SBR Health selected to participate in BluePrint Health IT Innovation Exchange Summit

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Admin

SBR Health is BluePrint Health IT Finalist

SBR Health is chosen as a BluePrint Health IT finalist.

SBR Health is proud to be one of 10 finalists chosen from more than 40 applicants for the BluePrint Health IT Innovation Exchange Summit, an event dedicated to accelerating innovation and adoption of transformative, healthcare IT solutions nationwide. The summit will bring together cutting-edge, healthcare providers with innovative, early-stage healthcare information technology companies to showcase and accelerate eHealth innovation across the nation.

Modeled after speed dating, the event introduces technology companies and leading healthcare providers in short 15-minute meetings with the goal of creating the ideal match and fostering a pilot project. Participants start the day by attending seminars on how to foster a successful relationship. Following the meetings, attendees will participate in the preliminary round of 10 introductory sessions. In the afternoon, companies will engage in two longer meetings with the intention of outlining a framework for a potential project.

The SBR Health team is looking forward to connecting with Midwestern hospitals to help them find ways to leverage the benefits of telemedicine among their patient population. Make sure to follow us on Twitter as we engage with some of healthcare’s leading innovators at the summit.

Day Two: SBR Health at the WHITv7.0 Conference

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Admin

Day two of the World Healthcare Innovation and Technology (WHIT) conference got off with less of a bang than Monday – hard to match the energy Todd Park put forth yesterday.

Today’s keynote was delivered by Peter Tippett, MD, Vice President of Connected Healthcare Solutions at Verizon who was to speak on the revolution in HIT being enabled by the marriage of the Cloud and mobility. Although very interesting, his keynote ended up pretty much being an hour long advertisement for Verizon. Not that this was all bad, as Verizon is doing a lot of interesting work applying science to uncovering falsehoods in current security dogmas. For instance, Peter presented how Verizon is attempting to make data more secure. By studying, then releasing information on data breaches and publishing the data at www..com/databreach, the updates will appear on their blog at securityblog.verizonbusiness.com.

What I find particularly interesting is that the length of a password does not significantly reduce the chances of being compromised. However, Tippett stated that most attacks come from remote access, so just doing port scans followed by locking down open ports would reduce data breaches by 70%!

I also found his discussion of the Verizon LTE was enlightening. Evidently Verizon uses a lower frequency than other carriers so their 4G service works better at penetrating buildings such as hospitals as these lower frequencies get around walls better.

In a panel session on mHealth, Joe Kvedar, MD, Founder and Director of the Center for Connected Health, spoke of his center has found that patients are starting to do a better job at more effectively taking care of their health. This is being enabled by connected consumer devices like the new iPod Nano that can track your daily steps. He also stated that this is a timely convergence with the change in the way healthcare is being paid for, where healthcare providers need to become better at managing their populations health so these tools could not be coming at a more plotting time.

I found the rest of the day pretty mediocre with the exception of a presentation by Cynthia Galbincea, Executive Director of Marketing Communications at the Cleveland Clinic. Galbincea spoke on their mobile strategies, stating they are seeing a lot of demand from consumers for wellness and information applications, and have been very active in developing and deploying these types of applications, especially in support of their branding strategies. From their doctors, their organization is seeing the largest uses of their iPads for sharing information with their patients, assisting with diagnosis, as well as tracking patient’s progress on them. Cleveland Clinic’s mHealth strategist, Tony Crimaldi stated they are focusing exclusively on iOS development, and with that, mainly applications for iPad devices as these are the preferred device with their clinicians.

That’s it from the final day of WHITv7. Overall, a pretty impressive line up of thought leaders and innovators and I’m looking forward to more high quality innovation events such as this one from the World Congress.

The Maribel Foundation: LA Children’s Hospital and Telemedicine

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Admin

Some may know her for her memorable characterization of Selena, others may remember her vast and ever changing music career, and most are just getting acquainted with Jennifer Lopez in the latest season of American Idol, but no matter how you know her, Jennifer Lopez, better known as J.Lo, is doing something worth remembering. Partnering up with her sister, Lynda, the pair founded the Maribel Foundation, their mission:

That’s why Lynda and I are working to create the Maribel Foundation. Our goal is to dramatically increase the availability of quality health care and health education for women and children, regardless of their ability to pay.

While this goal is no small task, they’ve taken it a step further and announced to launch a Telemedicine campaign, mainly in Los Angeles’ Children’s Hospital.

Jennifer and Lynda Lopez at the Telemedicine Launch in San Juan

Information from their Website:

The Foundation will work to expand the number of telemedicine clinics both domestically and abroad, increasing access to top quality pediatric care for the most serious cases. Telemedicine is a remarkable new healthcare delivery system that uses telecommunications technology to conduct medical diagnoses, consultations, treatments, transfers of data, education of physicians, and dissemination of public health alerts and/or emergency updates.

Simply stated, this technology allows patients located all over the world to receive access to care by the physicians at one of America’s top pediatric hospitals, the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

Patients living in under-served and under-privileged areas, two groups that are especially vulnerable to inadequate healthcare, can greatly benefit from telemedicine.

Some of the potential benefits of telemedicine are as follows:

Access: Telemedicine can allow children with serious childhood diseases in other areas of the world to be examined, diagnosed, and/or treated by the top pediatric oncologists, hematologists, and pediatricians at the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Doctors can virtually give patient care to children in different parts of the world.

Quality: Telemedicine permits consultations to take place among the referring physician, the consulting physician, the patient, and the patient’s family through interactive video and medical equipment and instruments, with the added benefit of having critical patient information available on-line. Additionally, the physicians or other personnel at remote or under-served locations can be educated before or during the consultations with specialty physicians and other experts, increasing their ability to treat other similar cases in the future.

Cost: The travel cost of the patients for specialty care, the travel cost of the health care professionals for continuing education or consultation, the personnel / equipment cost for not having to keep specialty care facility in rural or under-served hospitals, and other costs can be either eliminated or reduced.

To learn more about their campaign, watch the video here: Maribel Foundation

Visit SBR Health at the American Academy of Pediatrics 2011 National Conference & Exhibition

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Admin

Pediatrics is the talk of the town here in Boston. The American Academy of Pediatrics 2011 National Conference & Exhibition is this weekend with physicians, students and leaders in healthcare from around the globe gathering in Boston to discuss the hottest topics and trends in pediatric practice. The theme for this year’s conference is the prevention and treatment of childhood obesity.

Considered the premier pediatric educational event, the AAP conference exhibits some of the most innovative developments in medicine, services, resources and technology. A highlight at this year’s conference is the new Pediatric Office of the Future that will host an impressive variety of available technologies designed to deliver more efficient and higher quality medical care. The four Office of the Future areas include ARRA/HITECH/Meaningful Use, Patient Engagement, Practice Management and Design and Connectivity/HIE.

We are excited to be an exhibiter at the Office of the Future and will be on hand to demonstrate our solutions for reducing readmissions and driving patient referrals through simple and secure video communications platform that links physicians, patients and specialists across all distances. By enabling healthcare providers to quickly and more securely integrate videoconferencing into their workflow, our solutions make it cost effective and easy to improve the coordination and quality of care while at the same time enhancing rather than changing clinical and IT workflows.

Find us and other leaders in healthcare at this year’s Office of the Future exhibit space at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center from Oct. 14-18.

Welcome to SBR Health

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Admin

In 2008, I was serving as Chief Product Officer for a company started by some Stanford University graduates to address a need they saw for a video communication product that was as inexpensive and as easy to use as consumer products like Skype but that had enterprise-level collaboration tools and military-grade security. The initial markets for this new company’s products were users throughout the intelligence community, the military, and other government organizations. With the government market now firmly established, I began looking for commercial market opportunities, and to that end, I began analyzing the database of more than 5,000 businesses that had downloaded the free trial product from the company’s website. One thing that intrigued me was the number of users in healthcare who had downloaded and were using our product. When I called many of these users to inquire how they were utilizing our product, I found they were looking for an easy and low-cost way to communicate with their patients wherever they were, an application that is an aspect of telemedicine.

The term telemedicine can be used to describe any kind of healthcare delivered at a distance using a communication media such as remote data monitoring, store-and-forward transmission of images, or interactive video. Until recently, the specialized equipment and expensive network infrastructure required by video made it impractical unless the patient was a great distance from the doctor. It’s no surprise that some of the most extensive implementations were in places where the population was dispersed over a vast distance, such as Nebraska or Northern Ontario. Still, a number of the healthcare professionals I talked to felt that the real benefits of video were yet to be realized. If the cost and complexity could be brought down, there was a much larger population of patients who may not need to travel long distances but still could be better served if they could avoid traveling. These patients were in local community hospitals, rehab facilities, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, or in their own homes.

However, after much additional interaction with a variety of forward-thinking healthcare professionals using our televideo platform, we learned that simply reducing the cost and complexity of televideo technologies did not solve the larger problem of how to utilize these technologies seamlessly in existing IT and clinical processes. In effect, we discovered something that proved to be true throughout healthcare: The success of any technology depends only 10% on the technology itself and 90% on how that technology is integrated with the organization’s workflow and protocols. It isn’t that the healthcare community is crying out for more, cheaper technology, but that it needs solutions to facilitate the delivery of care in a more efficient and effective manner.

Out of this discovery, SBR Health was born. We exist not to create televideo products; rather we strive to create healthcare solutions that are video-enabled.

One-Clickify Change

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Admin

At the Inbound Marketing Summit, part of the Future M events, last week, Dan Heathtold a story about a study conducted at Stanford University which found that an unkind rich person with a map was three times more likely to donate food than a kind person without one.

Dan Heath speaks at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston.

So what does this story have to do with marketing and SBR Health? During his talk, Dan made a point that particularly resonated with me: One-clickify the change you are seeking, meaning make it easier to change by removing obstacles in the path to change and minimizing the amount a person has to do to implement the new system. It means thinking about how to alter a situation to get a different result. The researchers at Stanford made it easier for the “less kind people” to donate food by telling them a specific item to donate and giving them a map to the drop-off location. Similarly, business leaders need to give others a map to allow easy adoption of their ideas or services.

Since joining SBR Health, I have talked to more than fifty doctors and specialists who are interested in using televideo in their practices, but find the technology either too difficult or expensive to implement. What is needed is a change management process that is the equivalent of giving the doctors “a canned good and a map.”

Therefore, my team and I are working with clinicians to figure out the shortcomings of their existing systems for monitoring patients and how televideo can overcome those challenges. For example, doctors mentioned that unnecessary hospitalization costs were a burden on their hospitals; however, without being able to see the patient remotely, a doctor had to ask the patient to come in or visit the emergency room for an assessment. Others mentioned the difficulty of conducting post-operative checkups for patients who lived far away from the hospital. Yet, others were faced with the challenge of connecting with a specialist when there was no specialist working in or near their hospital.

Telemedicine technology does already exist, but there are too many obstacles in the way of implanting it. During our conversations, some doctors indicated that a cart-based system was impractical for them to use or too few practitioners would be able to access it. Others didn’t have the time to go through the process of getting an expensive system approved by the hospital IT department. Still others worried that the technology wouldn’t work well over the hospital’s Internet connection or it would be too difficult to learn how to use.

Each of these conversations has further inspired us to continue working to refine the SBR Health telemedicine platform: an inexpensive and easy to use video communications product that efficiently and securely links together any combination of patients, clinicians, specialists and extended care givers. It’s our way of one-clickifying communication in the healthcare industry. In the meantime, if you have any ideas for us, please share your thoughts here.

Welcome to the SBR Health blog

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Admin

The healthcare industry is ever evolving, and here at SBR Health, Inc., we are excited to be part of it.

SBR Health is dedicated to changing the way that clinicians deliver healthcare. We create real-time, video communications solutions specialized for the healthcare industry. Three months ago, we opened our doors at the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square, next door to MIT. Now, we’re in full swing, working toward our goal of making it easier for caregivers to provide better, more targeted care to their patients. To accomplish this goal, we’re engaging with a variety of medical professionals to learn how our platform can help solve some of the issues they face today.

The intersection of technology and medicine is an exciting field, and we created this blog as a way to engage with the community. Read about developments in telemedicine, SBR’s experiences in the field, the start-up business community in Boston and more.