The state of Illinois partners with OSF and Southern Illinois School of Medicine team up to monitor some COVID-19 patients at home. But before you get too excited, it’s pretty low tech.

While COVID-19 obviously makes some healthcare providers overburdened, some might struggle to survive: Almost half of primary care practices may have to close in a month due to lack of patients/revenue. Which could allow cash buyers to pick up the assets at fire sale prices, and that often drives up costs for consumers. On the other hand, here’s a viewpoint that it might ultimately send primary care docs down the direct primary care/concierge medicine path instead. For more on that, keep scrolling…

Good to see the federal government can still move apace when it feels the need: The FCC funds 6 hospital telehealth programs within days of application. 

Is consumer health tech more trouble than it’s worth? A high false alarm rate and lack of robust connectivity is a problem for Owlet. Being open that your device is not a medical device doesn’t matter. It might get you off the hook legally, but new parents who can splash $300 for a monitoring device are going to have high expectations. Being accurate/connected *only* most of  the time isn’t going to cut it.

Binah.ai’s solution for measuring vital signs automatically via camera is being trialed in Montreal.

Necessity is the mother of invention: Mount Sinai in New York adapts an existing stroke solution for remote monitoring of COVID-19 patients. Also adapting existing solutions to the pandemic, the eCart algorithm for early detection of patient deterioration is being fine-tuned.

Sensium gets a COVID-19 bump monitoring quarantined travellers arriving through Heathrow airport.

Could coronavirus derail the decades-long shift to value-based care? Could it derail it…? No “could” about it, it’s nailed on that it will. Coronavirus has already derailed absolutely everything else about “normal” that I can think of, so it’s pretty much guaranteed. Exhibit A: CMS is delaying the new payment model for ET3. There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re entering a new era for US healthcare. We’re a nation where so much of healthcare spend is via employer-subsidized insurance. And suddenly so many people have lost that benefit – and their income – however much we might whine about the cost of healthcare ordinarily. And everyone downstream of that cozy employer-employee relationship is going to lose healthcare revenue too – insurers, big pharma, PBMs, providers – everyone. Something is going to change. It’s a period of destruction, but will it be creative destruction? Maybe this will be a pivotal moment for direct primary care.  Similar thoughts here.

A sharp idea straight out of the University of Washington, using machine learning to distinguish a genuine cough from noise.

Digital health funding broke all records in Q1, according to Rock Health. It’s going to be really interesting to see how much the pandemic affects the rest of the year. I expect funding will drop overall, but anything that supports healthcare-remote-anything might find itself caught up in a funding boom.

Researchers in The Netherlands determine that AliveCor may be just as effective for managing blood pressure remotely as in-the-flesh visits to a clinic. Which leads us neatly into….

A couple of developments coming out of MIT. I think this is a development of a project I first saw maybe three years ago, using wireless signals to measure vital signs for COVID-19 patients at home. And further out still, embedding sensors into clothing to measure vitals continuously.

Is AI really better than physicians at diagnosis? I have two thoughts on that. First, AI’s diagnostic skills are still improving at a much faster rate than human docs. Second, AI is – or will be – cheaper. And that, in countries that have a strong focus on total cost of care, is going to be what drives adoption.

The long read: The history of telemedicine, how it came to be, how it promised to break down socio-economic barriers, and how it seems destined to be a tool for the wealthy. Really, it’s a good read, my description doesn’t do it justice. If nothing else, it highlights the tension between those that see the practice of medicine as a public good, and those that see it more as an opportunity for profit.