A consulting firm dealing with long-range, leading edge technological innovations and their consequences and implications for healthcare policy and practice.
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alt="http://hfdigest.com/wp-content/gallery/pics/robomed2.jpg" The acceleration of change in healthcare is driven to a large extent by the acceleration in computing and communication technologies. Spurts will soon come from: A collaboration between US healthcare’s leading IT association and the next-generation Internet2 consortium to explore the use of Internet2 for private, secure, and very fast health information exchange; and A […]
Some of us think that the acceleration of healthcare innovation is not being taken seriously enough. But what does it mean to take it seriously? What is one supposed to do? It has always been the mission of the Digest to highlight practical and pragmatic responses to acceleration, and your humble editor’s role at the […]
Some economists seem to be getting the message that technology may not be the main cause of runaway US healthcare costs, and that the cost of medical technology is worth it for its demonstrable improvement to outcomes. Still, it obviously wouldn�t hurt to bring down the cost of medtech, and we have suggested before that […]
A slew of new drugs is a sign that the pharmaceutical giants are shaking off their addiction to the blockbuster drug business model in favor of pharmacogenomic drugs with much smaller “niche” markets. That does not mean they are ignoring blockbusters: With the global demand for diabetes drugsexpected to reach US$25 billion by 2011, drug […]
We tend to think of the provision of healthcare services as a local activity. So it may be; but in theGlobal Village, the top US hospitals have figured out that Singapore, Dubai, and Panama are local, too. Mexico is even more local, from a US perspective. Those who argue that the free market is a […]
Johns Hopkins University hopes to achieve in nanobiotechnology the leadership that Sun Microsystems achieved in computing by stressing the network. Its new “virtual” Institute for NanoBioTechnology has no offices, just a hundred or so multidisciplinary researchers apparently bent on world dominance. Mice have been cured of the functional symptoms of Alzheimer’s while retaining the pathological […]
Evidence that technology erodes the deep-pocket advantage of academic hospitals as it becomes more powerful and less expensive can be seen in the development of an echocardiography alternative to nuclear stress tests, and the possibility that community hospitals that already own separate SPECT and CT scanners may not need to invest in an expensive combination […]
Three key elements of the healthcare of the future on which the Digest has consistently focused are computing, evidence-based medicine, and systems biology. All three have come together in the form of Dr. David Eddy’s Archimedes program, adopted by Kaiser Permanente doctors for treating diabetic patients with multiple conditions. This was a future (now it’s […]
Genetic tests may have problems in the consumer market, but they sure have promise in the clinical setting. Strengthening the promise are: A new genetic test technology that eliminates the need for PCR (polymerase chain reaction)processing, which could further stimulate the rapidly growing genetic testing market. A substantial venture capital investment suggests that the technology […]
Implanting brain chips that attach to neurons to help read thoughts (such as the BrainGate chip we have reported on before) carries obvious risks. It appears possible to achieve somewhat similar results non-invasively (though at a much coarser grain) using an EEG skull cap to sense and interpret spikes in brainwave activity. Taking another non-invasive […]
