This week had another host of exciting developments in healthcare. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.
The Apollo Hospitals group will set up 30 telemedicine units in Africa under a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) it has signed with AfroIndia Medical services. The first three units will be located at Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja in Nigeria. AfroIndia Medical Services is an Africa-based integrated medical service provider, which offers accessible and affordable medical care to patients from Africa at its network of over 1,500 hospitals in India, Israel and Europe.
How far would you go to help your parent if they had a stroke and couldn’t communicate with anyone? And what if you were a computer genius who knew his way around electronics and games? Chad Ruble has hacked Kinect software to create an interface that helps his disabled mother, who can’t use a keyboard after suffering from a stroke 12 years ago, communicate again. He did it by digging into Microsoft's Kinect motion sensor peripheral to create a visual dashboard complete with happy, sad, angry, tired emoticons to convey her wishes.
Though employees will see their health insurance premiums increase 6.5 percent next year, employers will take a bigger hit, 8 percent, according to a new Mercer, Inc. study, and confirmed by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation earlier this week. Though healthcare costs are rising more slowly than in other years, they’re still going up. And they’re still double what they were in 2002, Jeffrey Young noted. Early responses from a survey conducted by Mercer Inc., the New York-based employee and benefits consulting firm, indicate that employers expect premium increases of about 8 percent in 2013.
Telemedicine is fast becoming one of the most popular ways for physicians to treat patients who live far from hospitals or may be too ill or embarrassed to visit the office in person. But a surprising new use is emerging, and it’s the way healthcare providers are supporting patients in detox who are in early recovery, a critical time for these patients. Therapist and patient hook up through video conference, rather than physically meeting at an onsite care facility.
Just when we’ve started to get used to robots in hospitals, lifting patients, carrying trays, delivering medication – even operating on people – now they’re up to something new. Well, not really. We’re talking about a special suit, made by a company called Ekso Bionics, helping people with severe spinal injuries walk again. According to Brian X. Chen, Ekso is one of several companies and research labs working on wearable robots made to help disabled people. Ekso says it was the first company to introduce a self-contained robotic suit, without any tethers to a power supply. “And though its suits for the disabled are now used only in rehabilitation centers, it is looking ahead to a day when they will let people take to the sidewalks, the shopping malls – and maybe even the woods,” Chen said.
