| | | Good morning! I’ve got a fresh batch of scoops and exclusives from my health tech colleagues and a closer look at a lively ongoing debate about telehealth’s fraud risks. News tips and thoughts go to mohana.ravindranath@statnews.com. | | Apple goes head to head with AliveCor AliveCor, a small company that accused tech giant Apple of copying its heart monitoring technology for its smartwatches, may soon achieve a legal victory following allegations raised in federal court and before the International Trade Commission: An ITC judge recently found that the Apple Watch does infringe on two AliveCor patents, and the ITC is poised to decide in the coming week whether to ban imports of certain Apple Watches into the United States, my colleague Mario Aguilar writes. The dispute highlights the messy business of taking credit for an innovation, especially when technologies necessarily build on each other. AliveCor chief medical officer Dave Albert told STAT that Apple's entry into heart health actually accelerated consumer acceptance of remote monitoring like AliveCor's. It also raises another thorny question: Should Apple be better compensating other companies for innovations it has adopted along the way? Read Mario's full story. | Scoop: Thirty Madison expands into sleep care In an effort to further distinguish itself from direct-to-consumer competitors like Hims and Ro, Thirty Madison has spent the last year or so quietly planning to expand into sleep care with a new brand called River, my colleague Katie Palmer reports. The company offers various digital “storefronts” for various consumer health needs, like hair loss, allergy and migraine medication; it also recently acquired sexual and reproductive telehealth company Nurx. River is still in development, but eventually will target services to “a variety of sleep conditions” that could include obstructive sleep apnea, insomnia, and sleep deprivation. | The key to unbiased pulse oximeters: measuring skin tone  My colleague Usha Lee McFarling has been closely following critical inaccuracies with pulse oximeters, which produce especially biased measurements in patients with darker skin. And while there’s growing consensus among regulators and doctors that the bias needs to be fixed, they’re faced with one key hurdle: figuring out how to measure skin tone, not race, Usha writes. Race has long been a proxy for skin tone, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect a patient’s pigmentation. Harvard associate professor Ellis Monk is among researchers attempting to solve the issue: he worked with Google to develop the Monk Skin Tone Scale, which reflects a wider range of skin tones than the industry tools. He’s also collaborating with physicist and optics expert Robert Wilson, at the University of California at Irvine, to build a better device. Read more about their efforts — and the broader challenges they face — from Usha. And in other (potentially) faulty measurement news, it’s not clear how clinically useful consumer wearables like Fitbit and Apple Watch are in detecting atrial fibrillation, Gregory Marcus, a UCSF cardiology professor, argued in an opinion piece for Circulation Monday. | Kidney damage AI model works less well in women An AI system predicting acute kidney injury up to 48 hours in advance doesn’t work nearly as well on women, my colleague Casey Ross reports. While researchers at Google spinout DeepMind Health initially found promising results using deidentified data from the Veterans Affairs health system, a new analysis finds that a replica of the model trained primary on male veterans overestimated the risk for women in some cases and was overall less accurate for women. “If we have this problem, then half the population won’t benefit,” said lead author Jie Cao. Google researchers, for their part, flagged these issues and called for more testing following their initial study. But if the model were to be deployed prematurely, it could lead to poor treatment decisions, Cao said. Read more from Casey. | The evolution of benefits design, and insights from benefits leaders on the ground Investors, established providers, and emerging players alike track the evolving benefits landscape: how companies evaluate offerings, what problems new entrants address, and how leaders measure ROI. Top investors leverage Tegus to hear directly from the benefits leaders on the ground. Tegus hosts thousands of 1:1 conversations with top physicians, industry executives, and KOLs, so insight is just a click away. See for yourself: download a free report to hear from four benefits leaders. | The latest on telehealth's risk-reward tradeoff The federal government’s latest attempt to assess virtual care’s costs and benefits struck a cautious tone last week, highlighting several potential risks like inappropriate billing and a perceived dearth of information about the impact of telehealth on the actual quality of care. As I’ve reported over the past few months, these types of analyses can shape crucial Medicare reimbursement policy and ultimately determine who gets access to virtual care. (If you have data on telehealth fraud, please send it my way.) Telehealth lobbying groups urged Washington to keep the potential risks in perspective. “There is no evidence of a need for widespread concern related to telehealth in the Medicare program,” the Alliance for Connected Care said, noting that while HHS’ Office of the Inspector General found 138 providers who billed both original Medicare and Medicare Advantage for the same virtual care service, that's "a low number for such billing practices to be occurring for the 28 million Medicare beneficiaries who used telehealth services and the $5.1 billion in spending on Medicare telehealth services during the first year of the pandemic.” | Also from Washington... The HHS Office for Civil Rights issued a reminder to HIPAA-covered entities using online tracking tools like Meta Pixel or Google Analytics that they’re “not permitted to use tracking technologies in a manner that would result in impermissible disclosures of [electronic protected health information] to tracking technology vendors.” The bulletin follows a series of investigations from The Markup on ways those trackers can reveal patients’ sensitive medical information. | What we’re reading -
CPAP recall highlights device oversight gaps, STAT -
Oura has a new wellness arm, Fierce Healthcare -
Neuralink is facing a federal probe over animal tests, Reuters | | Thanks for reading! More on Thursday, | |
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