APAC Series Ep. 1: What is Roche Keeping an Eye on in Thailand? (Farid Bidgoli)

This is the first episode in the series of discussions about healthcare and digital health in the APAC Region.

In this episode Farid Bidgoli, General Manager for Roche in Thailand and neighboring countries. Farid talked about the healthcare system situation in Thailand, the state of digital health technologies, what kind of solutions Roche is keeping an eye on and more. 

The upcoming episodes feature:

• Ruby Wang, health and life science consultant, former Head of Health for the UK Government in China at the British Embassy in Beijing about the Chinese market. 
• We will be diving into Vietnam with Beth Ann Lopez, a Co-founder and CEO at Docosan, a healthcare marketplace that aims to make it effortless to access healthcare and help find a doctor who is available in Vietnam.

Website: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com

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What Exactly is Open Access To AI and Why We Are Not There Yet in Healthcare? (Bart De Witte)

After an intense race in AI development lighted by the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, two important things happened in the last week of March 2023: Over 1000 tech workers, such as Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX, Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director at Mila, Turing Prize winner and professor at University of Montreal,

Stuart Russell, Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and co-author of the standard textbook “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach”,   signed a public letter that urges a pause on AI development before humanity as a society decides how humans can control the development. The first subscribers include: 

As the letter states, “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” 

A day after this letter was published, UNESCO published a press release that calls on all governments to immediately implement the global ethical framework, which 193 Member States of Unesco has unanimously adopted. As warned by Unesco, we need to address many concerning ethical issues raised by AI innovations, in particular discrimination and stereotyping, including the issue of gender inequality, but also the fight against disinformation, the right to privacy, the protection of personal data, and human and environmental rights. And the industry cannot self-regulate, states the press release. 

Healthcare is moving from the era of gathering data through digitalized systems, EHRs, sensors, and wearables to the era of mining that data for better patient outcomes and operational efficiency. 

However, in order for AI and algorithms to help improve the health of many, we should strive for algorithms to be open and transparent, says Bart De Witte, founder of HIPPO AI Foundation, a renowned expert on digital transformation in healthcare in Europe, who regularly speakers and posts about technology and innovation strategy, with a particular focus on the socioeconomic impact on healthcare. 

In this short discussion, recorded at the Vision Health Pioneers Demo Day on 28 March in Berlin, Bart explains: why is open and transparent AI important for the greater good in healthcare, where global medical development is going with different values and regulations about AI and data, and comments on the upcoming European Health Data Space. 

Enjoy the show, and if you like what you will hear, subscribe to the podcast to be notified about new episodes automatically. Also, go to fodh.substack.com to read our newsletter, which is published roughly on a monthly basis.

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Transcript: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/open-ai-bart-de-witte-gpt4

Open Letter to pause all AI development: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ 

Unesco Press release: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/artificial-intelligence-unesco-calls-all-governments-implement-global-ethical-framework-without

How is Healthcare Re-Shaping (Towards Virtual and Retail Care) Globally, According to NextMed Health Participants?

Healthcare is facing challenges on all fronts. WHO estimates a projected shortfall of 10 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Countries at all levels of socioeconomic development face, to varying degrees, difficulties in the education, employment, deployment, retention, and performance of their workforce. Several other factors, such as the aging population and the rising demand for healthcare services, put healthcare systems under pressure to change and adapt. To a degree, with the help of technology. A big topic in many systems, especially in the US, is the move of retail providers such as Amazon and pharmacies, Walgreens, and CVS into primary care. Hospitals are looking at opportunities for virtual care and turning homes into hospital-like environments supported by virtual monitoring. 

At this year’s NextMed Health Conference is San Diego, Rasu Shrestha – Chief Innovation & Commercialization Officer, Executive Vice President at Advocate Health – hospital system of 67 hospitals across six states – Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wisconsin, mentioned that the health system made a deal with Best Buy, the provider of consumer electronics. 

In this episode, we will take this news as a starting point for a broader discussion: how is healthcare transforming globally, and what does the shift towards virtual care look like in 2023? You will hear from experts from the US, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Kenya, China, and UAE who spoke or attended the NextMed Health conference. 

Speakers:

• Rasu Shrestha – Chief Innovation & Commercialization Officer, Executive Vice President at Advocate Health (USA),
• Ali Hashemi, investor, CEO of meta[bolic] (UAE),
• Bianca Rowenhorst, CIO at the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports in the Netherlands,
• Lucien Engelen, thought leader, who operates globally at the convergence of Innovation & Strategy for executive boards, governments, corporates (Netherlands),
• Michael Friebe, HealthTEC Inventor/Investor/Entrepreneur and professor (Germany),
• Alex Zhavorkonkov, CEO of InSilico Medicine (USA, China, Canada, UAE, Belgium, UK, and Taiwan),
•  Emilian Popa, CEO of Ilara Health (Kenya)
• Zayna Khayat, VP Client Success Teladoc Health in Canada, In house health futurist at Deloitte Canada’s Life Sciences & Healthcare team and Adjunct faculty with the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management in the Health Sector Strategy stream (Canada).

The Netherlands Ep. 2: Buurtzorg: Redefining Nursing With Self-Managing Teams

One of the biggest global challenges in healthcare at the moment is the workforce crisis.

Workforce shortages are not related to the number of people that get trained for healthcare professionals but the working conditions that they need to operate under. 

In today’s episode, we will look at a good practice related to nursing organizations in the community of the Netherlands. I spoke with Thijs de Blok, CEO of Buurtzorg International – an organization of 15.000 nurses that work in self-managing teams and provide holistic care to patients. I asked Thijs, more about the early beginnings of the organization, how it fits in the dutch healthcare system context, and what he observed in terms of care providers globally.

Tune in to the episode about nurses in the US: Has The Risk of Becoming a Nurse Become Too Great in the US? https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/nurse-rebecca-love-nurse-alice

www.facesofdigitalhealth.com

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Netherlands Ep. 1: Insights from the CIOs of Three University Medical Centers in the Netherlands

After a series of discussions about healthcare data in the US, we’re now moving to insights and good practices in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has roughly 17 million people. As you will hear, its healthcare is highly digitalized with high digital literacy. You will hear a short panel discussion that was recorded at mHealth Israel in Tel Aviv. 

Corne Mulders – CIO University Medical Center Utrecht 

Simon Vermeer – CIO Erasmus University Medical Center (Erasmus MC Rotterdam) 

Paul Hillman – CIO Maastricht University Medical Center

Shared their views about digital health development in the Netherlands, how their institutions approach innovation, and where they see room for improvements regarding healthcare digitalization on the national level. 

www.facesofdigitalhealth.com

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Healthcare Data Series 5/5: Seqster – The Operating System For Easier Healthcare Research

This is the fifth and last episode of the Healthcare Data in the US series. In the first one, Arif Nathoo – CEO and co-founder of Komodo Health, described how the company is planning to capture and de-identify every encounter patients have with the US healthcare system.

The second episode featured Phil Lindemann, VP of Business Intelligence at Epic, and Epic’s Clinical Informaticist Dave Little, who talked about Epic Cosmos – a database of EHR data from 178 million patients. In the third episode, Samir Unni, Business Development Lead for Healthcare at Palantir Foundry, explained the principles of Palantir in healthcare, why they support an open-data approach, how knowledge from other industries is transferred to healthcare and more. 

In the fourth episode, representatives of four companies working on automating care tasks, providing clinicians with clinical decision support, and creating synthetic data records, four industry experts shared their experience with building solutions on top of EHRs, challenges related to connecting to electronic health records, and the need for better interoperability APIs to really enable data to be used for health outcomes improvement.

In this final episode,  Ardy Arianpour, CEO of Seqster, explains for Seqster provides its clients with an operating system for researching of clinical and tracking patient data to create new solutions. Enjoy the discussion and tune into other episodes as well.

This series will be summarized in our newsletter – find it and subscribe at

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www.facesofdigitalhealth.com

Seqster: https://www.seqster.com/