As healthcare reform forces physicians, health systems and payers to make hard choices as to which technologies will support their goals of reducing costs, readmissions, and meet other ACA targets, a team led by a former Samsung vice president of digital health offered a reinvention of a First Aid kit, called GALE. It’s short for Nightingale. Florence Nightingale.
I like it as prototype for the future of healthcare and as an exercise for how healthcare could be delivered. Ram Fish, who heads up 19 Labs, has led Samsung’s digital health strategy and has several years’ experience in digital health. He has developed devices such as wearable 3G monitoring device BlueLibris, which Numera Health acquired. He has also worked for other companies such as Nokia and Apple, both of which have big ambitions in digital health.
The design is interesting, but beyond that it seems a little fanciful and redundant.
Fish said, “It is not so much about reinventing the first aid kit but about designing/delivering healthcare the way it should be,” he said. “We are the first to bring together supplies and medication with a video interface.”
In addition to adding a video interface to a first aid kit, it also has educational content. But I didn’t really see anything on the GALE that you couldn’t already get on a computer, smartphone or tablet device.
Fish suggested that parents with children, seniors “aging in place,” and people with chronic conditions would get the most out of it. He noted that pilot studies on the device are slated for the third quarter this year. He said it is currently incubating the device with a major provider.
I think it has merit as an exercise in healthcare provides a useful way to illustrate what’s possible but I can’t see people throwing down hundreds of dollars for something they already have.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Check out the video and see what you think.
