News Clips
$250 Million to Support Advanced Robotics Venture Led by CMU
An independent institute founded by Carnegie Mellon University will receive more than $250 million to launch an advanced robotics manufacturing institute in Pittsburgh, the U.S. Department of Defense announced Friday. The Department of Defense awarded the public-private Manufacturing USA institute to American Robotics, a nonprofit venture led by Carnegie Mellon, with more than 220 partners in industry, academia, government and the nonprofit sector nationwide. The institute will receive $80 million from the DOD, and an additional $173 million from the partner organizations. The Richard King Mellon Foundation played a particularly important role in catalyzing the CMU proposal...
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Why You Must Secure Your Website with TLS
Security isn’t an option on today’s websites. It’s a necessity. Google confers on sites that use HTTPS a higher search ranking. And who doesn’t want a higher PageRank? But, wait there’s even more reason to lock down your site. Google will soon start marking websites that don’t use HTTPS first as insecure, then as broken. You so don’t want to go there...
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Auriga Releases Open-Source HL7 Library
The amount of patient data generated by various medical devices, wearables, and healthcare apps grows every day. However, hospitals can make use of all this information only in case when their devices and software systems communicate via a common protocol. One of such protocols that allow healthcare apps to securely exchange sensitive patient clinical data with each other is Health Level 7 (HL7), – a globally accepted, widely accredited, and one of the most commonly used set of interoperability standards in the world...
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A Nevada Woman Dies of a Superbug Resistant to Every Available Antibiotic in the US
If it sometimes seems like the idea of antibiotic resistance, though unsettling, is more theoretical than real, please read on. Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off 26 different antibiotics. “It was tested against everything that’s available in the United States … and was not effective,” said Dr. Alexander Kallen, a medical officer in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of health care quality promotion...
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IEEE Blockchain in Healthcare Event to Premier at HIMSS17
Premiering at HIMSS17, IEEE Computer Society's Blockchain in Healthcare, a Rock Stars of Technology Event , co-hosted with the Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHAlliance), will provide healthcare business and IT professionals the knowledge they need now to protect and secure data, electronic health records, connected devices, and health information exchanges with new blockchain technologies. Blockchain in Healthcare, one of the most controversial technologies of 2017, promises to address security and data integrity issues of the increasing volume of patient data managed by doctors, hospitals and insurance companies...
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Self-Experimenting Scientist Receives uBiome Grant to Investigate Consequences of Long-Term Antibiotic Use for Skin Conditions
uBiome, the leader in microbial genomics, has awarded a scientific grant to Dr. Eon Rios of Stanford University School of Medicine, supporting an investigation into how long-term use of oral antibiotics for skin conditions affects the gut microbiome. Microbial genomics leader uBiome, is awarding an ongoing series of in-kind scientific grants to ground-breaking microbiome studies. Its most recent microbiome impact grant award has been made to Dr. Eon Rios of Stanford University School of Medicine, who will study the effect of long-term use of oral antibiotics, prescribed for skin conditions, on the gut microbiome...
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Open Source Enlightenment Needed to End 'Dark Ages' of Health IT
Your article - "Whatever happened to Open Source in 2016?" highlights the brief vogue that open source recently enjoyed in the NHS – 2014-15 – and now seems to have lost. It raises some good questions and important issues, though I sense some broader perspective may be worth adding here. It’s worth remembering that healthcare is a well-established science – the first medical school established in the 9th century. While information technology is still a young science – the first MSc in software engineering dates from 1979...
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IBM Watson Health Announces Collaboration to Study the Use of Blockchain Technology for Secure Exchange of Healthcare Data
IBM Watson Health has signed a research initiative with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) aimed at defining a secure, efficient and scalable exchange of health data using blockchain technology. IBM and the FDA will explore the exchange of owner mediated data from several sources, such as Electronic Medical Records, clinical trials, genomic data, and health data from mobile devices, wearables and the “Internet of Things.” The initial focus will be on oncology-related data...
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Technology To The Rescue: App Helps Health Workers In Uttarakhand Improve Efficiency!
As the election dates have just been declared for Uttarakhand along with Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa and Manipur, this is as good a time as any to shine a spotlight on an exciting initiative Uttarakhand has embarked on. A new state formed in 2000 (which is fairly young in the Indian federal scheme of things) its challenges are unique. From limited revenue sources (tourism, its mainstay, has taken a hit since the 2013 flash floods; hence it is dependent on central assistance massively) to a hilly terrain and lack of trained personnel, the state has many hurdles...
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HealthTap Brings Artificial Intelligence to Self-Triage
HealthTap, which calls itself the “world’s first global health practice,” is moving deeper into virtual care by introducing an artificial-intelligence engine to triage cases automatically. Tuesday, Palo Alto, California-based HealthTap is launching Doctor A.I. It’s an AI-powered system that has been trained by clinical knowledge collected from the 104,000 physicians and millions of patients on the HealthTap network. Doctor A.I. is, as the six-year-old company said, “trained in the art of digital empathy”...
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Many Healthcare Technologies Are Married to the Fee-for-Service Model
Monday’s 5 p.m. digital health panel at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference happened to coincide with a presentation given by the popular U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. Some attendees were torn. For those that did make it, panel moderator Bob Kocher promised some topical debates far more interesting than that “moon-thing” Biden has been up to. It was all of the fun, without the metal detectors. A partner at Venrock Ventures, Bob Kocher set the stage with some fundamental observations about how technology can help enhance healthcare for all stakeholders...
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Strengthening Protection of Patient Medical Data
Americans seeking medical care expect a certain level of privacy. Indeed, the need for patient privacy is a principle dating back to antiquity, and is codified in U.S. law, most notably the Privacy Rule of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which establishes standards that work toward protecting patient health information. But the world of information is rapidly changing, and in this environment, U.S. rules fall precariously short in protecting our medical data...
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IBM and Illumina Partner to Standardize Genomic Data Interpretation
IBM Watson Health and Illumina, Inc. today announced a groundbreaking partnership to expand access to genome data interpretation by integrating Watson for Genomics into Illumina's BaseSpace® Sequence Hub and tumor sequencing process. The collaboration is designed to help standardize and simplify genomic data interpretation. By adding Watson for Genomics to Illumina's next-generation sequencing platform, researchers who use Illumina's cancer genome sequencing panel will have rapid access to information to help interpret the broad array of variant data produced by TruSight Tumor 170.
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Health Tap: Intelligent Interface for Patients
allows patients to connect with doctors online, and additionally hosts an enormous repository of doctors’ answers to health questions. In addition to its sheer size and its unique combination of services, HealthTap is ahead of most other health care institutions in its use of data. I talked with founder and CEO Ron Gutman about a new service, Dr. AI, that triages the patient and guides her toward a treatment plan: online resources for small problems, doctors for major problems, and even a recommendation to head off to the emergency room when that is warranted. The service builds on the patient/doctor interactions HealthTap has offered over its six years of operation, but is fully automated...
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Apervita Selected to Demonstrate Real-time Analytics for the Veterans Affairs’ Digital Health Platform
Apervita, Inc., the leading platform and marketplace for health analytics & data, today announced that Apervita participated in the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) proof-of-concept to demonstrate the power of real-time analytics to deliver higher quality, more efficient and flexible care as part of the Digital Health Platform (DHP) architecture. The VA’s DHP unlocks the enormous opportunity to integrate analytics for all patients and care providers, into a wide range of decision workflows and technologies, to provide the best care everywhere. In the proof-of-concept, Apervita acts as the real-time analytics engine to continuously execute pathways and guidelines and distribute resulting insights throughout the DHP and other platforms across the care continuum...
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