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The push to get patients involved in hospital design
Last month I trekked to Berkeley’s “extended reality” lab, home to a new study examining pediatric patients’ comfort with various hospital room layouts. The study, which immerses formerly hospitalized children in virtual reality mock-ups and measures their eye movement, facial expressions and heart rates, is a bid to make hospital design more inclusive for young patients, whose perspectives are too often excluded from the design process. (The XR Lab’s broader goal, says founder Luisa Caldas, is getting the public more involved “in decision making and in the construction of the built environment,” including in health care.)
“It’s not just about making things look pretty,” said Haripriya Sathyanarayanan, the Berkeley PhD candidate leading XR Lab study. “We can create environments that alleviate stress and anxiety, making [patients’] hospital stay a little less daunting and a lot more comforting.”
For one formerly hospitalized teen, participating in the study — which invites her input on things like window size and art placement — is a way to give back to future patients. “I find it really exciting to know that future kids will have more pleasant, and happy, and healing rooms, and to help their process,” high schooler Ariela Rubens told me. Read the whole story.
How a California health system puts VR into practice
Also on VR, I heard from Hoag Healthcare, an Orange County health system with almost 600,000 patients and almost 2,000 doctors, on their use of the tech. They’re using Penumbra’s REAL System, which is designed for rehab care for issues like strokes or brain tumors, and to help patients recovering from substance use disorder when they experience cravings, Hoag tells me. More than 1,000 Hoag patients have used the tech. It’s also helped the health system manage its own staff’s stress levels; clinicians are using the headsets to take breaks between patients. Hoag has about 70 headsets that it loans out.
For acute and outpatient rehab, VR offers a way for patients to start therapy faster than if they’d have to wait for fully in-person care, and it keeps them motivated, Thomas Hutchinson, executive director for digestive health and experiential reality at Hoag Hospital, told STAT. “Our staff thinks of it as a “digital extender” to potentially engage patients beyond the 3-hour of allotted rehabilitation, which provides a significant value to extend the amount of therapy time,” he said.
Commercial hurdles for brain-computer interfaces
As our medical devices reporter Lizzy Lawrence reminds us, the promise of brain-computer interfaces is astonishing: Giving totally paralyzed people the ability to control computers with their brains. The technology’s attracting increasing attention, in no small part due to Elon Musk‘s venture Neuralink.
Now, the hype’s translating into high funding rounds rarely seen in the medical device industry: Yesterday, Neuralink raised $280 million in a round led by Peter Thiel‘s Founders Fund.
Experts say they’re optimistic that BCIs could one day actually help patients — especially as Neuralink, Synchron and others look to begin clinical trials, Lizzy tells us. But they also warn that the field might face bigger commercial hurdles than scientific ones. Even if companies do score FDA approval, the size of the market for BCIs remains unclear.
Another fear: That hype, like Musk’s grandiose claims that brain chips could facilitate “superhuman cognition,” will fuel unrealistic expectations from investors who might be frustrated when the science, and business case, takes longer to prove out. “This is a very expensive and complicated technology that requires maintenance,” says Kip Ludwig, a former neural engineering director at the National Institutes of Health. “It’s a very small market. Who is going to pay for it?”
Read Lizzy’s deep dive into hurdles facing BCIs here.
Zoom clarifies terms of service following backlash
The video conferencing giant — which has facilitated the rapid transition to telehealth — responded to fresh scrutiny over terms of service released in the spring that allow Zoom to use content like meeting summaries for training and testing artificial intelligence and machine learning. Following backlash, on Monday, the company clarified that it would not use customers’ audio, video, or data for AI training without their consent.
The privacy implications were particularly concerning given how many people have medical appointments over Zoom. In an update to its terms of service, Zoom also said it wouldn’t use protected health information to train AI models without consent. “We routinely enter into student data protection agreements with our education customers and legally required business associate agreements (BAA) with our healthcare customers,” the update said. “Our practices and handling of education records, pupil data, and protected healthcare data are controlled by these separate terms and applicable laws.”
Multi-state ransomware attack shuts ERs
A large ransomware attack has wreaked havoc on Prospect Medical Holdings, a California-based health system operating 17 hospitals and 165 outpatient facilities in four states, my colleague Annalisa Merelli tells us.
The attack forced the health system to close some emergency departments and cancel some elective surgeries last week, and problems persist at a number of facilities. The FBI, which is conducting an investigation with support from the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, could not provide further details.
“This incident underscores the seriousness of the cyber threat to our nation’s critical infrastructure,” Eric Goldstein, CISA’s executive assistant cybersecurity director, said in a statement.
Ransomware attacks on health care facilities have doubled from 2016 to 2021, according to a 2022 study. In July, cyberattackers accessed sensitive data for 1.2 million patients at Tampa General Hospital, one of the largest in Florida. Smaller hospitals and health facilities are especially vulnerable to ransomware attacks, as they are less likely to be equipped to prevent the attacks and have fewer resources to recover from them.
GoodRx’s latest prescription play: pill reminders
I recently chatted with GoodRx’s chief product officer Mark Hull, previously at LinkedIn and Google, about a new product called Medicine Cabinet. The app tracks prescriptions, reminds patients to take pills and refill orders, and gathers coupons and price information. (It’s out for iPhones, and an Android version will follow.)
The company, which was recently dinged by federal regulators for sharing data with Facebook, specializes in prescription discounts, and also has a telehealth marketplace to help customers get prescriptions.
Reminding patients to take their pills might get them to be healthier, but it’ll also nudge them to stay engaged with their medication plan. And if customers pick up their refills, they’ll get additional discounts, Hull said. “Just having a reminder is not enough,” he said, adding that the goal is to incentivize customers to keep up with prescriptions.
Connecting pricing information and coupons together with individual patients’ data is a heavy technical lift, Hull told me, requiring relationships with pharmacy benefit managers, retailers and insurers, he said. “Technically speaking what’s involved in terms of managing those data pipelines that’s a serious level of complexity,” he said.