To strengthen behavioral health services in Solano County, Adventist Health Vallejo, which has served as the county’s behavioral treatment center of choice for nearly 25 years, announced it has signed a definitive agreement to sell the hospital and its behavioral health services to Acadia Healthcare, a leading provider of behavioral healthcare in the United States.

“Behavioral health and well-being are central to Adventist Health’s mission, and we are committed to taking actions that meet the needs of our communities,” said Steven Herber, MD, president of Adventist Health services in Vallejo and St. Helena. “Acadia has the national and local experience, clinical expertise and proven track record to be an ideal community partner. They share our vision of enhancing the hospital’s capabilities to provide high-quality behavioral health and substance use services.”

Adventist Health Vallejo, a 61-bed psychiatric hospital that is operated as a service of Adventist Health St. Helena, provides inpatient and outpatient care. Its services include short-term psychiatric care for children, adolescents and adults as well as partial hospitalization services for adults who are experiencing psychiatric problems or are dependent on alcohol, drugs or prescription medications.

As a leading provider of behavioral healthcare services, Acadia Healthcare owns and operates treatment facilities throughout the United States and Puerto Rico, including a facility in nearby San Jose. Acadia is solely dedicated to behavioral health and is the partner of choice for many health systems and communities across the country due to its commitment to high quality and integrated care. The investment that Acadia intends to make in the facility and its expertise will help meet the care needs of the community for years to come as the company explores opportunities to expand services.

“Adventist Health took great care and consideration in its process to select Acadia as its community partner, and we are proud they recognized the expertise and commitment to quality that we will bring to Solano County. We will invest in the facility to ensure it continues to serve as the center of behavioral health excellence for the surrounding community,” said Dwight Lacy, group president for the Western Region of Acadia Healthcare. “We look forward to building upon the tremendous foundation provided by Adventist Health for many years to come.”

Adventist Health recently expanded its behavioral health offerings through a partnership investment with Synchronous Health that leverages the power of human connection with AI to deliver behavioral healthcare to millions of people. Nearby Adventist Health St Helena, which operates a 21-bed mental health unit, also expanded behavioral health inpatient services by opening a 12-bed behavioral medical unit to better care for the needs of patients with both medical and behavioral health diagnoses.

Recognizing that people and continuity are the heart of behavioral health healing, Acadia Healthcare intends to retain current staff and associates.

The organizations expect to complete the transaction, following regulatory approval, by mid-2021 and will look for additional opportunities to partner together.

NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT announced that its Medical & Health Informatics (MEI) Lab has entered a joint research agreement with Japan’s National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center (NCVC) to develop cardiovascular disease-related computational models, implement them on a bio digital twin platform and develop applications for use by physicians and patients. The two-and-a-half-year project titled, “The Development of Human Hemodynamics Mapping and Autonomous Multimodal Therapeutics Systems,” involves research at both organizations. Principal investigators for the joint research agreement will be Dr. Keita Saku, Laboratory Chief for NCVC’s Department of Cardiovascular Dynamics, and Dr. Joe Alexander, Distinguished Scientist in the NTT Research MEI Lab.

The agreement, signed on December 24, 2020, calls for the NCVC to develop integrated computational models to support multimodal closed-loop interventions for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and acute heart failure (Acute HF). In parallel, the MEI Lab will implement these models into a bio digital twin platform and develop physician- and patient-oriented applications to support physician clinical decision making and patient self-care, respectively. The NCVC is a semi-independent national institution. Its government affiliation is through the Japan Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the counterpart to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The NCVC focuses on intramural cardiovascular clinical practice and dedicated cardiovascular research, similar to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Unlike the NHLBI, however, the NCVC is not a cardiovascular research funding agency. Near-term goals for the joint project, which began in October 2020 and extends through March 2023, include the development and validation of models representing heart and vascular dynamics, particularly as they relate to AMI and Acute HF.

“We are very pleased to launch this collaboration with the NCVC and this year expect to create heart and vascular models that will include neural control of the circulation, as well as heart energetics,” said MEI Lab Director, Dr. Hitonobu Tomoike. “These model elements will be fundamental to future computational platforms for determining optimal therapies for heart conditions, such as heart attack and acute heart failure, and will represent a major step forward in the realization of the cardiovascular bio digital twin for important, acute cardiac conditions.”

The NTT Research MEI Lab aspires to build highly complex digital assets essential to patient care and wellbeing. Its bio digital twin initiative seeks to address the complexity of diseases while helping to determine the best remedies from among a range of therapeutic options. New computational models that Dr. Keita Saku will develop in support of a cardiovascular bio digital twin (CV BioDT) will help determine optimal interventions for AMI and Acute HF across multiple therapeutic modalities, such as medications, medical devices, neuromodulation, etc. The ultimate goal is to realize patient-specific CV BioDTs to enable patient-specific therapeutics.

“We have chosen to partner with Dr. Saku and the NCVC because of their internationally recognized expertise in cardiovascular regulation and advanced technologies relating to closed-loop automated therapeutic interventions for conditions such as heart failure and mechanical circulatory support,” said Dr. Alexander. “As we begin this exciting project, we would also like to acknowledge the instrumental support of Dr. Kenji Sunagawa, professor emeritus in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Kyushu University and founder of the Department of Cardiovascular Dynamics at the NCVC Research Institute, who trained both Dr. Saku and me at Johns Hopkins, helped orchestrate this agreement and going forward will play a leadership role in this project for the MEI Lab.”

The MEI Lab has already conducted two proof-of-concept studies to establish requirements and frame the initial bio digital twin platform architecture. The CV BioDT models developed through this joint research agreement will need to be validated in further studies before subsequent validation in preclinical human studies. These tests will be conducted at NCVC hospitals. During later stages of CV BioDT validation and rollout that extend beyond the time horizon of this particular research agreement, additional organ systems (e.g. pulmonary, renal, endocrine and central nervous system) will be added towards the goal of an overall bio digital twin, a digital alter ego capable of replicating an individual’s underlying physiological systems and their responses.

In related research, the MEI Lab is engaged in a multi-year project involving three-dimensionally transformable, biocompatible and implantable electrodes. In August 2020, NTT Research announced the opening of an office in Munich in support of a joint research agreement with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), which links the MEI Lab with the Neuroelectronics Group within TUM’s School of BioEngineering. Leading that office is Dr. Tetsuhiko Teshima, an expert in nanomaterials. The MEI Lab believes that development of the bio digital twin will be informed not only by a vast array of biological, physiological, genomic, phenotypic and health records data, but also by data gleaned from wearable and advanced nanosensor devices.

About NTT Research

NTT Research opened its offices in July 2019 as a new Silicon Valley startup to conduct basic research and advance technologies that promote positive change for humankind. Currently, three labs are housed at NTT Research facilities in Sunnyvale: the Physics and Informatics (PHI) Lab, the Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Lab, and the Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab. The organization aims to upgrade reality in three areas: 1) quantum information, neuro-science and photonics; 2) cryptographic and information security; and 3) medical and health informatics. NTT Research is part of NTT, a global technology and business solutions provider with an annual R&D budget of $3.6 billion.

IntelliCentrics (6819.HK), a healthcare technology platform company and innovator of the SEC³URE Ethos, SEC³URE Passport, Link & GO! and BioBytes™ serving North America, the United Kingdom and China, all on an integrated, end-to-end technology platform, announces the creation of the industry’s first COVID-19 credential available to all users across its technology platform. This first-of-its-kind solution provides facilities with the data they need to ensure optimal steps are taken for each individual entering the facility.

Healthcare facilities are faced with the challenge of providing a safe environment to both COVID and non-COVID visitors. In order to accomplish this, facilities need to know, who among their visitors have received the COVID-19 vaccine, who have not, with a focus on the frontline healthcare workers. IntelliCentrics’ technology delivers all of this while going a step further by providing necessary insights to manage medically necessary exceptions.

“We relish the fact that our technology supports frontline workers who are most at risk in the battle against COVID-19,” said Michael Sheehan, CEO of IntelliCentrics. “And we understand the best solution needs to be a total solution, so we used our experience and made this work for virtually every possible scenario in the entire care delivery system. The result is that patients can once again receive treatments and have loved ones by their side without feeling vulnerable to the virus.”

When circumstances require, IntelliCentrics’ technology also provides facilities with the ability to set up alternatives such as attestation, screening questions, and PPE requirements as part of their COVID-19 credential. It is a total solution in that it covers all categories of individuals entering the facility and their unique circumstances.

IntelliCentrics’ technology platform currently hosts over 11,000 facilities worldwide, giving facilities the control and communication tools to inform all visitors, from the waiting room to the board room, their role in creating a safe and secure environment. Sheehan added, “the power of our community is in its varied and collective experiences and sharing what we have learned from SARS, H1N1, and all other vaccine-based policies.”

About IntelliCentrics
With a mission to use trust to make high-quality healthcare as accessible as a good cup of coffee, IntelliCentrics created the SEC3URE Ethos. Built on three core principles – transparency, neutrality, and independence, the SEC3URE Ethos is relied on by more than 11,000 locations of care worldwide to ensure mutual trust between patients, doctors, vendor representatives and healthcare companies. To learn more about the world’s largest trusted healthcare technology platform, visit www.intellicentrics.com. To learn more about the COVID-19 vaccine credential, visit our COVID-19 Solution Center. IntelliCentrics is publicly traded on The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited under the stock code 6819.

Healthfully, an enterprise healthcare solutions company, announced today that its consumer health platform is now supporting wellness tracking and services. This capability has been implemented at the Flagler Health+ health system. An important component of this platform extension is Healthfully’s integration of data feeds from a range of remote patient monitoring devices.

Healthfully has partnered with Flagler Health+ to deliver intelligent experiences that eliminate friction throughout all aspects of the healthcare journey. Consumers have a single point of entry through the Flagler Health+ Anywhere app, which supports scheduling, telemedicine, bill pay, health and wellness programs, and connecting individuals to online health and support communities. Use of the solution has been progressively expanded across care settings, including primary care, behavioral health, surgery, radiology, pediatrics, hospitalists, and many others.

Healthfully’s integration includes fitness trackers, smart watches, weight scales, SpO2, and other remote devices. Data from these devices enhances the Healthfully platform to provide full support for wellness services provided by health coaches and care providers such as nutrition, fitness, and chronic care management.

Paul Viskovich, Healthfully CEO, said, “This latest platform expansion adds value to health systems in their drive to expand service offerings, incorporating RPM & wellness services into their overall patient relationships. It enhances patient engagement, experience and satisfaction and improves outcomes.”

About Healthfully

Healthfully unifies access, support, and rewards to optimize consumer health. We provide enterprise organizations with a white-label, digital health experience platform to engage and empower consumers on their health and wellness journey. The platform blends compelling and valuable functions, intelligence, and content for patients, consumers, and communities, creating a great patient experience and helping achieve the goals of value-based care and population health management.

US-based healthcare providers Baptist Health South Florida and Nicklaus Children’s Health System have activated their collaboration for paediatric emergency care.

The latest move follows signing of an agreement by the two organisations to expand their collaboration for paediatric care, in September last year. As part of the deal, they will work together for the betterment of the children and families of South Florida.

Baptist Health stated that the Nicklaus Children’s Pediatric Specialists (NCPS) physicians are now appointed to work at the 24-hour paediatric emergency departments at Baptist Health as well as at the Homestead Hospital from this week.

Meanwhile, the paediatric emergency physicians currently working at the Baptist Hospital and Homestead Hospital emergency departments are now employed by NCPS, which is the medical group practice of Nicklaus Children’s Health System.

Nicklaus Children’s Hospital vice-president and chief medical officer Marcos Mestre said: “We welcome the Baptist-based pediatric emergency physicians to our Nicklaus Children’s family.

“We are pleased that they will continue to offer services to families who have come to know them at Baptist Hospital and Homestead Hospital emergency departments, while also engaging with the extensive array of pediatric subspecialists available on our medical staff to support children and families with continuing specialised care needs.”

Additionally, Baptist Health will extend an arrangement, which was in place since April last year, to transfer children who require inpatient admission to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital for paediatric care.

With 11 hospitals and over 23,000 employees, the organisation also provides other paediatric services such as neonatal intensive care (NICU), paediatric oncology services, outpatient paediatric general surgical and orthopaedic surgical care. With 11 hospitals and over 23,000 employees, the organisation also provides other paediatric services such as neonatal intensive care (NICU), paediatric oncology services, outpatient paediatric general surgical and orthopaedic surgical care.

Onduo Health, the virtual diabetes coaching program backed by Verily (and to a lesser extent Sanofi) announced this morning that it is expanding its platform beyond Type 2 diabetes to include several other conditions frequent among its populations.

Multi-condition services focused on hypertension, pre-diabetes, weight loss and mental wellbeing – as well as underlying coaching support for dieting, physical activity and medication management – are now available to the company’s payer and employer clients, Onduo CEO Dr. Vindell Washington told MobiHealthNews. The company is also increasing its support for mental and behavioral health issues such as anxiety and depression over the next several months, with other offerings slated for the back half of 2021.

“We’re pivoting to be more focused on whole person-centered care, and our first expansions are … rounding out some of the cardiometabolic solutions that are needed in the industry and continuing along that path,” Washington said.

“We’ve always had what we call supporting strategies for diabetics – that’s around diet, exercise, medication adherence and sleep. But we’ve actually expanded the population to which we’re trying to bring those solutions.”

Further, Onduo has kicked off a multi-language support effort by announcing that its offerings are now available for those who speak Spanish. To do so the company has translated all of the language included in its app, and hired coaches as well as providers with medical Spanish fluency, Washington said.

Onduo describes its take on chronic disease management as “personalization at scale.” For Washington, the technology side of this consists of three major components: connected devices like continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) to collect signal data, artificial intelligence to make sense of those signals, and user interface design backed by behavioral science to spur change.

Onduo will continue to rely on its tech-heavy approach, although “that doesn’t mean that we necessarily want to develop a device for every condition,” he said. “But we do have a lab in South San Francisco. We’re thinking about that, and we’re also not opposed to using some currently existing devices in the works. So [for instance], we’re using for the blood pressure program-connected Bluetooth blood pressure cuffs that we didn’t invent, but we also have some items down the pipeline that we are developing to improve that interface.”

Onduo’s various devices and algorithms together support the company’s human coaches and providers, who conduct virtual appointments with members to guide them toward healthier lifestyles. Washington said that this approach to Type 2 management has borne fruit for Onduo, but that the company has long been aware that members’ conditions aren’t defined by a single ailment.

“What our doctors were engaged in was not just the treatment of diabetes,” he said. “If a patient has problems with their medications around high blood pressure, for example, they were engaging with those members and trying to get them into a good state – when you hire a physician who’s taken a Hippocratic Oath and they can help, they tend to help.

“Early on, we found that 70% of our diabetic patients had high blood pressure. So in order to provide the best care for that individual, it became clear that we had to at least think about diseases in clusters, not just isolated entities, to bring people to their best health.”

The CEO said that this cluster approach led Onduo to prioritize the comorbidities that were most common among their members. Type 2 diabetes and older age are associated with high blood pressure. Chronic-disease diagnoses bring new challenges to emotional resiliency and mental wellbeing. He said the company had already been conducting pilots among members who had Type 2 diabetes, as well as hypertension or behavioral health concerns, with encouraging results.

Washington acknowledged that it isn’t hard to take this physiological progression of services a step further and wonder whether Onduo also has its eyes on expanding to additional conditions with heavy overlap.

One such example would be the increasingly crowded musculoskeletal (MSK) space, where other digital diabetes management platforms like Omada Health and Dario Health have recently made M&A-driven expansions. Extend that net to include other conditions stressing the system and you’ll land on COPD, women’s health and “other things we are certainly considering,” Washington said.

Still, Onduo is “very cognizant” that it’s a single virtual platform in a broader healthcare ecosystem. The company isn’t interested in providing physical services, or dipping into the decades-long relationships that define primary care, Washington said. If Onduo is going to expand into new areas of disease management down the road, it will be in areas that play to its strengths of behavior change, data-driven treatment plans and human coaching, he said.

“I don’t think many folks have taken that particular approach. I don’t think people have traditionally said ‘we need providers,'” he said. “We’re cutting a slightly different path in that space, but it does come down to convenience, not only for the individual, but for the health plan and the employer.”

Customers want comprehensive platforms, and patients need inclusive services

Of course, Onduo’s platform expansion is also a move meant to appeal to its clientele. To an employer or a health plan, having to coordinate a dozen different point solutions for different populations “is not particularly attractive,” Washington said. The company has heard “a lot of feedback” from stakeholders indicating single-condition approach wasn’t in especially high demand.

“I was the chief medical officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield Louisiana, so I was a target once upon a time for many disease management vendors,” he said. “At the end of the day, it was pretty clear when we talked to folks: If you could provide a digital service that was equivalent across a lot of different areas, that would have been more attractive. That’s the voice we’re listening to.”

Also on customers’ wishlist was the newly launched multi-language support. Pilots of the Spanish app and services began last fall, he said, and were prioritized over other languages due to the immediate needs of Onduo’s booked clients. Those will be added later on as the company identifies other communities among its membership for whom English is not their first language.

At the same time, Washington stressed the need for chronic disease services to design medicine “in a culturally competent way,” and keep in mind healthcare’s larger obligation to meet patients where they are.

“We have a mantra around doing more good as a company, and part of that includes our approach on product inclusivity. So not only is it a business imperative, it’s a moral imperative for us,” he said.

“And if you’re talking about chronic diseases and ignoring the fact that there are folks in our community who do not have English as a first language, you’re just not caring for a bunch of folks in the community that could receive services.”

The European Commission has presented its new SAMITA Action Plan which aims to ensure that radiological and nuclear technologies continue to benefit the health of EU citizens and contribute to the fight against cancer and other diseases.

The SAMIRA Action Plan – the Strategic Agenda for Medical Ionising Radiation Applications – will improve EU co-ordination and is the first follow-up to Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan. It will ensure that EU citizens have access to high-quality radiological and nuclear technologies in medicine with the highest safety standards.

Commissioner for Energy, Kadri Simson, said: “The current pandemic has reminded us all of the importance of health and the need to do everything we can to increase the wellbeing of our citizens. Safe medical use of radiological and nuclear technology is a highly useful tool in our arsenal and is already benefitting hundreds of millions of patients across Europe.

“This action plan will ensure that the EU continues to be the global leader in supplying medical radioisotopes and developing radiological diagnostics and treatments, while applying the highest quality and safety standards.”
Nuclear and radiation technologies

Several nuclear and radiation technologies are vital for dealing with cancer management, such as mammography, computed tomography, and other forms of radiological imaging, and radiotherapy is among the most effective and widely used cancer treatments. Nuclear medicine is also routinely used for cancer diagnosis and follow-up.

The plan will focus on three key areas including: securing the supply of medical radioisotopes; improving radiation quality and safety in medicine; and facilitating innovation and the technological development of medical ionising radiation applications.

Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, Stella Kyriakides, said: “With Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, we will take action to ensure that we screen more, and that we screen better. And to do so, we need to have radiation technology that is safe and of high quality. Radiological imaging is indispensable for early cancer detection and diagnosis, and more than half of cancer patients will undergo radiotherapy.

“It is an ever-present element in the life of a cancer patient. The SAMIRA Action Plan is our first deliverable under Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, and it is an excellent example of collaboration between the energy, health and research communities.”

A European Radioisotope Valley Initiative (ERVI) will be established by the Commission to maintain Europe’s global leadership in the supply of medical radioisotopes and help accelerate the development and introduction of new radioisotopes and production methods.

It will also launch a European Initiative on Quality and Safety of medical applications of ionising radiation and will create synergies between the Euratom Research and Training Programme and the ‘Health’ cluster of the EU research programme Horizon Europe through the development and implementation of a Research Roadmap for medical applications of nuclear and radiation technology.