Harvard Medical School

It’s the part of the eye exam everyone hates: the pupil-dilating eye drops. The drops work by opening the pupil and preventing the iris from constricting in response to light and are often used for routine examination and photography of the back of the eye. The drops sting, can take up to 30 minutes to work, and cause blurry vision for several hours afterwards, often making them inconvenient for both patient and doctor. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School have developed a cheap, portable camera that can photograph the retina without the need for pupil-dilating eye drops...

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Apple is quietly building one of the strongest teams in digital health, and on Thursday, it just added perhaps its most high-profile hire yet. Stephen Friend, co-founder and President of Sage Bionetworks, is joining Apple's healthcare team, Sage Bionetworks announced on Thursday. Apple said it had “nothing more to share about his role or title." Before Sage, Friend was an executive at Merck and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School...

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Medical and disaster planning experts from around the globe are set to converge in Sint Maarten for the 2020 International Conference on Disaster Medicine and Hurricane Resiliency. The three-day conference, held March 26-29, 2020, is hosted by the Caribbean Center for Disaster Medicine (CCDM) at American University of the Caribbean (AUC) School of Medicine medical sciences campus in Sint Maarten. Organized by the CCDM, a collaboration between AUC and Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Inc., the event draws international disaster and healthcare stakeholders. This year's conference keynote speaker is Dr. Greg Ciottone, an American physician specializing in disaster medicine and counter-terrorism medicine. Read More »

The idea that the healthcare industry can study the data being created in electronic health records (EHR) to foster ongoing improvement is not a new one, but it is gaining momentum. A “learning health system” is one that commits to the use of data as a byproduct of care for continuous learning. Clinicians and health system researchers want to tackle perhaps their industry’s most significant knowledge management challenge: how to capture the results of research into clinical best practices and more quickly feed it back to doctors and nurses at the point of care...

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Some people receive constant reminders on their smartphones: birthdays, anniversaries, doctor’s appointments, social engagements. At work, their computers prompt them to meet deadlines, attend meetings and have lunch with the boss. Prodding here and pinging there, these pop-up interruptions can turn into noise to be ignored instead of helpful nudges. Something similar is happening to doctors, nurses and pharmacists. And when they’re hit with too much information, the result can be a health hazard...

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The HITECH act of 2009 (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) gave an unprecedented boost to an obscure corner of the IT industry that produced electronic health records. For the next eight years they were given the opportunity to bring health care into the 21st century and implement common-sense reforms in data sharing and analytics. They largely squandered this opportunity, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars while watching health care costs ascend into the stratosphere, and preening themselves over modest improvements in their poorly functioning systems...

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