The Blockchain Solution to the Counterfeit Drug Problem

Takeaway: Blockchain’s public ledger could be the solution to the problem of counterfeit drugs by tracking all drugs throughout the complete supply chain from raw materials to patients.

In addition to posing a health risk to patients harmed by placebos or even harmful ingredients in the fake drugs, counterfeits add up to a major loss for the pharmaceutical industry to the tune of hundreds of billions a year. Aside from concerns about harm and loss, new legal requirements that demand traceability for drugs are kicking in.

Counterfeit drugs have been identified as a persistent global problem since 1985. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around 10 percent of drugs found in low to middle income countries are counterfeit. That translates into the deaths of tens of thousands of people with diseases who took medication without the necessary active ingredient to treat their conditions.

Given that what is at stake is not just billions of dollars for the pharma industry, but the lives and health of millions of people who have been prescribed medication, all the involved parties should come together to solve the problem of counterfeit drugs. If the difficulties in accountability and identification for drug production could be remedied by blockchain, it should be universally implemented.

Read more in  Countering Counterfeit Drugs with Blockchain

Marketing to patients out of patience

“Sure, I love waiting to be seen by a doctor who doesn't even bother to learn my name” said no one ever. Long waits in boring waiting rooms is one reason for patient discontent, but so is feeling like their time isn't valued and that no one cares about the lack of customer service for patients.

Any one of us who has had the experience of being in a hospital, or even of caring for a family member who was, can identify with the experiences depicted in these videos.

It doesn't have to be that way. That's the message that North Memorial Health, a healthcare system that operates two hospitals and 25 clinics in the Minneapolis area, is adopting for its new branding campaign created by BrandFire. The approach is to acknowledge that, while healthcare may be broken, it is working to fix it, and to humanize the healthcare experience.

Read more in Treating Patients Like Valued Customers

SaaS cuts down on sick visits

onically, seeking out healthcare can actually spread germs contained in a room packed with patients. If you've recently been in such a situation, and been forced to wait an hour or even longer to be seen, you might have thought, as I did, "there has to be a better way." There is, thanks to SaaS.

SaaS makes it possible for patients to use any web-enabled device to access convenient and affordable healthcare. It does not just give information like you'd find on WebMD, but a  personalized diagnosis and even a prescription--if warranted--at a cost that is just slightly higher than standard insurance copayments

Minneapolis-based Zipnosis is the company that developed the SaaS platform. It promises "online diagnosis and treatment in minutes" for $25. 

Read more in 

SaaS Replaces Sick Visits

Data for doctors: should there be limits on it?

This summer, Carolinas HealthCare System made the news rounds as a warning of the new levels of data mining available to healthcare companies. In Hospitals Are Mining Patients' Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick, we get a very Big Brother type of picture of the invasiveness of such data mining with an illustrative picture showing a doctor saying, “Don’t lie to me, Susan, I know about the 2 a.m. Papa John’s deliveries.”

 It makes for dramatic copy, but it’s still in the realm of fiction rather than fact, as I found our when  I contacted Carolinas HealthCare and got a response from Jason Schneider, Director, Clinical PR. He explained that the article “focused on how providers could use data for in the future and didn't include details what data we are currently using and how we are using it.”

The data they are currently using does not follow an individual’s consumer trail but looks at things like socio-economic circles, neighborhood limitations, and cultural affiliation that could shape one’s access to healthcare. One example of that was identifying why patients in one particular area were not coming in for regular doctor’s visits. It turned out that it didn’t have reliable public transportation to a doctor's office. After identifying the geographic problem, Carolinas HealthCare set up a doctor in the neighborhood itself.

As the person quoted in each of the articles on Carolinas use of data is Dr.  Michael Dulin, chief clinical officer for analytics and outcomes research at Carolinas, I contacted him and spoke with him on the phone. He explained that Carolinas has a decade of experience in using data to improve healthcare by identifying individuals within contexts that could pose obstacles to care.

Read more in 

More Info in the Name of Better Healthcare

Accurate monitoring woven into a shirt that's washable

Marketing to seniors no longer shows them as helpless peopel who have fallen and can't get up but as active people who take control of their health and monitoring. They are enabled to do this with an  "hWear" shirt that has built in sensors. It's made by HealthWatch, an Israeli startup with the slogan, "Weaving Health Into Everyday Life."
Read more in 

This Shirt Could Save Your Life

RX for Prescription Errors: Big Data Analytics

We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the doctor with bad handwriting whose prescriptions are all but illegible. While the use of electronic medical records (EMR) eliminates that chicken-scratch problem, it unfortunately doesn't fix other, often fatal, errors.

(Source: Carbon Arc)

In fact, EMR's introduction has made “new and alarming types of errors that didn't exist in manual records” creep up, says Dr. Gidi Stein, co-founder and CEO of MedAware, a startup using big-data analytics to combat the problem of prescription errors. Automatic selections are faster and neater than individual writing, but they also make it possible for doctors to put in errors they wouldn't have made on their own.

As reported in "Medical Errors: a Report by the Staff of U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer" (available in PDF format), prescription errors account for many of the 210,000 to 440,000 deaths in America each year that result from "medical errors and other preventable harm at hospitals.” 

read more in 

Analytics Startup Prescribes Fix for RX Errors

Big data, analytics, and insight into health

Mobile phones coupled with apps make it possible for people to hold the key to their own health information in their hands at all times. There are major ramifications for this possibility.

  Healthcare Analysis: Doctor vs. Device explores the position that doctors are becoming obsolete, replaced by more timely feedback from monitoring devices.

IFighting Heart Disease With Big Data  looks at the Health eHeart plan to collect health data of a million people over ten years in an effort to learn more about heart disease, the leading cause of death in America.  

EHR in NYC

Though the Big Apple has had a bad time with storms and power outages, last month, it got to report some good news. At the “NYC Celebrates Improved Health Through Technology” event on February 7th, New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced positive results for the adoption of electronic health records. Read more about it in 

Big Data for a Healthy Big Apple

Big Data Health Hazards

If anything can go wrong, it will." Murphy's Law (or Sod's Law, as it is known in the UK) applies to big data projects, as well. When those projects concern someone's health, something going wrong in the data can lead to something going very wrong with the patient.

The more one relies on the accuracy of the system, the higher the potential for error. Electronic health records (EHRs) are considered a boon to data aggregation, but they hold a potential downside.  Read more here

Big Data and Cancer Research

That's the subject of my post Big Data Battles Cancer.  For a completely different take on cancer, see Beyond Pink.

Big Data Applied to Health

I've written several pieces on the topic from various angles:

On how cell phone data is used to map the spread of Malaria in order to come up with effective prevention in Africa Analyzing Cellphone Data for the Greater Good

On Retrofit's approach: Data Gets Personal to Fight Obesity

On UPMC $10 million dollar big data plan: Creating Custom-Fit Healthcare

What do you think of pink?

Do you automatically buy anything that allies itself with "the cause?" There are reasons to think rather than blindly support all that is dressed in pink as discussed in http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2012/10/beyond-pink.html

Sensors you swallow

The cliché advice from doctors who don’t want to be bothered after hours by their patients has long been, “Take two pills and call me in the morning.” But soon it might be: "Take a pill, and we’ll call you." Read more at "Take 2 Pills & They'll Call You"