Start your engines: A fleet of GoBabyGo cars, customized by therapists and parents to give disabled children mobility and help strengthen weak muscles. (Courtesy Cole Galloway)
TEDMED2014 focused on a powerful theme: unlocking imagination in service of health and medicine. Speaker after speaker shared tales of imagination, inspiration and innovation. Here are a few of our favorites:
$100 plastic car stands in for $25,000 power wheelchair
In the first (and likely only) National Institutes of Health-funded shopping spree at Toys R’ Us, Cole Galloway, director of the Pediatric Mobility Lab at the University of Delaware, and crew stocked up on pint-sized riding toys.
Galloway’s quest was to facilitate independence and mobility among disabled children from the age of six months and older and offer a low-tech solution during the five-year wait in the United States for a $25,000 power pediatric wheelchair.
The hackers jerry-rigged the toys with pool noodles, PVC pipe and switches, reconfiguring them as mobile rehabilitation devices to promote functional skills among kids with special needs. Full story »
Fixing a real problem, even a small one, can transform health care.
What can innovators do to work with investors and industry to move an idea toward commercialization? Speakers at the upcoming Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards, hosted by Boston Children’s Hospital, have some simple advice: Don’t think your innovation has to be sexy.
Health care is plagued by problems that aren’t necessarily sexy or compelling, says Mandira Singh, MBA, of AthenaHealth, who will speak at the Summit’s Mobile & Digital Health panel. More than many other industries, it still depends on outdated technology. For example, it’s the only industry that continues to rely on fax machines. “These are small problems that need to be fixed,” Singh said recently at a Boston Children’s Hospital forum.
Instead of focusing on everyday challenges, innovators often think far out into the future—to where they think health care will be in 10 years. That can be a trap: Full story »
My father had a favorite bit of advice as we embarked on our adult lives: “Go big or go home.” Going big is exactly what OPENPediatrics is doing, empowering physicians and nurses to care for children across the globe.
The Web-based digital learning platform was conceived 10 years ago by Jeffrey Burns, MD, MPH, chief of critical care at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Traci Wolbrink, MD, MPH, an associate in critical care. It concluded a year-long beta test in April 2014, and version 1 has now been launched.
Developed to impart critical care skills, OPENPediatrics uses lectures, simulators and protocols to deliver training. In the process, it has helped save lives. Full story »
Zulfiqar Bhutta, MBBS, PhD, inaugural chair in global child health at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, and founding director of the Center of Excellence in Women and Child Health, Aga Khan University, Pakistan, is a global child health superstar. Presidents, prime ministers and princes welcome his advice. Yet India ignored him when he called its proposed innovation to curb infant mortality “nonsense.” “I was dead wrong,” says Bhutta. “What happened is remarkable.”
Projections that the global mobile health market will boom to nearly $50 billion have ignited interest among innovators. A pair of physician innovators from Boston Children’s Hospital peg wearables as the technology to watch and offer a sneak peek at what adoption might mean, while others ask about the pediatric market for wearables and point to a few potential stumbling blocks. Read on for their views. Full story »
Can putting a price tag on childhood obesity propel treatment and prevention efforts into comprehensive action? Perhaps, says David Ludwig, MD, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital.
Although the U.S. Task Force on Childhood Obesity set a goal of dropping obesity prevalence among youth to 5 percent by 2030, efforts have failed to make a significant dent. Recent data indicate only slight dips in obesity prevalence among 6- to 19-year-olds in some states. And other data show that the prevalence of extreme obesity in children continues to rise.
With nearly 20 percent of U.S. children tipping the scales as obese, policymakers need not only to act but also to justify the investment in childhood obesity treatment and prevention programs.
Duke University researchers offered a helping hand in a review article in the April 7 online Pediatrics, estimating the incremental lifetime direct medical cost of childhood obesity. Their economic model showed a $19,000 incremental lifetime medical cost of an obese child relative to a normal-weight youth.
By the time Cameron Shearing arrived at the South Shore Hospital Emergency Department (ED) during a December snowstorm, he wasn’t breathing. He didn’t have much time. The two-year-old had aspirated a chocolate-covered pretzel, which sent tiny bits of material into his lungs.
The odds of a good outcome were not high. Pretzel is one of the worst foods to aspirate for two reasons: The small pieces can block multiple small airways, and the salt, which is very irritating, causes a lot of inflammation.
“Cameron was one of the sickest patients I ever cared for as an emergency physician. I did everything I could within my scope of practice, but he needed the tools and expertise of pediatric subspecialists,” recalls Galina Lipton, MD, from Boston Children’s Department of Emergency Medicine, who was staffing the South Shore Hospital emergency room that evening. Full story »
A clinician's-eye view of a patient with spinal muscular atrophy during a telemedicine visit.
The jury is still out on telemedicine. Proponents and many patients appreciate its ability to deliver virtual patient care and to extend the reach of experts beyond the brick-and-mortar setting of a hospital. But the real question about telemedicine is: Does it make it difference? Does is it improve care and if so, in what circumstances?
TeleCAPE, a small pilot project at Boston Children’s Hospital, inches the dial toward “yes” for some patients—in particular, home-ventilated patients.
Home-ventilated patients require an inordinate amount of health care resources for even minor conditions. Costs for a simple urinary tract or viral respiratory infection that might be managed without hospitalization can reach up to $83,000 because the child’s complex medical needs require ICU admission. Full story »
Schools have manned the front lines in the battle against childhood obesity. Through the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama has promoted low-cal lunches, fresh produce and more. Now, she hopes to ban junk food and soda marketing in schools.
Are these efforts enough to turn the tide? Offering healthy foods and promoting physical activity at school may not be enough to negate the impact of other unhealthy influences in students’ homes and neighborhoods, according to Tracy Richmond, MD, MPH, of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Division of Adolescent Medicine.
Richmond recently published a study in PLOS One that looked at how a school’s physical activity or nutrition resources might influence fifth grade students’ body mass index (BMI).
The study focused on 4,387 students in Birmingham, Ala., Los Angeles and Houston. “We wanted to find out if certain schools look ‘heavier’ because of their composition—meaning that kids at higher risk of obesity, like African American girls or Hispanic boys, cluster within certain schools—or whether something structural in the school influences BMI, like the facilities or programs offered,” explains Richmond. Full story »
Beginnings—whether a new year or a new century—offer an optimal time for evaluating goals. Quality improvement literature reminds us that goals should be specific, measurable and timely, and that progress checks are crucial. With one year left to achieve the ambitious Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), global child health stakeholders are assessing gains and gaps.
In 2000, the United Nations set the MDGs, and homed its sights on child mortality in MDG 4, aiming to cut mortality among children younger than age 5 by two-thirds by 2015, from the 1990 base figure of 12 million.
By 2012, the figure was nearly halved to 6.6 million.
“There’s a hopeful sense,” says Judith Palfrey, MD, director of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Global Pediatrics Program in the Department of Medicine. At the same time, the goal remains “seriously off target for many countries,” wrote Zulfiqar Bhutta, MB, BS, PhD, from the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and Robert Black, MD, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in The New England Journal of Medicine in December.
Palfrey agrees, noting that while some countries are on track to meet the goal, some have stagnated and some have regressed. “It may be that there are some intractable issues,” she says. The countries that have failed to make progress are marked by corrupt governments, armed conflict or both. Full story »
