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 growing number of prestigious institutions and physicians offering online consultation is evidence of acceleration in the adoption of telemedicine. Technology is available that further bridges the gap between online physician and online patient, by allowing for telemetry monitoring and management of the patient’s condition. Tracking technology trends is vital to all practitioners in medicine, […]
Doubts about the validity of recent health cost predictions highlight the growing futility of long-range studies that fail to factor-in the dynamic of technological innovation. An example is LVADs, which could cost Medicare $15 billion annually if there is no competition and if competition and ever-improving, lower-cost technologies do not bring the cost way down […]
Electronic and fluorescent chemical devices built at molecular/nanometer scale can detect molecules ranges from DNA to TNT. These devices often rely on molecular imaging, which is advancing by leaps and bounds and has the potential to rapidly change the entire field of healthcare and the practice of medicine. In the meantime, simple breath tests could […]
You know that major movements in the medical technology sector are afoot when Big Blue starts to take a direct interest, as it has by making a wireless heart monitor. Already, defibrillator and pacemaker manufacturers are competing to build wireless monitoring and management capabilities into their implant devices, and next-generation LVADs, small enough for implant […]
The antidote to Internet viruses may be a whole new Internet, already under construction. While we’re at it, why not a whole new Web as well? Today’s Web is a massive, publicly-accessible information warehouse utilizing the combined storage capacity of the millions of computers connected to the Internet. Tomorrow’s Web — also already under construction, […]
Health Futures Digest is less about predicting the success of specific innovations or breakthroughs or discoveries, and more about predicting the trends that innovations help bring to the surface. For example, the discovery of a chemical that gives up to 80 percent more life to fruit flies may or may not lead to similar success […]
Significant strides are being made toward growing replacement organs in the lab, and in substantially repairing badly damaged ones in situ including injecting muscle and pacemaker cardiomyocites grown from embryonic — and potentially even adult — stem cells. Growing Replacement Organs Growing entire organs in the lab requires scaffolding for the cells to grow on […]
Already-emerged technologies and techniques underlie the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s confidence that it will be essentially out of a job by 2015. And that’s without considering the rapidly emerging technologies we discuss in Health Futures Digest. Viruses may be losing their evolutionary edge in being able to mutate faster than vaccines can keep up. Old […]
The acceleration of innovations appears to be taking its toll on ethics, which can’t keep up; and in the United States the PATRIOT Act could be taking a toll on the acceleration of innovations, which is being denied the contributions of foreign scientists. Surgical procedures are being broadcast live over the Internetto beef up hospital […]
The lab-demonstrated potential of nanomaterials is restrained by the difficulty of producing them in quantity. Two new techniques could bring nanomaterial mass production to fruition within one and five years, respectively. Very stable, durable, lightweight, and transparent magnets with major potential impacts on lasers and holography are under development. Nanodevices Easier to Make A simple […]
