HealthTech News Roundup
What We’re Reading
Developments in The Healthcare Industry
IBM announced it would stop selling its AI-powered Watson drug discovery products due to disappointing sales. The company will continue to work with existing customers like Pfizer, Novartis, Illumina, and Teva Pharmaceutical. This issue is the latest in a series of problems for IBM's Watson Health product suite.
Federal prosecutors charged Rochester Drug Cooperative, the sixth-largest pharmaceutical distributor in the U.S., and two of its former executives, with drug-trafficking offenses related to their role in the opioid crisis. The prosecutors allege that the company and these executives distributed "tens of millions of oxycodone pills and fentanyl products to pharmacies they knew were distributing drugs illegally." Rochester Drug Cooperative is the first major corporation to get charged in connection with the opioid crisis.
A new study shows the promise of using vocal biomarkers to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder. The authors of the study developed an algorithm that analyzes 18 different speech characteristics to determine the presence of PTSD. This algorithm "correctly identify patients with PTSD 89 percent of the time" in the study.
An article in NPR describes a recent study that linked high-deductible health plans to delayed diagnosis and treatment. The study looked at 316,244 women whose health insurance switched from a low-deductible plan to a high-deductible plan between 2004 and 2014. It found that when comparing low-income women with high-deductible plans to low-income women with low-deductible plans, the women with high-deductible plans "waited an average of 1.6 months longer for diagnostic breast imaging, 2.7 months for first biopsy, 6.6 months for first early-stage breast cancer diagnosis and 8.7 months for first chemotherapy."
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