Finance
VCs want to buy hospitals. Can they be better stewards than private equity?
Venture capital giant General Catalyst's plan to buy a health system as a playground for innovation made big headlines and seems to come with all of the right intentions/buzzwords: Health care transformation! Health assurance!
As my co-author Mohana Ravindranath writes, one of our existing models for how such acquisitions play out is private equity firms buying distressed hospitals. More often that not, they attempt to make the hospitals profitable by boosting revenue and streamlining operations, sometimes at the expense of clinical care. While VC outfits tend to have longer time horizons and more tolerance for risk than PE firms, it's unclear how that might apply to buying hospitals — and what might happen when pressure for returns ramps up.
For its part, General Catalyst has said its plan is a long-term bet.
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Research
All of Us gets a boost from real-world data
All of Us, the federal research program that promised to propel precision medicine forward with data from at least 1 million diverse Americans, is expanding its approach to collecting health data. Most of the program's information comes directly from participants, who share everything from their genetic sequences and survey answers to wearables data and electronic health records.
But STAT's Katie Palmer reports, there are still significant gaps — and with a new $30 million award to establish a Center for Linkage and Acquisition of Data, the program thinks it can siphon up more real-world data and match it to their participants while preserving their privacy. "If we really want to realize the promise of precision medicine and public health — evidence-based decision making for both — we've got to put the patient back together again," said Melissa Haendel, the new center's leader.
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DIY
3D printing tourniquets in Gaza
Aside from the stethoscope, the around 20-person Glia team manufactures tourniquets, ear otoscopes, and caps to stop bleeding in dialysis patients.
Tarek Loubani looked around at his fellow doctors at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and realized he held one of just two stethoscopes in the room.
It was 2012, and he was treating patients injured during the recent clashes between Israel and Palestinian groups. Without stethoscopes, providers knelt down to patients' chests to check if they were breathing. Loubani, an emergency room physician in Canada and Kuwait-born Palestinian refugee who regularly works in Gaza, wondered how health care workers could manage without one of medicine's most basic tools.
STAT's Lizzy Lawrence reports that the stethoscope became the inaugural device of the Glia Project, a group founded by Loubani in 2016 that 3D prints open-source medical equipment for low-resource areas. Loubani grew the organization with the help of Carrie Wakem, a former hospital colleague who now serves as Glia's executive director. The tiny group is pioneering a bold new vision for democratizing medical devices, starting in war-torn areas where they're most needed.
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