Medical Devices

Pedro Arrabal, M.D.

“Fetal echocardiography allows us to diagnose fetal heart defects as early as possible – while a woman is still pregnant – and determine what diagnostic measures can be performed during the pregnancy to further advise the parents,” says Pedro Arrabal, M.D., one of Sinai’s high-risk pregnancy specialists.[read more]

Medical technology / shutterstock

Conventional wisdom has it that investment in medical technology is down. I don’t buy it. I have seen the emergence of so many new medtech companies, even since the Great Recession of 2008. I have witnessed hundreds of millions of dollars flow into medtech.[read more]

Dr. Terry Simpson

The governor of New Jersey had a Lap-Band installed in February and has already lost 40 pounds. Lap-Band surgery is the least invasive of all the operations. But it still has risks – it is surgery, and with surgery comes complications. Here's what the Lap-Band can do, and some tips for success afterward.[read more]

This is the first post in HealthWorks Collective's new series: Health Start-Ups!. There are many, many cool healthcare startup companies out there. A few of them make it big. Many don't. I admire the developers of startups. They had an idea and they ran with it. I welcome any news, posts, ideas, people to interview, any information at all related to health start-ups. Post a comment on any of the posts in the series and I will get back to you![read more]

medical technology / shutterstock

The unrelenting economic forces underpinning medical technology — to drive down healthcare costs — have forced manufacturers to respond to competition that is broader, more aggressive and centered less on “features” than on “benefits.” Here is a THEN and NOW view of medtech.[read more]

medical technology / shutterstock

The medical technology industry is characterized by its focus on continually finding innovative solutions. There are a number of key opportunities in medtech that are driven by specific forces and are likely to be solved by one or more high value platform technologies.[read more]

Google Glasses

The movement for self-quantifying patients is not too old. Many experts believe that self-quantifying patients are the logical next step in evolution of person-centered healthcare. Physicians have found wearable self-quantifying by patients especially useful in management of chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, blood diseases, arthritis etc.[read more]

wellness/shutterstock

A number of companies sprung up using various trackers to monitor health and fitness information (Runkeeper, MapMyFitness, Fitbit and our own Healthrageous are just a few examples). In each case, and in our own research, we followed outcomes for a group of participants defined from a disease perspective. ... But something was not quite right. If our approach was so good, why weren’t we hitting closer to 100%?[read more]

CT scan

In recent years, there has been an increased amount of attention paid to the radiation risks inherent in CT scans. One major innovation that is saving time and protecting patients is the use of cloud-based data sharing, in particular, for storing medical images.[read more]

mobile health

Stephen Colbert ran an interview with Dr. Eric Topol from the West Wireless Institute. I first started covering some of Dr. Topol's presentations from 2008 and 2010 with TED; back then, I agreed with him that perhaps everyone was just not ready for wireless yet.[read more]

rehabilitation robot/shutterstock

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst are touting success in the case of a robot that delivered speech and physical therapy to a 72-year-old male stroke patient. In 10 years we’ll look back at these early results and it will be totally obvious the direction things were moving.[read more]

radiology/shutterstock

Radiologists at Intermountain Primary Children’s Medical Center are extremely pleased with the improvement in visualization of soft tissues and small structures for all children, but they report the difference is especially pronounced in premature babies and infants.[read more]