In May 2019, 14% of older adults said that their health care providers offered telehealth visits, compared to 62% in June 2020.
Similarly, the percentage of older adults who had ever participated in a telehealth visit rose sharply from 4% in May 2019 to 30% in June 2020. Of those surveyed in 2020, 6% reported having a telehealth visit prior to March 2020, while 26% reported having a telehealth visit in the period from March to June 2020.
Over the past year, some concerns about telehealth visits decreased among adults age 50–80 whether or not they had a telehealth visit. Older adults’ concerns about privacy in telehealth visits decreased from 49% in May 2019 to 24% in June 2020, and concerns about having difficulty seeing or hearing health care providers in telehealth visits decreased from 39% in May 2019 to 25% in June 2020. Concerns about not feeling personally connected to the health care provider decreased slightly (49% to 45%).
Healthcare Rankings: “America’s Top Hospitals 2020-2021” (U.S. News)
The Best Hospitals Honor Roll highlights 20 hospitals that excel across most or all types of care evaluated by U.S. News. Hospitals received points if they were nationally ranked in the 16 specialties – the more specialties and the higher their rank, the more points they got – and if they were rated high performing in any of the 10 procedures and conditions. The top point-scorers made the Honor Roll.
- 1. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota
- 2. Cleveland Clinic
- 3. Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
- 4 (tie). New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell, New York
- 4 (tie). UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles
- 6. Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
- 7. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles
- 8. UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco
- 9. NYU Langone Hospitals, New York
- 10. Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago
- 11. University of Michigan Hospitals-Michigan Medicine, Ann Arbor
- 12. Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston
- 13. Stanford Health Care-Stanford Hospital, Stanford, California
- 14. Mount Sinai Hospital, New York
- 15. Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian, Philadelphia
- 16. Mayo Clinic-Phoenix
- 17. Rush University Medical Center, Chicago
- 18 (tie). Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis
- 18 (tie). Keck Hospital of USC, Los Angeles
- 20. Houston Methodist Hospital
Telehealth Technology: Philips “Virtual Care Station” – “High Quality, Secure, Clinical-Grade”
Philips Virtual Care Station, inspired by the VA’s ATLAS program, is a community-based telehealth solution designed to expand access to high-quality care by connecting patients and providers remotely through a secure, clinical-grade environment.
Infographic: “The Economics Of U.S. Healthcare” In 2020
New Healthcare Tech: “Consult Station” By H4D – First Telemedicine Booth
H4D facilitates access to healthcare by allowing patients to consult a doctor remotely in the Consult Station®, the first connected local telemedicine booth. This medical device allows quality healthcare to be delivered for primary care, occupational health, and general health promotion.
Boomers Daily 