A digital-first health strategy | Virtual hospital | Health robotics

"You have to understand what are they worried about, what are their fears, what are they trying to do? If we don’t engage with them that way, it doesn’t matter what technology we use." — Roy Rosin, chief innovation officer, Penn Medicine

Today’s issue:

• A digital-first health strategy
  
• Rolling out a virtual hospital
• XLerateHealth alum brings new product to market
  
• MSU converts lab courses to online format
• Cleveland Clinic and Clorox join forces
• Brazilian COVID variant discovered
• Health Tech

May 26, 2021

PANDEMIC INNOVATION

Image by Adao for Shutterstock

Digital-first safety strategy

Wisconsin healthcare system ThedaCare is using a digital app to reach out to patients during the pandemic as part of its digital-first strategy. A biometric sign-in using facial recognition will be added to the app, called Ripple, in the third quarter of this year.

Rolling out a virtual hospital

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the use of "virtual hospitals," which monitor patients in their homes. Atrium Heath launched the idea with the Charlotte, NC-based nonprofit health system. Here's the story of how they rolled it out.

XLerateHealth alum brings new product to market

Crosby Innovations, an XLerateHealth alumni in Michigan, has signed a commercialization deal with Florida-based Healthe Inc. to bring UVC 222nm technology and proprietary Healthe HANDS™ product to market by Q4 2021. The companies are exploring applications within COVID, as well as future viruses and bacteria that could pose potential pandemics.

MSU converts lab courses to online format

Tyrone Rooney and Alex Steiner, Michigan State University researchers, wanted to find a way for Earth Sciences students to access microscope labs when COVID caused the school to turn to online classes. The two created an open‐source device that combines a 3D-printed mechanism and an integrated camera to convert lab courses to an online format.

Cleveland Clinic and Clorox join forces

Cleveland Clinic is collaborating with The Clorox Company to develop health and safety measures to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The $1 million fund provided by Clorox will focus on tomorrow's health safety products.

Brazilian COVID variant discovered

Wastewater researchers from the University of Louisville's Co-Immunity Project discovered a Brazilian COVID-19 variant and alerted the health department. Identifying a virus earlier gives officials more time to contain the spread.

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PUDDLE HOPS: HEALTH TECH

Fast Future has followed medical and tech news around COVID-19 from the beginning of the pandemic. We're adding coverage to this report related to health care innovation to feature more advances across Fast Future Country. 

• Pittsburgh's Duquesne University is building a virtual learning space for the College of Osteopathic Medicine that uses HoloLens mixed-reality technology and virtual anatomy software from the Cleveland Clinic Medical School. The virtual technology will allow students to see 3D body parts in action.

• Durham's Tellus Therapeutics has secured financing to develop the first treatment for newborns with white matter brain injury. Neonatal WMI is the most common brain injury leading to neurodevelopmental disability in survivors of preterm birth.

• Kindred Healthcare is rolling out EksoNr, a robotic exoskeleton, to four of its long-term acute hospitals in the U.S. The tech empowers patients recovering from acquired brain injury, stroke and spinal cord injury to learn to walk again with a more natural gait.

• St. Louis consulting firm BioRankings has launched an initial version of its detection software designed to more quickly analyze raw data in the study small molecules known as metabolites. This is the company's first release of a standalone software product.

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