Health IT

AR/VR innovation needs to accelerate in order to meet the critical demands of health care. Policymakers should empower and fund immersive technologies in the health-care industry because of the long-term cost saving benefits and positive impact on patient care.

Many of the world’s biggest challenges are health challenges. The good news is that, more than ever, people are meeting these challenges with innovative solutions.

Selena is transforming eye care by leveraging AI to detect diseases like diabetic retinopathy with unprecedented accuracy, helping to diagnose issues early and prevent blindness, thus improving patient outcomes and offering more access globally.

David Moschella appeared on Health Stealth Radio with host Frank Cutitta for a lively “fireside spat” about digital health transformation, and Moschella and Rob Atkinson’s newly released book Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths about Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy.

By improving privacy protection and facilitating secure collaborative research, privacy-enhancing technology could complement data-sharing policies and enable analysis of sensitive medical data and support biomedical innovation.

As demographic change and aging populations in many Western countries entail higher relative health-care burdens, AI’s support in diagnosis, drug development, and health-care operations may serve as a much-needed remedy.

Innovation plays a critical role in improving public health and in overcoming global health challenges. The call for LATAM Health Champions, which ran from February 5 to March 5, 2024, received more than 60 applications proposing innovative health solutions to a wide range of health challenges. Here, the top 20 are highlighted.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, federal policymakers enacted a series of legislative and regulatory measures to expand access to telehealth services. Congress recently extended many of these changes for two years in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 (H.R. 2617). However, policymakers should permanently extend these temporary measures to ensure that medical providers can continue to offer care to patients remotely after the extension ends.

Policymakers should both make permanent many of the COVID-19 era policies that allow medical providers to see patients remotely and enact provisions allowing for the practice of telemedicine over state lines. However, policymakers should also take further steps to ensure that telehealth providers offer and abide by the same standard of care as in-person treatment.

Stephen Ezell will be speaking at the James Madison Institute’s Florida Tech & Innovation 2022 Summit in Coral Gables, Florida on a panel discussing “Innovations and the Future of Healthcare.”