By Brooke Faulkner, freelance writer; @faulknercreek.
We look towards technology to help solve many of the issues that plague the world today. From healthcare to environmental degradation, innovation has led the way in developing solutions. The spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) is a worldwide issue and one that researchers are looking to alleviate.
A rise in numbers
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there are 19.7 million new sexually transmitted infections reported each year. This report accounts for number of infections, not individuals, as some individuals may have contracted an infection more than once or different types of infections in a single calendar year. The CDC found in a four year study, between 2013 and 2017, the number of those infected with syphilis nearly doubled, gonorrhea cases increased by 67 percent, and chlamydia infections are at record highs.
There also appears to be a correlation between certain demographics and the number of those infected. Populations with lack of access to healthcare, as well as those who live below the poverty line are at a higher risk for infection. Gay and bisexual men continue to be at an increased risk of contracting a sexually transmitted infection, including HIV and AIDS — this demographic accounted for 85 percent of all cases in 2015.
There has been much speculation as to why the rise of STDs is occurring, however, no one can say for sure. In heterosexual relationships, the blame has been put upon the use of long-term birth controls with a main focus of avoiding unwanted pregnancy as opposed to STD prevention. The number of seniors contracting gonorrhea are also rising, which is hypothesized to be a result of seniors being more active later in life as a result of longer lifespans. Since it has been found that the numbers are rising, researchers are redirecting focus to make a plan on how to prevent STDs from continuing on this increasing track.
Information gathering
Many people are uncomfortable with how much of their personal information is being taken and shared without their knowledge or consent. While taking precautionary measures, such as covering your computer camera when not in use and not sharing your location on your smartphone, may provide you with a sense of comfort, understand that some companies are using this information to pinpoint STD outbreaks.
Similarly to predicting earthquakes or volcanoes, researchers are looking at trigger points, in this case search terms, to predict STD outbreaks. Tech companies, such as Google, are helping to monitor STD rates and work toward preventing STDs. Google is collecting the location of search terms in association with STD symptoms and comparing it with diagnosis data from local healthcare providers to draw a correlation between the two.
If a rise in the number of times the search term for “vaginal discharge” and the diagnosis of chlamydia occur in a concentrated area, it alerts health professionals of a potential outbreak. This enables medical practitioners to react appropriately by informing the public and preparing their clinics accordingly.
Sex and apps
Nearly all aspects of personal information is shared on social media nowadays — where you are vacationing, what you’re eating, who you’re with, and your life goals and ambitions. Software developers are hoping to engage individuals by creating apps to share sexual health information. Forums, websites, social media channels and apps have been created as a safe place to ask questions, gather information, and seek out centers to get tested.
STD Triage is a new app that has been developed to maintain anonymity for those who are fearful of going to a doctor about a rash or bump that may be nothing more than an ingrown hair. The app charges a $40 fee to examine photos taken by the user and then offer their recommendation on whether or not to seek out healthcare or schedule an appointment with their dermatologist. The app is not run by medical professionals and should only be taken as opinion and advice, not matter of fact.
There are apps to help match people of similar interests, as well as those to help find a more casual encounter. To counterbalance the scale, some people feel that there should be a way to protect themselves against contracting an STD through some of these apps. It would take both partners being willing to divulge personal medical history, which is not something that everyone is willing to do before a first date.
Although, for those who have tested positive for lifelong diseases such as HIV and AIDS, there has been a positive response in the development of apps to seek one another out. We can expect to see the sexual health culture continue to shift into the mainstream in the future.
How do you provide care to underserved patients who have difficulty getting to the office? This was the challenge we were trying to solve at the Clark Clinic. Some of our patients don’t have access to a vehicle or are physically restricted and unable to travel far. But, as most of our community is underserved, we needed to collectively identify a solution to ensure we can serve all our patients.
I knew from conversations with other healthcare executives that telemedicine was the solution. I recently learned of a pediatrics office in Jacksonville that uses telemedicine to serve its ADHD patients better. Like the Clark Clinic, its patients found it difficult to comply with required visits. Telemedicine allowed ADHD patients to conduct their appointments remotely. Rates of visit compliance skyrocketed. We realized then that telemedicine technology would be ideal for a rural community.
We have experienced seismic shifts in the popularity of telemedicine. Technology has largely influenced every aspect of our society. With instant access to every component of life, people are developing a dependence on technology. In healthcare, patients want easy and efficient access to healthcare, without having to wait for hours in the office. After a telemedicine visit, they are convinced of its value. The process is simple — download the healow TeleVisits app and schedule an appointment. There is no doubt patient satisfaction has improved.
At the Clark Clinic, our slogan is “We are wherever you are” and telehealth allows us to provide the same level of care no matter where our patients are located. With multiple clinics across central Florida, our doctors are often on the road. There have been various situations where patients had urgent visits but couldn’t be seen because our doctor was miles away. But with telemedicine, the doctor can schedule a remote appointment and conduct and treat patients in need while maintaining the established provider-patient relationship. Amazingly, our physicians have even noted that in most cases they are able to make accurate judgments, all from observing a patient’s speech, breathing, motions, and mood.
Our patients who reside at local assisted living facilities also love the convenience of telemedicine. These individuals appreciate the ability to download the app directly onto their phone or tablet and schedule an appointment with their doctor. Typically, they take the call in their room, and all their health questions are quickly answered. We’ve also heard from their families and loved ones, who enjoy the reassurance that, with telehealth, the level of care never wavers and access to quality care is not limited.
Software testing and quality assurance have grown in critical importance for companies. Over the few years, it has established itself as a formidable career choice which is unlikely to stop anytime soon. Now as the name implies, quality insurance is all about maintaining “high quality” on a constant basis. And it isn’t surprising at all to see the concept making its way to the core of several industry verticals including the healthcare.
Quality monitoring is gaining momentum for purchasers, patients, and providers who strive hard to evaluate the value of health care expenditures. Over the past decade, science has evolved in regards to quality measurement despite a few challenges that might be a counterforce to the demands of cost containment. Well, the following post explores those crucial challenges that must be addressed in the Healthcare sector. But before that let’s take a bit of a detour which will eventually lead us to the answer.
Why the healthcare sector needs QA and testing
Speed and quality are one of the core essentials that tend to serve the healthcare industry more efficiently leading to a significant amount of inventions and advancements. One of the best examples showing how digitalization is becoming more capable of transforming the industry is that more and more number of people and devices are found connected to deliver meaningful interference from the data generated.
Technology is the best support system where different kinds of applications are created to deliver best services even at a distant. A sudden increase is found in the growth of healthcare products such as wearables, followed by applications especially the ones being associated with them. It may quite interest you to know that these can be termed as products featuring a big market and will continue to have a tremendous impact on the economy even in the upcoming years. Down below I would like to mention a few reasons stating why QA testing tools and testing are crucial in the healthcare industry.
#1 Big Data Testing in Healthcare: Because of being well associated with tons of information related to their patient’s health conditions, the healthcare industry is believed to be one of the most highly data-intensive sector. Several healthcare institutions and the associated segments to devise the right strategy building the right and relevant kind of products. Initially invented to derive the right interferences and the data point big data testing also helps in making certain decisions in regards to drug inventions, disease cure, and the last but not the least research and development. These decisions are some of the best and informed ones that anyone could take.
#2 Security of applications: I am sure you will agree with me when I say that healthcare websites have the most sensitive kind of the data about their patients and their health-related information. By security testing and penetration testing, we can make the websites, as well as applications, hack proof and sustainable especially in challenging a digital scenario. It is very important to conduct quality assurance and testing to ensure security to all such applications.
#3 Usability testing in healthcare: Usability testing is the most required in the health care industry. However, there are various features and the user scenarios that a pharmacist or a nurse can continue to face during their working hours. Do you think these tasks are of prime importance? Absolutely not! In fact, they can be eased with the help of automation, adding in more number of features that will help to simplify the entire process.
QA Challenges in Healthcare Apps
Healthcare industry has also started to introduce mobile platforms across the care delivery cycle, creating a voluminous medical app market. Further, we have extracted a few QA challenges concerning testing and healthcare mobile apps and how to get over them.
Challenge #1 Users and their expectations
Software usability has been a core element in the healthcare industry. Look at those EHR systems; it is very important to come up with something that not just offers accurate physical records but also aggregate physical activity recommendations with nutrition tracking. While testing a mhealth app, thinks about situations which patients may need it. During critical cases, older patients can make the most of condition management app that aids well in finding what their actual condition is and tap the emergency call button at an extreme point.
In addition to this, healthcare mobile apps have the potential to influence the stakeholders this includes patients, caregivers, care team members, administrative staff, insurers and more. The app should adequately support their workflows, so QA specialists need to get a good picture of basic user needs. Let’s say for example if the patient likes to connect his or her smartwatch to the app to monitor heart rate while exercising or if a physician would like to review his patient’s treatment plan progress remotely.
Damo Consulting, a healthcare growth and digital transformation advisory firm based in Chicago, recently released its third annual Healthcare IT Demand Survey report. The report indicates technology vendors will continue to struggle with long sales cycles as they aggressively market digital and AI. For the second year in a row, the rise of non-traditional players, such as Amazon and Google, will have a strong impact on the competitive environment among technology vendors while EHR vendors grow in dominance.
Top spending priorities for healthcare executives are digital, advanced analytics and AI. However, spending on EHR systems will dominate technology spending budget in 2019. Healthcare executives continue to be confused by the buzz around AI and digital and struggle to make sense of the changing landscape of who is playing what role and the blurred lines of capabilities and competition.
“Digital and AI are emerging as critical areas for technology spend among healthcare enterprises in 2019. However, healthcare executives are realistic around their technology needs vs. their need to improve care delivery. They find the currently available digital health solutions in the market are not very mature,” says Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO Damo Consulting. “However, they are also more upbeat about the overall IT spend growth than their technology vendors.”
The top spending priorities for healthcare executives are digital, advanced analytics, and AI. EHR systems will dominate technology spending budgets, even as the focus turns to digital analytics.
IT budgets are expected to grow by 20% or more. Healthcare executives are more upbeat about IT spend growth than vendors.
Healthcare executives say they are confused by the buzz around AI and digital. They are also struggling to make sense of the changing landscape of who is playing what role and the blurred lines of capabilities and competition.
Cybersecurity issues are a challenge for 2019 in the healthcare sector, but not the biggest driver of technology spending or the top area of focus for health systems in 2019.
The CIO remains the most important buyer for technology vendors, however IT budgets are now sitting with multiple stakeholders.
The biggest challenge for technology vendors is long cycles, along with product/service differentiation and brand visibility.
The rise of non-traditional players, such as Amazon, Apple, and Google will have a strong impact on the competitive healthcare technology environment. Deeply entrenched EHR vendors such as Epic and Cerner will grow in dominance.
Researchers are constantly working on innovative approaches to deal with treatment resistant depression. This offers hope to those who have been unable to deal with their illness successfully using traditional methods. However, some of these novel approaches are only available to people suffering from depression through research studies.
Here’s a quick look at some of the advances currently being made in this area.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation
TMS, or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, is a technique that sends bursts of energy that are produced by electromagnets to specific parts of the brain. This is a treatment that’s thought to affect the communication of the nerve cells that play an active role in depression. Because this is something that must be done in a doctor’s office, some people might ask: “Does TMS require anesthesia?” It doesn’t, and is said to be painless and has very few side effects and risks.
Moodivator
This is an app that was created by Pfizer that helps people with some of the key elements of the treatment of depression. It helps by allowing people to set goals, track their mood, and share their results with their doctors. That being said, you don’t need to be in treatment with a doctor for depression for you to use it. Currently, Moodivator is only available for iPhone users.
Magnetic seizure therapy
Magnetic Seizure Therapy is a procedure that’s experimental at the moment. It utilizes magnetic fields in order to induce a seizure (a controlled one) inside the brain. The effects are purported to be similar to those that are inherent with ECT. While doctors and researchers still don’t understand why, the seizures that are induced can rapidly reduce the symptoms of depression. This treatment does require a hospital stay because you need to be anesthetized for the procedure.
By Dr. Giovanni Colella, CEO and co-founder, OODA Health.
Giovanni Colella, MD
2018 was another year of rapid changes in the healthcare industry. Over the past twelve months, I’ve had fascinating conversations with executives in the provider and payer community and they have described the challenges they face and their visions for the future. One thing has become clear among everyone in the healthcare ecosystem: expectations are changing.
Patients are looking for a retail-like experience for their treatment, and sure enough, a number of new, innovative providers are gaining traction by leading with convenience and patient-centricity. Patients are embracing alternatives to the traditional doctor’s office or the local hospital. Unwilling to wait for an appointment, patients are eager for more responsive, high-quality treatment options.
Healthcare providers are becoming more innovative in an effort to improve the quality and efficiency of patient care while continuing to look for ways to reduce costs. Payers are exploring new approaches to improve their back-office systems and are willing to partner with third-party vendors to accelerate this improvement, rather than trying to develop everything in-house.
I am confident that this year will be full of important change in the industry and that these changes will touch the lives of millions. Of course, there is still a long way to go since the healthcare industry is historically slow to embrace change – it is often difficult to break through a culture that normally stays with the status quo. However, the desire for change is definitely there. If I were to list my top three predictions for trends in healthcare in 2019, they would include the following:
1) Health plans will get much more serious about improving member experience and predictability.
Health plans are eager to improve their member experience, partially because of the emergence of new consumer-centric plan models. As the market becomes more competitive with new entrants, traditional health plans will continue to partner with agile startups to deliver an improved member experience. These partnerships will enable health plans and startups to pilot projects and scale them quickly, leveraging the strengths of both organizations.
2) Employers are focusing on providing access to targeted healthcare solutions that meet specific therapeutic needs.
As of 2018, 83 percent of employees say healthcare is very or extremely important to/for staying in a job or changing a job. Given the importance of healthcare to their employees, and that the average company spends $10,000 on healthcare annually for each worker, employers will recognize the need to invest in specific solutions in areas where traditional networks fall short. These include programs for infertility, women’s health and behavioral health.
Data is the future of healthcare, especially when it’s combined with new technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. As we generate more and more healthcare data, we increase the potential for us to discover deep insights that might otherwise have gone undiscovered.
Data analysis can be used to enhance drug discovery by running simulations and identifying areas of potential research. It could also be used to provide a kind of Netflix of healthcare which provides personalized recommendations for every patient based on what’s worked well for other, similar patients.
And of course, it can also be used to improve employee engagement. After all, it’s these front line employees that are interacting with patients and acting as the face of your organisation. An engaged employee can make all of the difference, both to your bottom line and to the patient’s prognosis.
Here are seven tips to help you to get started.
Monitor engagement
You can’t track whether your efforts are having an impact if you’re not tracking employee engagement in the first place. Bernice Winters of XpertWriters.com recommends using 360-degree feedback programs at regular intervals and adds that you can never gather too much data. “Even if you don’t need that data today,” she says, “you never know when you might need it in the future.”
Choose the right metrics
If you try to measure too much, you stretch yourself too thin and spend more time logging the data than acting on what you’ve learned. If you measure too little, you find yourself with insufficient data to make effective decisions. You’ll also want to ask questions that are specific to your business so that you can dig deeper.
Provide data-led training
Edward Laws of CareersBooster.com says that any company that isn’t providing training is failing to invest in its own future. In the healthcare industry, employers have a responsibility to provide training to staff so that they’re providing the best service possible. Data-led solutions can help you to identify weaknesses and to help employees to address them before it’s too late.
It has become clear in the last few years that when it comes to cybercrime, hackers are not fussy about which organization or sector they focus on – if there’s profit to be made, anyone is a potential target.
However, there are of course institutions which will always be of particular desirability to cybercriminals. Financial institutions, banks and retail are among the most targeted because the goal of most cyberattacks is financial gain, and organizations in these industries are the most lucrative targets for cybercriminals. The healthcare sector is also heavily targeted because of the personal data it holds. This data may be stolen and used for different purposes, including fraud. As a consequence, the focus on healthcare institutions by hackers has ramped up in recent years.
This increased attention on the health sector is because of hackers seeing it as an inexhaustible source of money. On multiple occasions, media reports have described leaks of data from medical centers, followed by a ransom demand sent to clinic management and patients.
There are a number of other ways criminals can monetize attacks on healthcare equipment and applications. These include threatening patient health by altering stored information; using stolen data to fraudulently obtain access to medical care or controlled medications; leveraging personal information on patients and their family members; and sabotaging websites and/or infrastructure on behalf of unscrupulous competitors. Attacking healthcare institutions also allows criminals to resell stolen data to third parties such as insurance companies, healthcare providers, banks, and others, who can use this valuable information for a number of purposes (such as advertising, research, or even discrimination based on pre-existing conditions).
One such specific way that criminals can carry out attacks is by exploiting advancements in health technology and equipment in recent years. We’ve seen an increasing number of medical devices such as pacemakers, drug pumps (like insulin infusion devices), implantable defibrillators, and other devices implementing wireless connectivity for doctors to control and fine-tune their work and update firmware. This makes these devices potentially incredibly dangerous for patients. A criminal could research and reverse communication protocols and exploit vulnerabilities in a simple piece of software used in those tiny devices, for example changing the heart rate controlled by pacemakers, injecting incorrect doses of drugs or even making them show the wrong data — leading doctors to the wrong conclusions and causing them to make mistakes in their treatment.
We look towards technology to help solve many of the issues that plague the world today. From healthcare to environmental degradation, innovation has led the way in developing solutions. The spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) is a worldwide issue and one that researchers are looking to alleviate.
Software testing and quality assurance have grown in critical importance for companies. Over the few years, it has established itself as a formidable career choice which is unlikely to stop anytime soon. Now as the name implies, quality insurance is all about maintaining “high quality” on a constant basis. And it isn’t surprising at all to see the concept making its way to the core of several industry verticals including the healthcare.
Researchers are constantly working on innovative approaches to deal with treatment resistant depression. This offers hope to those who have been unable to deal with their illness successfully using traditional methods. However, some of these novel approaches are only available to people suffering from depression through research studies.
