Industry Insight

Partnership to Use Artificial Intelligence
to Combat Breast Cancer

Royal Philips, a global leader in health technology, and PathAI, a company that develops artificial intelligence technology for pathology, are collaborating with the aim to develop solutions that improve the precision and accuracy of routine diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. The partnership aims to build deep learning applications in computational pathology, enabling this form of artificial intelligence to be applied to massive pathology data sets to better inform diagnostic and treatment decisions. The initial focus of this effort is on developing applications to automatically detect and quantify cancerous lesions in breast cancer tissue.

The accurate quantitative assessment of cancer involvement and scale is a central and challenging task for pathologists. This task, while critical to diagnosis and treatment, is very time-consuming and can place increased pressure on pathologists to conduct slide readings and analysis faster. Historically, pathologists have manually reviewed and analyzed tumor tissue slides using a microscope, but the rising shortage of pathologists and the increase in cancer caseloads require digital pathology solutions and smart image analysis software that reduce pathologists’ routine workload, improve diagnostic accuracy and precision, and reduce error rates.

“Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, with more than 250,000 new cases diagnosed every year in the United States,” says Andy Beck, MD, PhD, CEO of PathAI. “Our goal is to help patients receive fast, accurate diagnosis and support treating physicians to deliver optimal care by empowering pathologists with decision support tools powered by artificial intelligence. For example, identifying the presence or absence of cancer in lymph nodes is a routine and critically important task for a pathologist. However, it can be extremely laborious using conventional methods. Research indicates that pathologists supported with computational tools could be both more accurate and faster.”

Deep learning is an algorithmic technique that is revolutionizing what is possible in areas such as finance, communication, automotive, natural language processing, computer vision, and more. It allows computers to analyze vast amounts of data and automatically detect patterns and make accurate predictions. Philips has already implemented deep learning in its clinical informatics solutions for radiology, such as Illumeo and IntelliSpace Portal 9.0. With the proliferation of digital pathology and whole slide imaging, computers will soon be able to learn and unlock the big data potential of thousands of digital tumor tissue (histology) images and related patient data. As a pioneer in the digitization of pathology, Philips has created a leading digital pathology business through strategic investments, partnerships, and technology licenses.

“Digitizing images in pathology has the potential to transform the field by unlocking new opportunities in image recognition,” says Russ Granzow, general manager of Philips Digital Pathology Solutions. “With computational pathology and the application of artificial intelligence, there is an opportunity to increase efficiencies, enable greater accuracy and precision, and allow pathologists to see things and access insights not previously available.”

Last year, Beck and colleagues from Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won a global challenge on the detection of metastatic lesions in lymph nodes with a performance that rivals human error rates consistently. Now Philips and PathAI are partnering to ensure such highly promising technologies could find a practical application in aiding pathologists in their effort to deliver high-quality, high-confidence diagnosis.

— Source: Royal Philips

Study: One-Third of Health Care Providers
Use Remote Monitoring

About one-third of health care providers are using remote patient monitoring and video-based “Virtual Care” services to improve patient engagement and access to care, and more of these programs are likely to come, according to a survey commissioned by US tax, audit, and advisory firm KPMG LLP.

“We are seeing a strategic shift in how providers are thinking about investment in digital health capabilities including virtual health platforms, enhanced portals and web interactions as well as scheduling and referral management tools to improve patient experience, increase access to care, and provide continuity of care,” says Michael Beaty, a principal at KPMG’s Healthcare & Life Sciences Practice.

Technology can remove the constraint of geography in health care, improving patient engagement, increasing convenience, and providing a higher quality treatment to remote areas. Despite being used interchangeably, telemedicine connects the medical specialist-to-primary care or emergency department clinicians through technology. Telehealth connects clinicians directly with patients in their home, on mobile devices, or in community locations, such as retail pharmacies or employer health stations.

Approximately 31% of health care organizations presently use video-based services and 34% offer remote patient monitoring, the survey conducted by HIMSS Analytics found. Expansion plans for these services could drive future use, with another 44% seeing video-based services and 48% planning for remote patient monitoring, the survey found.

About one-half of providers said they had clinician-to-clinician consults or continuous monitoring through tele-stroke or tele-ICU offerings. The survey found some variance in the pace of adoption of Virtual Care; three-quarters of providers have some form of telemedicine or telehealth offering but only a fraction call their program “advanced.”

About one-quarter of survey respondents said “maintaining a sustainable business and/or financial model” was the biggest challenge, followed by adoption issues with clinicians (17%), defining a strategy to implement Virtual Care (12.2%), and regulatory compliance and risk/liability concerns (12.2%).

“The business case for implementing a Virtual Care program is improving as health care evolves toward value-based care incentives from limited fee-for-service reimbursements,” says Richard Bakalar, MD, KPMG managing director and member of the firm’s Global Healthcare Center of Excellence. “It’s more efficient for high-cost and limited clinical staff as well as other onsite resources, while making it more convenient and timely for patients to receive their care.”

— Source: KPMG LLP

Mayo Clinic Health Information
Offered Through Epic Patient Apps

Mayo Clinic is offering its trusted, expert health information on demand through Epic patient apps.

Mayo Clinic is offering this embedded content option to Epic’s health care clients as a way to help other providers share expert health information with their patients. More than 4,000 comprehensive health topics spread across more than 18,000 pages of Mayo Clinic content are available, including symptom, condition, disease, life stage, and healthy living information.

“Mayo Clinic delivers original, trusted health information and content based on more than 150 years of medical practice, and is one of the few content providers that is also a health care provider,” says Sandhya Pruthi, MD, consultant in the division of general internal medicine and associate medical director for Mayo Clinic Global Business Solutions. “We are pleased to work with Epic on offering easy-to-access, evidence-based clinical information to patients.”

Mayo Clinic health information is available in article, video, image, slideshow, and expert answer formats. Content is provided in English and Spanish, with new content being added weekly. Mayo Clinic medical experts regularly review and update this evidence-based health content to ensure its accuracy and relevance.

“Making Mayo Clinic’s world-class health knowledge available within MyChart and MyChart Bedside can help patients understand and better manage their health and well-being,” says Carl Dvorak, president of Epic. “We look forward to collaborating with Mayo Clinic on this and other innovations.”

To access this information, patients can click the HL7 Infobutton or on a keyword within Epic’s MyChart web portal and MyChart Bedside inpatient tablet applications for iOS and Android. With this click, they can get Mayo Clinic health information based on their chart elements, such as diagnoses and results. Patients will be able to access Mayo Clinic content from multiple areas, including Problem List, Health Maintenance, Medications, Allergies, and Results Review.

— Source: Mayo Clinic