WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

The Digital Health 150 is CB Insights' annual ranking of the 150 most promising digital health startups in the world.

Telehealth has helped expand access to care for patients restricted from seeing their doctors. Actions taken today will determine if its full potential is realized after the crisis is over.

As more workers return to the office, companies are considering ways to track their employees to help prevent the spread of coronavirus among their workforce.

The past few decades have seen unprecedented levels of innovation, especially in what Peter Thiel calls the world of “bits,” or software, internet, and mobile technology.

According to Thiel, however, there’s a sense that the tech space “could be doing so much more,” especially in what he calls the world of “atoms” or efforts to create things like new forms of energy, medicine, and transport — spaces that tend to be costly and challenging to tackle, but also potentially transformative.

Can robotics transform the medical industry? While there are plenty of medicine-focused robotics apps in development, the long-term outlook for their use remains to be seen.

From assisting in chronic disease management to gamifying aesthetic medicine, we look at Tencent-owned super app WeChat as a vital part of healthcare in China.

A new wearable hardware-camera-software bundle will enable frontline screeners to check body temperatures without using their hands or thermometers.

When you’re done reading the article, this is what you’ll take away:

It’s coming at an exponential speed: gradually, and then suddenly.
It’s a matter of days. Maybe a week or two.
When it does, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed.
Your fellow citizens will be treated in the hallways.
Exhausted healthcare workers will break down. Some will die.
They will have to decide which patient gets the oxygen and which one dies.
The only way to prevent this is social distancing today. Not tomorrow. Today.
That means keeping as many people home as possible, starting now.

Many of the companies I work with are undergoing some form of a “Digital Transformation” to ensure they stay competitive and relevant into the future. These big, transformational changes are very hard and require far more than an investment in new technologies. They require a clear and solid strategy for how technology can be used to transform the business and provide better customer experiences, a culture that embraces change and collaborates heavily, and the technology capabilities to execute the strategy quickly and efficiently. Otherwise, these digital transformation initiatives will end up just like the failed ERP projects of the past we’ve all heard about or been a part of.

Eighth-grade science students have used a 3D printer to create a prosthetic leg for a duck found without a foot shortly after he hatched.

For the past several months, Nasr has led a team working on several proofs of concept based on blockchain technology, with an eye toward building real applications next year. Most are geared toward better public health surveillance, which could include using a blockchain to more efficiently manage data during a crisis or to better track opioid abuse.

As a hybrid physician/engineer, I spend a lot of time pondering how new platforms can empower doctors. I am particularly excited about the potential of smart speakers coupled with advances in A.I. In this article I will synthesize my findings, show a bunch of fun demo videos, and explain why smart speakers represent a transformative technology in healthcare.

In an ongoing effort with Boston-area hospitals, including the Boston Medical Center and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, we found that we could predict hospitalizations due to these two chronic diseases about a year in advance with an accuracy rate of as much as 82%. This will give care providers the chance to intervene much earlier and head off hospitalizations.

Scientists developed a stretchable electronic sensor that looks like a temporary tattoo.

Here's a collection of all 71 CB Insights market maps and unbundling/disrupting graphics.

The CB Insights artificial intelligence deals tracker looks at top AI deals across industries.

The most anticipated slide deck of the year is here. Key takeaways:

• Global smartphone growth is slowing: Smartphone shipments grew 3 percent year over year last year, versus 10 percent the year before. This is in addition to continued slowing internet growth, which Meeker discussed last year.
• Voice is beginning to replace typing in online queries. Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016, while accuracy is now about 95 percent.
• In 10 years, Netflix went from 0 to more than 30 percent of home entertainment revenue in the U.S. This is happening while TV viewership continues to decline.
• Entrepreneurs are often fans of gaming, Meeker said, quoting Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg. Global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995. Global gaming revenue is estimated to be around $100 billion in 2016, and China is now the top market for interactive gaming.
• China remains a fascinating market, with huge growth in mobile services and payments and services like on-demand bike sharing. (More here: The highlights of Meeker's China slides.)
• While internet growth is slowing globally, that’s not the case in India, the fastest growing large economy. The number of internet users in India grew more than 28 percent in 2016. That’s only 27 percent online penetration, which means there’s lots of room for internet usership to grow. Mobile internet usage is growing as the cost of bandwidth declines. (More here: The highlights of Meeker's India slides.)
• In the U.S. in 2016, 60 percent of the most highly valued tech companies were founded by first- or second-generation Americans and are responsible for 1.5 million employees. Those companies include tech titans Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook.
• Healthcare: Wearables are gaining adoption with about 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016. Leading tech brands are well-positioned in the digital health market, with 60 percent of consumers willing to share their health data with the likes of Google in 2016.

Over 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain. SnowWorld attempted to divert a patient’s attention from the pain they were experiencing, and into a magical world that saw them flying through a virtual canyon while throwing snowballs at penguins and snowmen. It’s early, but according to Quartz, others have had similar success: the Pain Studies Lab at Simon Fraser University in Canada, Virtual Reality Medical Center in San Diego, and others have all reported significant improvement for patients using VR simulations to treat pain.

A study published today suggests your Apple Watch could help detect and track serious heart conditions. According to CNET, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco worked with the app Cardiogram on the Health eHeart study, gathering cardiovascular data from 6,158 people who used Apple Watches. They tested whether the watches were able to …

Scopis Introduces the First Mixed-Reality Surgical Holographic Navigation Platform Integrating Microsoft HoloLens for Open and Minimally-Invasive Spine Surgery

The technical potential for automation differs dramatically across sectors and activities.

Alphabet’s artificial intelligence outfit, DeepMind, plans to build a blockchain-style system that will carefully track how every shred of patient data is used. The company, which is rapidly expanding its health-care initiatives, has announced that it will build a tool that it calls Verifiable Data Audit during the course of this year. The idea: allow hospitals, and potentially even patients, to see exactly who is using health-care records, and for what purpose. By logging how every piece of patient data is used, the company hopes to leave behind an indelible audit trail.

The watch collects your heart rate and rhythms, but it only tells you the time and date.

The future of medical learning

Take a look at the latest work from our 3D4Medical labs, where our developers and experience designers are working on immersive anatomical learning, by blending our models and technology with Mixed Reality.

The ‘deep learning’ research company will use 1m anonymised eye scans to train a neural network to identify early signs of degenerative eye conditions