Slide 10.<\/strong> That\u2019s where health sensors come into the picture. We have wearables, ingestibles, implantables. There will soon be health sensors that measure every aspect of human health. The iWatches and Fitbits that we see today are just the tip of the iceberg. We already have:<\/p>\nMicroneedle patches to measure blood analytes\u2026<\/p>\n
The ability to do an entire sleep study in the home\u2026<\/p>\n
Ultrasounds that fit in one\u2019s pocket\u2026<\/p>\n
Tattoos that measure vital signs\u2026<\/p>\n
Intelligent pills that measure what\u2019s going on inside the body, and\u2026<\/p>\n
Nanoparticles that find cancerous cells in the body<\/p>\n
The only thing that\u2019s missing from this list is a hydration sensor, which is what I\u2019m working on developing in my PhD. Despite the fact that our bodies are mostly water, there\u2019s no good way to measure hydration.<\/p>\n
As these health sensors become commonplace, healthcare and the way we practice medicine is going to look very different.<\/p>\n
Slide 11.<\/strong> We\u2019ll actually be able to understand trends and get closer to practicing truly personalized medicine. Your tests may come out in the normal range at your annual doctor\u2019s check up but if the long-term picture was something like this, that would be a lot more worrisome than something like\u2026<\/p>\nSlide 12.<\/strong> \u2026this.<\/p>\nSlide 13.<\/strong> That\u2019s the power of health sensors. They will enable us to have access to long data \u2013 longitudinal data on a single individual over time. Long data will change our definitions of disease and bring us closer to practicing truly personalized medicine.<\/p>\nI don\u2019t care what Bob and Craig\u2019s average blood pressure values are. I care about my own baseline and my own trends and when I\u2019m deviating from my own normal.<\/p>\n
Slide 14.<\/strong> This is my vision for the future of medicine and this is what I\u2019m working on. But there are lots of areas of medicine that are broken and we need people to come up with their own visions for how to fix those parts as well.<\/p>\nSlide 15.<\/strong> This is where health hackathons come into play.<\/p>\nI was Co-Director of a group called MIT Hacking Medicine and our vision is to ignite medical innovation by bringing all stakeholders together in the same room.<\/p>\n
Slide 16.<\/strong> Health hackathons are these jam packed weekends where we bring doctors, engineers, nurses, designers, business people, patients\u2026 all the different stakeholders who normally don\u2019t chat with each other\u2026 together to start tackling some of these real world healthcare problems.<\/p>\nSlide 17.<\/strong> Health hackathons have grown exponentially since they started. There were 3 in 2010 and nearly 80 2014 and those numbers continue to go up. MIT Hacking Medicine has had the fortune of being involved in 20% of health hackathons that happen around the world.<\/p>\nSlide 18.<\/strong> Health hackathons are happening everywhere.<\/p>\nSlide 19.<\/strong> And they\u2019re involving everyone. These are just some of the partners that we\u2019ve worked with. They range from high tech companies like Samsung and Intel to governments to hospitals and universities. Everyoen is getting involved in this movement as a way to catalyze innovation.<\/p>\nJust to give you all an example of what a health hackathon might be. They can address a variety of different topics. This is one of my favorite and it\u2019s about breast pumps.<\/p>\n
Slide 20.<\/strong> Breast feeding is a nearly universal experience but it\u2019s certainly a challenge for working moms. That\u2019s where breast pumps come to the rescue and allow moms to feed their children despite having a busy working schedule. But existing breast pumps are loud, clunky, lots of parts that are hard to clean\u2026 That\u2019s why a group of moms came together and asked\u2026<\/p>\nSlide 21.<\/strong> \u201cWhy is a Prius quieter than a breastpump?\u201d<\/p>\nSlide 22.<\/strong> And they held a \u201cMake the breastpump not suck\u201d-hackathon. That hackathon brought together moms, moms brought their babies, dads came too, engineers and designers joined. In 48 hours they came up with better solutions than the industry developed in the past 20 years. That\u2019s the power of these health hackathons. That\u2019s what happens when you put stakeholders in the same room and empower them to solve their own problems.<\/p>\nFrom the hackathons we\u2019ve done, there have been dozens of successful startup companies come out\u2026 companies who have clients in all 50 US states and raised tens of millions of dollars in funding. Projects that begin at these weekend-long health hackathons have a real impact on the healthcare system and improving people\u2019s lives today.<\/p>\n
I talked to you about 2 things today: (1) my personal vision for the future of healthcare involving health sensors, (2) health hackathons as a model to promote innovation. We\u2019re going to open things up now and would love to hear your thoughts on all of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was absolutely thrilled to get an invitation from Bob Graboyes at the Mercatus Center to\u00a0be on a panel on healthcare innovation at the NABE Economic Policy Conference.\u00a0Here is a recap of\u00a0the panel. Policies to Promote Health Care Innovation March 8, 2106 at 1:30-2:30p Lina A. Colucci, Former Co-Director of MIT Hacking Medicine, MIT\/Harvard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,16,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-health","category-health-hackathons","category-speaking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Photo-Mar-08-2-57-51-PM-e1460484967495.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1159"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1180,"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions\/1180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linacolucci.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}