Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

Health Datapalooza IV just wrapped up here in Washington, DC, and we’ve been following it closely, both as a media partner and as an interested spectator. For those of you who are just learning about it, Health Datapalooza is an annual conference featuring innovations in the use of health data and advocating for open data to spur future innovations and improve health care. It’s organized by the Health Data Consortium, a collaboration of government, non-profit, and private sector organizations working to liberate health data and put it to good use.

The panels and break-out sessions were informative, and gave a good sense of why open data is important and how it’s currently being used for consumer engagement, better health outcomes, and more. But the real stars of the show were the start-ups and innovators who were there to participate in various challenges. That is, after all, what open data is all about; once you get it, how do you use it? (more…)

One scroll through your Facebook or Twitter news feed and you’d think the world was going crazy. People share their addresses, their heated political commentaries, and strange pictures of cats or food that seem to have absolutely no relevance to their lives or yours. Despite this, last March, I stood up on the stage at TEDxCollegeofWilliamandMary and spoke about the potential of using crowdsourcing technology to save lives.

About two years, ago, I started the Lunas Project—an integrative disaster management platform that leverages crowdsourcing technology, SMS messaging, and mapping tools to improve disaster relief in developing countries. The system has four main competencies: (1) text message warnings to even remote populations, (2) a crisis map that collects emergency reports from social media and texts to better coordinate rescue and relief operations, (3) a road status map where people can upload photos, videos and news links of roads being down or alternate routes that they know of, and finally (4) a donor portal to connect willing donors across the globe to local stores on the ground. (more…)

On May 21^st and 22^nd VentureBeat hosted its first HealthBeat conference in San Francisco with extreme success.  Focusing on how technology disrupts care, the event explored how “smart” hospitals, practices and patients are making positive changes in the health care industry.

Disruptive Women was proud to participate as a media partner and got the opportunity to attend the event. Below are a few highlights we wanted to share with you!

Do you find it difficult to stay fit while working full time? To remedy this, Keas announced a program called My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia to help employees make wiser nutritional choices and save employers money on health care costs.

In addition to learning sessions and compelling speakers, up-and-coming innovators got a chance to participate in the Grand Rounds Innovation Showdown, an innovation challenge. Beyond Lucid Technologies and Liviam walked away as winners. Beyond Lucid won for the Series A and above, they are the maker of a tablet app for emergency medical responders. Liviam won for the Seed round,  and is a social networking tool for people with serious illnesses. (more…)

On June 2nd, 2013, XX in Health, in partnership with Rock Health, will host our third XX Retreat on the East Coast, bringing together our growing communities in Boston, New York and DC. This one-day, invitation-only event is a transformational and multi-generational gathering of 120 female visionaries in healthcare including entrepreneurs, executives, and public sector officials.

Attendees include:

(more…)

This weekend, the new Star Trek movie opened in theaters and hundreds of thousands of moviegoers lost themselves for two hours in a vividly-imagined future in which humankind finally breaches “the final frontier.”

As for me, I prefer the more immediate, but no less exciting, frontiers that modern, cutting-edge technology is making possible.  In the field of health care, for example, we don’t have to wait for an era in which a Starfleet Command exists in order to see entire populations achieve better health and longer lives through devices that only existed in imagination as recently as a decade ago.

This week, Disruptive Women in Health Care is a proud partner of the HealthBeat Conference in San Francisco.  What’s particularly interesting about HealthBeat is that it spotlights how health care is being transformed by visionaries who don’t necessarily have M.D. behind their names. (more…)

Widely regarded as a pioneer in e-health technology solutions, Gale Wilson-Steele, founded MEDSEEK, Inc. in 1996. The company started with the purchase of a book called, “How to Turn Your Mac Into a Web Server”, and with the evolution of the Internet and many outstanding additions to the team, MEDSEEK, Inc. now serves over 1,000 hospitals with online solutions that empower patients, physicians, employees and consumers to securely exchange knowledge, interact with health care organizations and access medical records online.  While her Stanford degree is in biology and she has promoted technology after teaching Computer Aided Design at UCSB, her real gift is as a cheerleader for disruptive change.  Ms. Wilson-Steele has been known to hold company meetings called “show and tell”, and take engineering camping in yurts. She understands that for work to be more than a paycheck, we need to feel we are part of a vision and are making a difference.

Her approach to fixing health care is to provide tools to the people who make it happen, both from the industry and the consumer side.  Her philosophy: we have the science of medicine, now we must improve the process of delivery and the art of living well. (more…)

Progress in health care is driven by people who believe in the power of human imagination.  From antibiotics to genome mapping to virtual surgeries, medical advancement depends on human ingenuity and innovation.   One of the world’s most passionate students of imagination is also the leader of a growing force in health care:  our Man of the Month, Jay Walker.

As “curator” of TEDMED, one of the famous TED conferences, Mr. Walker will convene this community of health care leaders and medical innovators in Washington, D.C. from April 16-19.  Headliners at the annual gathering range from UC San Francisco chancellor Sue Desmond-Hellman to U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, NIH Director Francis Collins and “Brain Activity Map” initiator Rafael Yuste. (more…)

The Learning Health System (LHS) – Essential Standards to Enable Learning (ESTEL) is the theme of an initiative we just launched through CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium) on behalf of the Learning Health Community. Twenty of the brightest minds in the area of health IT in the U.S. and a representative from Argentina convened in early February to develop LHS use cases and identify relevant standards, opportunities and challenges.  The output of the ESTEL Launch meeting was presented in a webinar on March 14^th, after which I was encouraged to write a blog post for Disruptive Women.

I must say that my background as a scientist and my work with various sectors of the federal government (including regulators and other such agencies around the world) have embedded caution into my writing.  (more…)

The traditional (and archaic) practice of medicine involves a physician prescribing a treatment plan to a patient, with little to no participation by that patient. In this construct, patients are the passive recipients of treatment and care that is generally episodic, based upon illness, disease or urgent care. This system limits the opportunities to improve the patient’s–your--health status. If we are continually not “in the know” or considered part of the care team, how can we as patients gain the knowledge we need to improve our health?

Peggy Jo’s Experience

A patient friend of mine is dying of an undiagnosed disease. Her name is Peggy Jo, and over the past seven years she has experienced multiple brain bleeds and numerous hemangiomas (benign tumors made up of blood vessels), was placed in a medical coma and had multiple surgeries.  Each time she enters a new hospital, it is up to her to make sure that all of her files are transferred. (more…)

Disruptive Women is proud to be a media partner of Venture Beat’s new event, HealthBeat 2013. HealthBeat 2013 will explore “Smart Hospitals” and “Smart Practices,” the focal point of where technology is disrupting health care. The event also covers how “Smart Patients” fit in. Patients are now equipped with a library of web stats and tools, giving them more control over how they get medical care.

HealthBeat will help decision makers — CIOs at hospitals, physicians, 
providers, insurers — understand what technologies are most effectively 
transforming health care in 2013 and beyond. It will also help business leaders 
assess the multi-billion dollar market opportunities in this sector. (more…)

Disruptive Women is proud to be a media partner of the second annual AARP Health Innovation@50+ LivePitch, Friday, May 31 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. This is the premier showcase featuring the most exciting start-up companies in the “50 and over” health technology and innovation sector. The pitch event offers the venture capital and angel investor community as well as the media, the opportunity to connect with these outstanding start-ups.

Health Innovation@50+ takes place at the annual 2013 Life@50+ AARP National Event & Expo in Las Vegas, which is attended by 20,000+ members and guests from across the U.S. and the globe. (more…)

Dysfunctional, disconnected, uncoordinated, costly, inefficient. These are just some of the words used to describe the state of the American health care system. Health care reform focuses on eliminating these labels by creating programs that improve the quality, cost, and efficiency of care.

Health IT is viewed as a key catalyst in this reformation. An extremely broad term, health IT refers to the exchange of health information in an electronic environment, including the use of mobile devices, computers, and cloud technology. The use of this technology is found in the majority of reform efforts, including new payment and care delivery models, communication tools, and the methods in the transferring of patient data. (more…)

Two weeks ago I had the good fortune to be invited back to the South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) to participate as a judge of a digital health care start-up competition. SXSW, which takes place in Austin, TX, is historically an indie music gathering that has evolved into a massive mainstream music conference as well as a monumentally huge film festival, like Sundance times twenty. There are literally hundreds of bands and films featured around town. There has now evolved alongside this a conference called Interactive that draws more than 25,000 people and focuses on technology, particular mobile, digital, and Internet.

In other words, SXSW has become one of the world’s largest gatherings of hoodie-sporting, gadget-toting nerd geniuses that are way too square to be hip but no one has bothered to tell them. Imagine you are sitting at a Starbucks in Palo Alto, CA among 25,000 people who cannot possibly imagine that the rest of the world still thinks the Internet is that newfangled thing used mainly for email and porn. SXSW is a cacophonous melting pot of brilliance, creativity, futuristic thinking, arrogance, self-importance, ironic retro rock and roll t-shirts and technology worship. (more…)

I endured what very few people could (or would) do in the past ten days: I traveled to New Orleans to the annual conference of HIMSS, the Health Information Management Systems Society, which features hundreds of suppliers to the health care information technology industry. I returned home to kiss my family hello and goodbye, and a day later flew to Austin for the annual South-by-Southwest conference for music, movie and digital folks. The health track at SXSW has grown over the past five years, and provides a start contrast to “health care” as embodied at HIMSS, and “health” translated through SXSW’s lens.

That contrast represents the confounding nature of the chaos and creative destruction, as Eric Topol has coined it, that the health/tech industry is undergoing. (more…)