Archive for the ‘Technology’ 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…)

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…)

OWL’s 2013 Mother’s Day report, In the Arena: How Women and Girls Change the World (PDF), is a bit of a shift for us. Our reports have traditionally focused on specific policies that impact the lives of women as they age – the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, women in the workforce, end of life decision-making. They reflect OWL’s mission – to fight for economic security, access to health care and enhanced quality of life for the nation’s 74 million midlife and older women.

But in our current toxic and polarized political environment, there are few opportunities for real discussions about major life-altering issues. Facts about Social Security, Medicare, retirement security and health care are being drowned out by partisan bickering and posturing.  That’s why we decided to examine the state of 21^st Century advocacy, to look at the innovative ways people – particularly women – are using new technologies to make progress. (more…)

The United States leads the world in fields like technology and business but consistently ranks behind other countries in health outcomes. (1) Recent data show that the life expectancy at birth in the United States is the 50th in the world. (2) Nationally, chronic disease accounts for more than 70% of deaths, (3) but huge health disparities exist between races, (6) income-levels and states. (7) Vulnerable communities within the country, therefore, have even worse outcomes than national statistics would suggest.

Advances in information technology can reverse these trends by accelerating the development of high-impact health solutions. (8) Traditional public health approaches can use lessons from entrepreneurs such as repeated, rapid experimentation with systematic learning from failure to create better solutions. (more…)

Did you know that the infant mortality rate in the United States is higher than most developed countries? Many preventable factors contribute to these negative outcomes including lack of access to prenatal care, negative health behaviors such as smoking or substance abuse, poverty, and unsafe sleep for baby. Ensuring that pregnant women are well informed about their pregnancies, connected to available health resources, and getting prenatal care can help. That’s why I’m proud to be a part of the text4baby initiative, the largest and only free health text messaging service in the U.S. for pregnant women and new moms. (more…)

1 in 3 U.S. adults have enough trust in online health resources that they’ve gone online to diagnose a condition for themselves or a friend. “For one-third of U.S. adults, the Internet is a diagnostic tool,” according to Health Online, the latest survey on online health from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Nearly one-half of these people eventually sought medical attention. One-third did not. Women are more likely to do online medical diagnoses than men do, as do more affluent, college-educated people. (more…)

UnitedHealthGroup toured the 2013 CES show room floor with Disruptive Woman Halle Tecco from Rock Health. She spoke with innovators behind some of the fascinating sensor gadgets on display at the conference. Check the video out here.

In April 2008, at the age of 22, Leslie Rott was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. This post originally appeared on her blog, Getting Closer To Myself, which she started to create awareness about autoimmune diseases.

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So, every once in awhile, I move away from posts that are extremely personal, emotional, and philosophical, to talk about the more practical aspects of being a patient, with some old-fashioned research thrown in for good measure. (more…)

On September 28, 2012 I ventured up to the Hill to hear a panel called A Dose of Reality in the Virtual World of Health IT.  I expected the panel to be a group of cheerleaders for moving to an entirely technological system and cutting more human interaction out of practices.  However, I attended a panel that truly examined the argument and looked at the best and worst case scenarios and what we should do moving forward. (more…)

National Health IT Week may be over, but the ways in which information technology is transforming our health care delivery system – including children’s health – should be talked about all year round. Here are some of the ways that health IT is impacting children’s lives for the better. (more…)

Kenneth Eisner

Ivor B. Horn, MD, MPH

By Ivor Horn, MD, MPH and Kenneth Eisner. Asthma is the most common chronic pediatric medical condition in the United States.  Its prevalence has tripled in the last three decades with disadvantaged, urban, minority children incurring a disproportionate share: 12.8% of African American children are diagnosed with asthma compared to 7.9% of Whites, and African American children are nearly seven times more likely to die from asthma than Whites. Additionally, African Americans use emergency departments more frequently, incurring higher healthcare costs. (more…)