Industry Watcher’s Digest

 

  • Major provider-supplier combo making big plans. Duke Health (Durham, N.C.) and analytics giant SAS (Cary, N.C.) have signed a letter of intent to combine forces over ways to “shape the future of healthcare via informed data and analytics.” The collaboration would blend Duke Health’s expertise in tech-based patient care and clinical research with SAS’s experience integrating healthcare data from clinical, claims, genomic and social sources. Duke Health announced the move April 11.
     
  • Smart sensors for frenetic workflows. AI remote monitoring vendor Care.ai is working with Google Cloud to extend the startup’s reach in hospitals and nursing homes via availability on Google Cloud Marketplace. The primary product in play, Care.ai’s Smart Care Facility Platform, uses ambient sensors and generative AI to, for example, alert nurses and other frontline caregivers when bedside attention is and isn’t warranted. Learn more.
     
  • Highly ‘promising’ healthcare AI vendors. Forbes is out with its annual selections for 50 of the “most promising privately held companies building businesses out of artificial intelligence.” Five names making the list are specific to healthcare: Bayesian Health (New York City, patient risk detection); Insitro (San Francisco, drug discovery); PathAI (Boston, diagnostics and drug discovery); Unlearn.AI (San Francisco, clinical trial forecasting); and Viz.AI (San Francisco, disease detection). Forbes’s own coverage here.
     
  • Happy (data) trails for edifying (patient) journeys. Health-data platform supplier HealthVerity (Philadelphia) is partnering with cloud-based analytics outfit Axtria (Berkely Heights, N.J.) to offer HIPAA-compliant transfer and analysis of patient-level data across myriad transmittal streams. Supported programs might include digitized patient support, provider or vendor marketing and any other engagement channels reflecting or facilitating “patient journeys.” Read the rest.
     
  • Could your hospital pull this off? People stricken with a cardiovascular crisis often survive and recover as long as they’re transported ASAP to a hospital that has two attributes: expertise in emergency heart care and capacity to accommodate the incoming episode. Machine learning could help paramedics and EMTs quickly thread that needle at the scene of first response, new research shows. The study was conducted in South Korea at Yonsei University (Seoul) and published April 6 in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. AIin.Healthcare coverage here.
     
  • AI invigorates America’s oldest medical journal. The NEJM Group, publisher of the 211-year-old New England Journal of Medicine, has launched an all-digital journal to publish research and associated content related to the use of AI in medicine. Called NEJM AI, the publication has as its first editor-in-chief Isaac (Zak) Kohane, MD, PhD, founding chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School. Coverage from HealthExec here and the Harvard Gazette here.
Dave Pearson

Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.

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