Health and Disability

While Silicon Valley’s technological breakthroughs have transformed the way people live, work, and play, health care remains an arena bogged down by archaic technology and inefficient paperwork. At the 2017 Forbes Healthcare Summit, executives from startups Color, Virta Health, Honor and Collective Health gather to discuss how they apply the hallmarks of their industry — user-friendliness, big data, virtual communication — to everything from caring for elderly parents to managing your employees’ health insurance plans.

Seth Sternberg, who cofounded non-medical homecare company Honor, recalls getting the idea for the startup during a visit with his mother. The California transplant, whose mom lives in Connecticut, noticed that she was driving much slower than he’s used to. “Mom, why are you driving so slowly?” Seth remembered asking. “Well, driving is harder than it used to be,” his mom replied.

The incident got him thinking about his mother’s future, when she may not be able to drive at all. “I don’t want to be the kid that says, mom, sorry, you now have to move to California to be with me,” Sternberg says. As it stands, if a person loses the ability to perform a few necessary tasks — such as cooking, bathing or getting groceries — they will no longer be able to live independently in their homes. Sternberg started to look into non-medical homecare for seniors — services that provide caretakers who help with daily activities — and found an extremely fragmented industry that has over 30,000 players but no one owning more than 0.5% of the market.

There’s a global push for doctors and patients to use antibiotics more judiciously, largely because overusing them is contributing to growing resistance—meaning that some infections that were previously treatable no longer respond well to medications. Now, a new study in mice suggests that antibiotics may come with another potential health consequence. They could be interfering with the microbiome—a community of bacteria that live in the gut and elsewhere—and these changes may be passed down through generations and may cause disease.

Prior studies in humans have linked antibiotic exposure to a higher risk for IBD, which is thought to affect about 1.3 million Americans. Blaser says that the new study’s findings add to the evidence that antibiotic overuse may cause health complications even beyond antibiotic resistance.

“A lot of pregnant women are taking antibiotics, and a lot of teen girls are taking antibiotics,” says Blaser. “We are concerned that it could have an effect on the next generation.”

He noticed that changes in activity and behavior patterns showed up well before the underlying issues manifested into medical conditions and sought a system to observe his parents continuously and let him know of these changes early enough to intervene.

Finding the existing technologies inadequate and outdated, Movva set about creating a first-in-the-industry system to observe the daily activity and behavior patterns of each parent individually and with privacy, and alert him to anomalies. Movva has worked in technology for 30 years, 23 of them in healthcare, including being the founding CIO for Sheridan Healthcare and creating its first mobile EMR device on the Palm Pilot. He also created the first web-based home-care platform at Interim Healthcare.

Researchers using functional MRI (fMRI) have found that neurofeedback training has the potential to reduce the severity of tinnitus or even eliminate it, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

Tinnitus is the perception of noise, often ringing, in the ear. The condition is very common, affecting approximately one in five people. As sufferers start to focus on it more, they become more frustrated and anxious, which in turn makes the noise seem worse. The primary auditory cortex, the part of the brain where auditory input is processed, has been implicated in tinnitus-related distress.

For the study, researchers looked at a novel potential way to treat tinnitus by having people use neurofeedback training to turn their focus away from the sounds in their ears. Neurofeedback is a way of training the brain by allowing an individual to view some type of external indicator of brain activity and attempt to exert control over it.

The researchers gave the participants techniques to help them do this, such as trying to divert attention from sound to other sensations like touch and sight.

“Many focused on breathing because it gave them a feeling of control,” Dr. Sherwood said. “By diverting their attention away from sound, the participants’ auditory cortex activity went down, and the signal we were measuring also went down.”

Amid the steady rise of the hospitalist model, inpatients cared for by their own primary care physicians experience lower length of stay and reduced mortality compared to hospitalists and covering generalists, according to a study published by JAMA Internal Medicine.

These findings appear to contradict previous research suggesting that hospitalists delivered more efficient and higher quality care, which authors of the new study allege faced substantial limitations. Previous studies, for example, did not differentiate among nonhospitalist physicians based on prior knowledge of the patient.

The study compared patient outcomes among three types of inpatient care delivery:

• PCPs with existing relationships with the patients
• Hospitalists with extensive knowledge of the hospital
• Generalists without previous familiarity with the patients or the hospital

The FDA has approved the first epinephrine auto-injector specifically designed for infants and small children weighing 16.5-33 pounds, kaléo, the device's manufacturer, announced Monday.

"Until now, healthcare practitioners and caregivers to infants and small children have not had an epinephrine auto-injector with an appropriate dose of epinephrine available to them, potentially causing some delay in the administration of epinephrine in a life-threatening allergic emergency," said Vivian Hernandez-Trujillo, MD, a pediatric allergist at Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami, in the release. "Having an epinephrine auto-injector with a needle length and dose specifically designed for infants and small children should help alleviate concerns around hitting the bone or injecting too much epinephrine."

More children are getting treated for anaphylaxis, the company noted, citing a study that found a 129.8% increase in emergency department visits for the condition by children age 4 and younger between 2005 and 2014.

"The approval of an epinephrine auto-injector specifically designed for infants and small children is timely, especially given the recent changes to guidelines recommending that certain high-risk infants, as young as 4 to 6 months old, be introduced to peanut-containing foods," said Eleanor Garrow-Holding, president and CEO of the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Connection Team, in the press release.

"We are pleased that the pediatric allergy healthcare community and parents of infants and small children with life-threatening allergies will have the ability to obtain an FDA-approved epinephrine auto-injector in the event of an allergic emergency."

Video.....

https://goo.gl/1KMMkm

Device selection for the administration of long-acting bronchodilators is an important factor for the treatment of people diagnosed with COPD. At the American Thoracic Society International Conference in Washington, D.C., we talked to some of the investigators presenting data on this subject.

I am your host, Dr. Prathima Setty and I would like to welcome my three guests to the program. Speaking with me today are Dr. Sidney Braman, a pulmonologist and Professor at Mount Sinai Health System; Dr. Donald Mahler, a pulmonologist and Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth; and Dr. Nicola Hanania, a pulmonologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine Airways 
Clinical Research Center.

Doctors, thank you for being here to share your insights on delivery devices for long-acting bronchodilators for COPD.