4 takeaways from CES: Entrepreneurs eye shift towards enterprise

(Modern Healthcare)

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has increasingly become a showcase for digital health developers, investors and buyers. The conference, with more than 100,000 attendees, took place in Las Vegas from Jan. 5-8, 2023. Some of the takeaways from the event include that many emerging companies will utilize business-to-consumer as a training ground for a business-to-business pivot; that Age Tech could be at an inflection point; that raising money is difficult but necessary for many companies; and that narrowing artificial intelligence applications to specific problem areas will be key for companies to be successful.

Massachusetts General, Beth Israel Deaconess hospitals testing in-home dementia care

(Beckers Hospital Review)

Boston-based Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are among the hospitals and academic institutions testing artificial intelligence-powered tech solutions to help with in-home care of diseases such as Alzheimer's and dementia.

The new Massachusetts AI and Technology Center for Connected Care in Aging and Alzheimer's Disease, or MassAITC, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst distributed $1.7 million in National Institute on Aging funding Jan. 9 to its first seven pilot projects:

1. Testing a vocal biomarker platform for remote detection and monitoring of cognitive impairment (Massachusetts General Hospital and Sonde Health).
2. Sensor-guided psychopharmacology for Alzheimer's and related dementias (Belmont, Mass.-based McLean Hospital).
3. Early acute-illness detection for delirium and dementia (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Boston-based Northeastern University).
4. Smartphone blood pressure monitoring for healthy aging (University of California San Diego).
5. Developing real-world digital biomarkers from wearable sensors for Alzheimer's (UMass Amherst and VivoSense).
6. Detecting frailty at home through noninvasive, whole-room, body-heat sensing (UMass Amherst, Hebrew SeniorLife and Butlr Technologies).
7. Vascular aging using infrasonic hemodynography embedded into earbuds (MindMics).

Google Introduces ChatGPT-like ChatBot for Healthcare

(Digital Health)

While ChatGPT seems to be all over the place with no real use cases, Google Research and DeepMind recently introduced MedPaLM, an open-sourced large language model for medical purposes. It is benchmarked on MultiMedQA, a newly introduced open-source medical question-answering benchmark. It combines HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions sought online, with six existing open-question answering datasets covering professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries. The benchmark also incorporates methodology for evaluating human model responses along several axes, including factuality, precision, potential harm, and bias.

MassChallenge Health Tech

Apply by Monday, February 6, 2023

MassChallenge HealthTech works to accelerate high-impact digital health startups by forming partnerships with industry-leaders. The HealthTech community comprises of physicians, healthcare professionals, scientists, policy leaders, and business mentors all working together to improve health care through entrepreneurship.

7th Annual Virtual Reality and Healthcare Global Symposium

Friday, March 3 – Sunday, March 5, 2023

The International Virtual Reality and Healthcare Association (IVRHA) is a member driven organization comprised of entities throughout the healthcare ecosystem, including technology companies, teaching hospitals and universities, as well as healthcare providers and insurance companies. IVRHA’s mission is to facilitate and support the growth of the virtual reality in health and life sciences.

Mass Digital Health Challenge: Innovations to Support Healthy Aging

Apply by Friday, February 24, 2023

Startups and entrepreneurs with digital health solutions designed to support healthy aging are encouraged to apply.

Up to eight finalists will be selected to participate in the program and compete for prizes worth up to $200,000. Selected entrepreneurs will participate in a two-month, virtual Introduction to the Massachusetts Digital Health Ecosystem program. The introduction will include a speaker series featuring prominent voices from across the ecosystem, including venture capitalists, successful digital health innovators, and leading researchers. During the program, participants will also be assessed on their testing and validation needs and then matched with members of the MA Digital Health Sandbox Network, a group of cutting-edge research and development organizations supporting digital health companies. Participants will work with their Sandbox partners to scope detailed testing and validation projects.

Patient Safety Technology Challenge

Submissions will be open from Thursday, December 1, 2022 - Tuesday, January 31, 2023

The Patient Safety Technology Challenge is designed to fuel the engagement of innovators in creating technology-enabled solutions and envisioning transformational approaches to reduce medical errors. The Futurist Patient Safety Transformation Award is meant to conceive anew who delivers what care, where, when, and how by incorporating modern technology, new professional roles, and new construction to achieve safe, optimal care. Three cash prizes of 1) $2500, 2) $1500 and 3) $1000, as well as a $2500 travel stipend for the first prize winner go to Philadelphia for the award acceptance are available

MGB Data Science Office Launches Service for Obtaining Radiologic Imaging Studies for Research

Accepting Requests on Rolling Basis

Looking for imaging studies for research? The Enterprise Medical Imaging team within the Data Science Office recently launched the Medical Imaging Data As A Service (MIDAS) that enable MGB investigators to obtain radiologic imaging studies for research purposes. The first product available under MIDAS is the Defined Exam Retrieval Service. Using this service, researchers can specify a list of imaging studies, up to 1,000 per request, to be retrieved from clinical imaging archives and stored in a temporary location that has security and access control based on IRB permissions.

Guidance for Sharing Model Code and Data as a Requirement for Publication

As AI/ML research continues to expand, there are increasing privacy concerns stemming from the publication or dissemination of model code, hyperparameters, weights, and training datasets. At the same time, in an effort to advance the field, ensure scientific reproducibility, and embrace open science, many journals and granting agencies are requiring machine learning model code with or without associated data to be shared as a requirement for publication. This document provides guidance for researchers as they consider when to publish and what elements to share as part of a discrete individual research project (i.e. not part of an on-going open source activity).

Harvard Clinical Informatics Lecture Series

Weekly lectures are held on Tuesdays at 12:00PM

The Harvard Clinical Informatics Lecture Series (HCILS) provides a forum for clinicians and researchers at HMS and beyond to learn the field of clinical informatics. The series addresses core topics in clinical informatics as outlined by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education as well as cutting edge research being done nationally.