| |  By Casey Ross, Katie Palmer, Mario Aguilar, and Mohana Ravindranath | | | Truepill halts prescriptions for stimulants The online pharmacy Truepill is temporarily halting prescriptions of Adderall and other controlled substances used to treat ADHD as concerns mount that some telehealth startups are prescribing those medicines too liberally, the Wall Street Journal reports. Truepill, which didn't provide a customer list, said it was acting out of an abundance of caution. But its decision came amid stepped-up scrutiny of prescribing practices at Cerebral, a digital mental health company that describes Truepill as its preferred pharmacy. A former employee of the company filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging he was fired after raising concerns that the company was failing to police prescriptions for stimulants, according to Bloomberg Law. Others have raised concerns that Cerebral targets teens and young adults with marketing on social media. Meanwhile, Cerebral’s chief medical officer, David Mou, defended the company’s practices during the annual conference of the American Telemedicine Association in Boston, Mobihealthnews reported. “At no point do we pressure clinicians to prescribe anything,” said Mou, who added that patients fill out a screening form and get a 30-minute assessment, or 60 minutes for an opioid intake. Mou did acknowledge problems with marketing campaigns that had been outsourced, but he said those messages are now being reviewed by a clinical quality specialist. | Mayo Clinic detects heart problems on Apple Watch A new study by researchers at Mayo Clinic establishes the feasibility of using an algorithm to detect a weak heart pump from electrocardiograms recorded on Apple Watch. If validated in additional testing, the algorithm would allow users to detect the potentially fatal condition outside medical settings, enabling earlier treatment. Perhaps even more importantly, the study established that such testing can be done on broad populations rapidly in a decentralized trial. In its study to test the algorithm on single-lead EKG data, Mayo quickly collected 125,000 Apple Watch EKGs from more than 2,400 participants in 46 U.S. states and 11 countries. Casey has the full story. | The home health rush is on Major health systems, insurers, and technology giants are coalescing around lobbying efforts to enable more medical services to be delivered and reimbursed at home. Amazon is perhaps the largest company to throw its weight behind Moving Health Home, a lobbying group seeking to broaden the home health services paid for by Medicare. But a broad group of providers, lawmakers and interest groups is also involved in the quest. Mohana has a look breaking down the biggest players and how they fit into the bigger picture. | Boston | The journey from lab to patient’s bedside Meet us on May 3 to explore the challenges, and the unique opportunities, of the drug development process with individuals working to address a diverse set of medical challenges. Get your ticket now to unpack their experiences. | A big data approach to long Covid As patients and providers struggle to understand and treat long Covid, machine learning researchers are turning to real-world data to see what insights they can turn up. A team with the National Covid Cohort Collaborative, a massive centralized database of electronic health records that includes more than 13 million patients, is using algorithms to cluster the many dispersed symptoms that characterize long Covid. “If we are able to identify these sort of constellations of symptoms that make up these potential long Covid subtypes…we might find out that long Covid is not one disease, but it’s five diseases or 10 diseases,” said Emily Pfaff, the team’s co-lead. Ultimately, Pfaff said, those classifiers could be used to support recruitment for prospective studies of the syndrome and potential treatments. Katie has the full story. | Skin cancer algorithms fall short in the real world Diagnosing skin cancer is a prime area of research and development in artificial intelligence, with some models showing even greater accuracy than dermatologists. But a large-scale validation challenge of 129 predictive algorithms showed that even the best performers miss their mark when applied to images that reflect the complexity of clinical practice. When presented with image sets that included diseases it wasn’t trained on, the best algorithm managed accurate results less than 60% of the time. And among images of those new diseases, the top 25 algorithms mislabeled them as malignant 47% of the time — a warning against deploying automated diagnostics until it’s clear they won’t lead to overtreatment. | Dollars & Deals - The remote monitoring company BioIntelliSense inked a partnership with UC Davis Health to enable more virtual care across the health system. BioIntelliSense advertises wearables that can monitor more than 20 physiological signals for up to 30 days.
- Digital heart health startup Hello Heart raised $70 million in a Series D round led by Stripes. Hello Heart makes a mobile app that uses personalized coaching to help people prevent heart disease.
- Sema4, a data analytics company, completed its acquisition of GeneDx, which specializes in testing and analyzing genomics data for rare disorders. Katherine Stueland, former chief executive of GeneDx, will serve as CEO of the combined company.
- Software-as-a-service firm Element5 raised $30 million in a Series B round led by Insight Partners. The company builds digital assistants to support administrative tasks for post-acute care
| Tapping new talent - Wearable cardiac monitoring company iRhythm has appointed Mintu Turakhia, founding director of Stanford’s Center for Digital Health, as its first chief medical officer and chief scientific officer. Simultaneously, chief clinical officer Judy Lenane is retiring from the company.
- The American Telemedicine Association tapped Kristi Henderson to chair its board. Henderson is CEO of Optum Everycare, which focuses on building virtual care products.
| | | Thanks for reading! See you Thursday,  | | | | Have a news tip or comment? Email Us | |
No comments