Besides being launched by Amazon alumni, General Medicine has close business ties to a senior Amazon health exec Excerpt – A new digital health care marketplace, launched last week, has a good amount of Amazon in its DNA. General Medicine, with $32 million in funding, came out of stealth with three former Amazon employees as co-founders and investors, a business model that could compete with Amazon’s One Medical — and behind the scenes, a current senior Amazon executive. The former employees, including the founders of PillPack — the pharmacy company that Amazon bought in 2018 for about $750 million and … Read More
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Results could help build case for insurance coverage for prescription digital therapeutics “In a new report, the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) finds that Rejoyn, an app for depression from Otsuka Precision Health, and DaylightRx, an app for anxiety from Big Health, warrant further adoption because their clinical trials show strong evidence of benefits. Both apps are intended to be used alongside ongoing mental health treatment, and in most cases, the institute found the apps will save money. PHTI was founded in 2023 with $50 million to conduct independent evaluations of health technology. Its findings, both positive and negative, have ruffled feathers in the industry, and have … Read More
“A wave of new ventures is no doubt poised to deliver fresh possibilities in DTC [direct-to-consumer] health care. However, Big Tech is uniquely positioned to scale their own DTC health care services rapidly and efficiently or can choose to provide the technological backbone for traditional HCOs [health care organizations] or new entrant startups. Big Tech platforms have hundreds of millions of users and access to hyperpersonalized data from search, social media interactions, mobility data, and LLM [large language model] engagement. Google Search has long been a de facto patient decision support tool for diagnosis and more, well before being tuned … Read More
“To paraphrase health policy expert Timothy Hoff, there is a fight going on for the soul of health care, and primary care is at the center of the struggle. In the United States, we face an unresolved tension between two conflicting visions: Does our society want an empathetic, highly relational care delivery system built around primary care and trusting relationships, or, as Hoff puts it, “a more efficient, convenient, and highly transactional care delivery system, impersonal and built on algorithms, health care corporations, and technology”? [..] Increasingly, health care organizations and information technology vendors, recognizing the need to better support … Read More
“The process of extracting systemic health insights by analyzing ocular data, including retinal images with AI, is referred to as oculomics. We define prescreening as a preliminary assessment of disease or potential disease in asymptomatic individuals. Healthcare From the Eye (Topcon Healthcare Inc) prescreening is utilization of retinal images to identify ocular or systemic disease or potential disease in asymptomatic individuals in a coordinated care system that includes eye care professionals (ECPs), primary care professionals (PCPs), and specialty care professionals using secure and responsible technology. It offers the potential for rapid, cost-effective, and accessible prescreening for a wide range of devastating diseases. Such … Read More
The tool will allow women to screen for HPV, which causes almost all cases of cervical cancer, without visiting a doctor. Excerpt – The Food and Drug Administration approved the United States’ first at-home cervical cancer screening tool on Friday, a decision that stands to give women an accessible alternative to Pap smears, which many find painful or traumatic. The new test, made by Teal Health, involves swabbing the vagina with a spongelike tool rather than inserting a speculum and scraping cells from the cervix, as health care providers do in Pap smears. [..] Cervical cancer experts told The New … Read More
“[Abstract] Efficacy of digital health (d-Health) interventions on workers’ physical activity (PA), sedentary behavior, and physiological outcomes remains unclear. This umbrella review searched PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar up to October 25, 2024. We identified 24 systematic reviews (SRs) and selected 130 individual studies from these SRs for analysis. The AMSTAR 2 tool rated the quality of most SRs as critically low. Narrative syntheses suggested that d-Health interventions could potentially improve all outcomes compared with no intervention. However, whether d-Health interventions outperform non-d-Health interventions remains uncertain. Meta-analyses showed a significantly small effect of d-Health interventions on step counts, sedentary/sitting … Read More
“Symptoms of hypothyroidism are nonspecific and poorly predict clinically significant thyroid dysfunction, especially in patients with underlying medical conditions and advanced age. Thus, it is essential to identify thyroid dysfunction before initiating therapy. Yet, it is estimated that about 30% of persons newly started on l-thyroxine treatment in the United States have normal thyroid function. When symptoms result in ordering thyroid function tests, an elevated thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) level should not trigger therapy without confirmatory TSH and free thyroxine (FT4) levels. Symptoms associated with overt hypothyroidism (elevated TSH, low FT4) usually resolve with l-thyroxine replacement, but therapy for subclinical hypothyroidism … Read More
“We identified all DHTs [digital health technologies] prescribable for a hypothetical patient with 5 chronic conditions (type 2 diabetes, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD], osteoporosis, and osteoarthritis), and assessed the number of DHTs this patient should be prescribed to receive benefits from functions health professionals considered important. We chose to evaluate devices involving hardware and standalone apps together to reflect patients’ perspective, as patients would have to cope with tasks from all DHTs, regardless their nature. [..] We defined DHTs as all software as a medical device (SaMD); implanted, wearable, external, or environmental medical devices driven by software; and … Read More
Hearing aids and cochlear implants have been getting better for years, but a new type of device—eyeglasses that display real-time speech transcription on their lenses—are a game-changing breakthrough. Excerpt – free voice-to-text app on his [David Howorth, a person with multiple causes of hearing loss] phone, Google Live Transcribe & Notification. When someone speaks to him, he can read what they’re saying on the screen and respond as if he’d heard it. He belongs to a weekly lunch group with half a dozen men in their seventies and eighties, and when they get together he puts his phone in the … Read More