As healthcare digitizes everything from insurance claims to clinical decisions, some functions remain frustratingly analog, old school, and inefficient. One such function is the distribution of human biospecimens necessary for medical research. Specimens are essential in providing much of the data that researchers examine, EHRs capture, and scientific databases aggregate. Unfortunately, the distribution of specimens and their data to researchers is woefully outdated and inefficient. Frankly,
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A Patient Engagement Strategy Needs to Deliver a Holistic Experience
Researchers from Johns Hopkins published a study in October on the impact of the pandemic on health care delivery. Among its findings, the data show a 21.4% decrease in primary care visits in Q2 of 2020, compared against the average volume of Q2 visits for the previous two years. By contrast, there was a sharp increase in telehealth engagements, accounting for 35.3% of all provider visits in Q2 this year, compared with 4.1% in Q1 and 1.1% in 2018-2019. Despite the shifts in healthcare
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Volpara Acquires Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Platform CRA Health for $18M
What You Should Know: - Volpara Health, an integrated breast care platform assisting in the delivery of personalized patient care has acquired breast cancer risk assessment platform CRA Health. - CRA Health, LLC, is a breast cancer risk assessment company spinoff from Massachusetts General Hospital — a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital. Today the company delivers more than two million assessments annually to women’s imaging clinics. - CRA software is cloud-based
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Fujifilm & Volpara Partner to Help Clinicians Determine Patient Breast Density
What You Should Know: - FUJIFILM Medical Systems U.S.A., Inc. and Volpara
Solutions announced the extension of their partnership to provide mammography
facilities and clinicians with breast imaging solutions designed to improve
image quality, streamline workflow and accurately assess a patient's breast
density. - Building on a successful 6-year partnership, Fujifilm's
customers using ASPIRE Cristalle with Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) now
have access to the latest innovations from
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AWS, PHDA Collaborate to Develop Breast Cancer Screening and Depression Machine Learning Models
What You Should Know: - Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance (PHDA) announce a collaboration to produce more accurate machine learning models for breast cancer screening and depression. - In work funded through the PHDA-AWS collaboration, a research team led by Shandong Wu, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Radiology, is using deep-learning systems to analyze mammograms in order to predict the short‐term risk of developing
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Consumer Genetic Tests Accelerate Precision Medicine for Some Providers
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests have been on the scene for some time now. The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first DTC test on three specific BRCA1/BRCA2 breast cancer gene mutations more than two years ago. Six months after that, the agency similarly green-lighted a DTC pharmacogenomic (PGx) test to examine 33 variants for eight different genes that indicate how effectively patients metabolize specific medications. Like many such advances, availability of DTC tests is
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How AR and MR Technology Can Reduce Medical Vulnerability to Improve the Patient Experience
Hospitals and health systems work hard every day to deliver patient-centered care. In fact, “the patient experience” is something now being measured, monitored and discussed throughout the healthcare continuum. Yet for most patients, moments of anxiety and medical vulnerability still abound, and the conversation rarely addresses this important fact. Patients awaiting an X-ray, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) scan, for instance, maybe fearful of the results.
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XRHealth Lands $7M to Expand Telehealth VR/AR Platform
What You Should Know: XRHealth raises $7M in funding to expand its telehatlh virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) platform for clinicians and patients. XRHealth is the first certified Extended Reality medical
company in the world; their Medical Applications are FDA & CE
Registered. XRHealth created the first virtual reality telehealth
clinic in the world that is currently certified in 17 states. XRHealth, formerly known as VRHealth a provider of extended
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COVID-19: XRHealth Launches Virtual Reality Telehealth Supports Groups
What You Need to Know: - In response to the growing social distancing precautions to avoid the spread of COVID-19, XRHealth is making VR telehealth support groups available for patients. - XRHealth support groups are tailored for patients with the following conditions: Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's, breast cancer, menopause, an injury that affected motor function, anxiety, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, substance abuse, post-stroke rehabilitation, brain injury and there will also be a
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LifeOmic, Susan G. Komen Tissue Bank Partner to Advance Breast Cancer Research
- Susan G. Komen Tissue Bank partners with LifeOmic to aggregate and analyze data on LifeOmic’s AI-powered cloud platform, the Precision Health Cloud (PHC), to gain insight into breast cancer. - The Komen Tissue Bank is the only repository in the world for normal breast tissue and matched serum, plasma, and DNA. The tissue bank advances breast cancer research by offering high quality, richly annotated tissue samples to scientists worldwide. LifeOmic, the creator of the LIFE mobile apps and the
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