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Posted: 05 may 2021

Women Not Getting The Healthcare They Need During Covid-19, New Survey Shows

Just as women have borne the brunt of economic damage from the pandemic, a new report makes clear that Covid-19 has also disproportionately taken a toll on women’s health and access to care. According to a national survey, conducted late in 2020 by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), more than one-third (38%) of women had skipped preventive services, such as checkups or routine tests, during the pandemic. Nearly one-quarter (23%) had forgone a recommended test or treatment. In comparison, only 26% and 15% of men had missed preventive or recommended care, respectively. “The fact that women are more likely than men to delay their healthcare services is not surprising, as women have been disproportionately burdened with child and household care, home schooling and, in many cases, an inability to maintain employment due to the many obligations placed upon them,” said Dr. Sonia S. Hassan, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and associate vice president in the Office of Women’s Health at Wayne State University.

Motesque's CEO Prof. Dr. Kai Oberländer and CSO Dietmar Hagen Horn will explain how Motesque uses motion data to analyze and predict motions at the GIANT

Motion data is an immensely valuable asset in the health tech sector. Motesque's CEO Prof. Dr. Kai Oberländer and CSO Dietmar Hagen Horn will explain how Motesque uses motion data to analyze and predict motions at the GIANT Health event…

Growing HealthTec community - Focus on the HealthTec cluster (STFC)

Connecting a wide variety of stakeholders, the North West HealthTec Cluster is improving the understanding of the health and life science sector in the region and the unique capabilities across industry, academia, public sector and entrepreneurs. Through the creation…

conversationHEALTH Announces Key Hires to Accelerate Global Growth and Expansion

April 23, 2021 (Toronto, ON) - conversationHEALTH, the conversational AI platform purpose-built for the Life Sciences industry has announced it is scaling growth across all divisions of the organization in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. This includes the hiring of Chery Burt, VP, Strategy to lead thought leadership and go-to-market planning with customers and partners, and Kei Kubo, Managing Director of APAC, to lead business development and build strategic partnerships across the Asia-Pacific market.

Have you seen 14 Episode | Season 3 of GIANT's Healthy Innovators Live TV Show on our Youtube channel?

Host: Barry Shrier, Founder and CEO, GIANT Health Events Guests: Jen Estherby, Healthcare Innovation Lead at Barclays Eagle Labs at Barclays Wealth & Investment Management Darren Crombie, Founder and CEO of Bridgit Care Fiona Willis, Founder and CEO of Link-ages Tech Ltd. Click here to…

Guide to German Medtech Companies 2021 written by GIANT's media partner Biocom

Hello! Feel free to download a guide here https://medtech-zwo.de/fileadmin/medtech-zwo/PDF/Guide-to-German-Medtech-Companies_2021_web.pdf

This Startup Raised $25 Million To Liberate Your Healthcare Data In The Cloud

Ricky Sahu is on a mission to free patients from the tyranny of paper medical records. More than a decade after the federal government pushed health systems to digitize records, some patient files are still shared by mail or even fax machines. Sahu’s startup, 1upHealth, aims to end these practices by building the infrastructure for healthcare data to flow in the cloud. With $25 million in Series B funding announced Wednesday, the Boston-based startup is expanding its foothold among insurance companies. This means it can provide more patients with a combination of both clinical data and insurance claims records, which is what’s needed to move the needle to improve care, says founder and CEO Sahu: “You can marry the two together and truly drive better quality and costs.” The benefit for health insurers, Sahu says, is this can better enable what’s called value-based care—arrangements where insurers pay for the outcomes of healthcare services, rather than paying for the individual services provided. As it currently stands, many of these contracts are a shot in the dark for healthcare providers, since doctors don’t really know how much they’re getting paid until the claims are processed months after the fact. That’s because the data is isolated across multiple, different systems. Federal rule changes going into effect this year require both health systems and insurers to make healthcare data available to patients electronically through standardized APIs, which will allow different software systems to communicate with each other and transfer packets of data. Here’s what that means in practice for patients. Each time a person changes jobs, it can often be a Sisyphean task to move to a new health insurance plan: filling out paper forms, regurgitating medical history, and re-establishing relationships with doctors—all because there is no data transfer between rival health insurers. With 1upHealth, a patient’s healthcare data “is liberated and you can go wherever your care journey needs you to go,” says Carl Byers, a partner at F-Prime, which led the Series B. Returning investors Jackson Square Ventures, Eniac Ventures, and Social Leverage also participated in the round. These investors are hoping that 1upHealth, which has raised $35.4 million to date, will disrupt the healthcare industry much like the data warehousing company Snowflake did. That company had software’s largest-ever IPO by raising $3.4 billion, and its current market cap is around $68 billion. The company’s name is a nod to the Nintendo video game Super Mario, where magic mushrooms give the player a new life, or 1UP. Getting to that disruption point, however, won’t be easy. Building out 1upHealth’s infrastructure can be likened to building out electrical service into a new neighborhood. First, the wires must be strung from house-to-house. These are connections between health systems, insurers and app developers. For the electrical current to flow in a neighborhood, there is a transformer from each house to the street. This is similar to the way 1upHealth goes inside each health system or insurer, takes huge troves of data sitting around in multiple forms, converts it all into a standard format known as FHIR (pronounced fire) and stores it in the cloud. 1upHealth’s software then allows other organizations to interact with the patient data in a secure way. “It's not that people will say, ‘I want to be able to download a file and have it on my laptop.’ That doesn't do anyone any good,” says Byers. “It's that people want the constellation of care providers who are keeping them healthy to know what's going on and to work together, so people can actually have a better life and live longer.” Sahu founded 1upHealth in 2017 with this vision of getting healthcare systems to talk to each other. The company’s name is a nod to the Nintendo video game Super Mario, where magic mushrooms give the player a new life, or 1UP. By giving patients access to their own aggregated data, they have more control and knowledge of their own body, which Sahu likens to controlling an avatar in a video game. “The best way to get there in the real world is to help customers and patients unlock and take control of their health data.” The company started out with connections to 12 health systems, which has since grown to thousands. It now has 35 enterprise contracts totaling more than 11 million patients. It gains revenue both by offering fixed-fee access to its platform, as well as collecting fractions of a cent each time an organization accesses its software. Those charges add up to around a couple dollars per patient per year. “We're not selling the data, but we are helping our customers operate on their own data,” says Sahu. With the latest funding round, 1upHealth will be able to expand its services to help customers handle new regulations around issues like price transparency and prior authorization. The company will also push out other features using machine learning and analytics. “If you look at the most valuable companies in the U.S.—Google has the most data about online web traffic. Facebook has the most data about social. Amazon has the most data about e-commerce,” says Sahu. “At this time next year, we will have the most data about healthcare.”

Microsoft’s Acquisition Of Nuance Reaffirms Its Interest In Dominating The $11+ Trillion Healthcare Market

One of the largest global market sectors is healthcare, expected to be valued at more than $11 trillion by 2022. The growth in healthcare continues to be tremendous, especially as new innovation is increasingly being embraced by the field. Ranging from digital health, to artificial intelligence, data-driven care models, and novel ways to improve care access, healthcare innovation is transforming at a rapid pace. Microsoft continues to forge its path within healthcare, with a reaffirmed commitment to expanding its offerings of impactful and meaningful technology and services within the industry. The latest of these ventures by Microsoft was announced earlier this month when it confirmed that it will proceed with an acquisition of Nuance Communications, “a trusted cloud and AI software leader representing decades of accumulated healthcare and enterprise AI experience.” The purchase has been valued an astounding $19.7 billion dollars. Microsoft describes this venture as a part of its larger “Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare” infrastructure and strategy. Specifically, it describes Nuance as “a pioneer and a leading provider of conversational AI and cloud-based ambient clinical intelligence for healthcare providers. Nuance’s products include the Dragon Ambient eXperience, Dragon Medical One and PowerScribe One for radiology reporting, all leading clinical speech recognition SaaS offerings built on Microsoft Azure. Nuance’s solutions work seamlessly with core healthcare systems, including longstanding relationships with Electronic Health Records (EHRs), to alleviate the burden of clinical documentation and empower providers to deliver better patient experiences. Nuance solutions are currently used by more than 55% of physicians and 75% of radiologists in the U.S., and used in 77% of U.S. hospitals.”

Homelessness Is A Healthcare Issue. Why Don’t We Treat It As One?

Housing alone will not solve the problems of people experiencing homelessness. Los Angeles is home to more than 65,000 individuals experiencing homelessness. Los Angeles is home to more than 65,000 individuals experiencing homelessness. LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES How you define a problem determines how you solve a problem. Take homelessness, for example. If you see it fundamentally as a housing problem, then your solution will be to build more housing. If you see it as an economic problem, then your solution will be to create more and better-paying jobs. And if you see it as a quality of life problem, in that the encampments that have taken over streets and public parks, for example, diminish housed residents’ ability to enjoy their communities, then your solution will be to clean up the tents and move their inhabitants into shelters. I see homelessness as a healthcare problem (in part). And while none of the above approaches is wrong per se, they are all stunted by a kind of myopia that prevents their prescribed solutions from tackling the challenge of homelessness in the sort of broad manner that has been demonstrated not just to improve life for the homeless, but speed the process of getting them housed as well. Building affordable housing, for example, would certainly put a roof over the head of the unhoused, but would likely do little to help someone struggling with a substance use disorder. On the other hand, the solutions I envision entail providing more and better healthcare, as well as an array of related care services, to people experiencing homelessness. What’s more, I’m convinced that, in Medicare Advantage, we have a financial model of care whose incentives are aligned with the needs of homeless people—and the funding to make meaningful strides in addressing the manifold challenges they face every day.

30 Under 30 Asia: The Young Entrepreneurs Innovating In Healthcare

To Ryuichi Onose, launching his own business was led by deeply personal reasons. When his grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, Onose struggled to get a second opinion. The former trading company employee decided there had to be a better way, especially for another view on treatment, and approached Japanese investment fund ANRI, who introduced him to bioengineer Takao Yasui. Together, they founded Craif in 2018 to focus on early cancer detection. The Tokyo-based startup will check for cancers, including lung and ovarian, at its lab by using AI to analyze urine samples collected by its own proprietary device. “When everybody said that urine wouldn’t work, that’s when I thought that that was an opportunity,” Onose says. Its point of differentiation: it can extract more biomarker data than others in the industry, he adds. Craif, which raised $7.5 million in funding so far, aims to launch the testing service next year. Eventually the firm hopes to broaden the range of illnesses screened, offer the best treatment options and expand in Japan and overseas.

How Virtual Reality Is Making Healthcare More Accessible

As more people move away from cities to live in more rural areas, driven away by the pandemic or looking to simplify their day-to-day routines, access to healthcare is becoming more challenging. Healthcare is an essential need, but a complicated factor for many people who live far from hospitals, medical experts, and other specialists. MedTech entrepreneur Erik Maltais took note of all of these competing factors and, driven by a desire to do good in the tech world, utilized Virtual Reality (VR) technology to make healthcare specialists accessible to all. Virtual reality (VR) systems are currently understood as entertainment tools, used for watching movies, playing video games, and even to immerse oneself into the digital NFT market. But Maltais saw a bridge between VR and the medical world and applied his entrepreneurial spirit to make a way for it to transform the healthcare industry. Within three years of their initial idea, the Maltais and his partner Jon Clagg built VR software that went beyond entertainment and offered something that could benefit society. With their newfound focus on the medical training market, Maltais and Clagg founded their award-winning company, Immertec. Leading the Way in MedTech Innovation Maltais is leading the way in an area of healthcare where experts see great potential. According to medical professionals at Cedars-Sinai, VR is a new frontier in medical innovation. It helps doctors learn necessary procedures more easily, provokes further empathy among healthcare providers that leads to greater progress in treatments, and helps by giving at-risk people a hands-on education about the disease.

What’s Next For Molina Healthcare Stock?

The stock price of Molina Healthcare (NYSE: MOH), a managed care company best known for its health insurance through Medicaid and Medicare, has seen an 8% rise over the last ten trading days, while it’s up 4% over the last five trading days, and we believe the stock may continue to trend higher in the near term. The recent rise can largely be attributed to an overall growth seen in healthcare stocks, including Molina, Centene, and Humana, among others. Healthcare stocks have been in focus this year with expectations of increased investments into the healthcare system under the new government administration. Healthcare stocks focused on government sponsored healthcare plans stand to benefit from increased investments. Furthermore, Molina last week announced that it has won a contract to provide medical care coverage to Medicaid beneficiaries in Ohio, aiding its stock price growth. Looking at the recent rally, the 8% rise for MOH stock over the last ten days compares with just 1.7% gains seen in the broader S&P 500 index. Now, is MOH stock poised to gain further? It appears so. Given the current momentum in the healthcare stocks, and based on our machine learning analysis of trends in the stock price over the last few years, we believe that there are higher chances of a rise in MOH stock over the next month (twenty-one trading days). See our analysis on Molina Healthcare Stock Chances of Rise for more details. Curious about the possibility of rising over the next quarter? Check out the MOH Stock AI Dashboard: Chances Of Rise And Fall for a variety of scenarios on how MOH stock could move. Five Days: MOH 4.1%, vs. S&P500 -0.01%; Outperformed market (20% likelihood event)

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