Health Tech
Smarter, Better, & Faster
Thomas Grandell CEO & Co-founder, Etsimo
Smarter, Better, And Faster
I’ve always been easily bored, and what bores or annoys me most is when things are done in unnecessarily complicated ways. When I run into something that in my opinion doesn’t work right, I automatically start thinking about why something is done the way it is and how this could be done smarter, better or faster. So, for me everything starts with “why” and this is also why I think helping people to understand “why” is one of the most important things in leadership. Understanding gives everything a purpose and that inspires people and help them align with the goals.
The Challenge in Healthcare
Healthcare is lagging behind other sectors in terms of adapting to technical possibilities, i.e., seizing opportunities. There are several good reasons for this; patient safety, information security, and regulations are among the most defendable ones. The future hurts only once but resisting it hurts forever. And if you resist, you are not among the ones shaping the future so resisting leaves you worse off when the future catches up. This is especially true with AI and machine learning.
Don’t be scared of technology and the future but be realistic. Don’t plan too much in detail—start small but start somewhere—for example supporting current operations with new technology. Support successful change and kill off less successful initiatives quickly. After all, augmented intelligence where man and machine work together usually render much better results than just man or just machine.
The Journey to a Better Health
I’m easily irritated by suboptimal processes, and healthcare has felt overly complicated forever. It’s very doctor-centric and siloed.
The start for me and Etsimo was three things happening at once; (1) I had three small children that needed medical care now and then, always in the middle of the night, (2) my wife got ill with a rare and life-threatening disease, and it took 2,5 years for the professionals to diagnose her correctly and even then it happened by coincidence, and (3) I was presenting an information discovery technology to the largest hospital district in Finland, and they gave me feedback that changed my thinking. All these together got me thinking that healthcare should be fixed, and I realized we could do it, we have the required skill sets and technology. So, I talked with my team and these discussions led to us start building our current offering.
We provide a platform with the infrastructure that enables our customers to get started on the journey towards being a data-driven company utilizing AI in their operations. It utilizes medical data and makes it possible for our customers to transfer from reactive to personalized and preventive care. For the consumer, the above translates into an improved customer experience with 24/7 access to healthcare and an easy-to-use fully digital care experience. For the provider and payer, it reduces the costs of the care process with automated triaging and care path assignment. This enables optimization of the use of human care resources and analytics on the care process.
Keeping People Healthy
At Etsimo, we believe in keeping people healthy instead of treating sick people. To accomplish this, through prediction and prevention, you need to be patient-centric and have a continuous flow of medically credible data from the patient. For this to work, we need a user experience that is part of your day-to-day life, but in a non-intrusive way—a way that doesn’t bother you with continuous data update needs and irrelevant alerts. It utilizes the data from your patient history and the data you generate with your wearables to track of you in the background and requires actions from you only when it’s absolutely needed. Getting healthcare and wellbeing to be a continuous activity enables us to fulfill our mission to keep people healthy.
Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs Of 2020
Health Tech
Viruses: Biological versus Computer
By Mark Webb-Johnson, Chief Technology Officer of Network Box
During this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, those of us working with computer viruses continue to be amazed at the similarities between the techniques used by the medical community to fight SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease) and the processes involved in our electronic anti-virus systems. Let’s look at some of these similarities, and see how computer anti-virus researchers help protect.
By Mark Webb-Johnson, Chief Technology Officer of Network Box
What is the Virus?
SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus. Essentially, a strand of information wrapped up in a protective shell and a mechanism to infect cells – information, envelope, infection mechanism.
By comparison, a computer virus consists of the payload, a carrier, and an exploit mechanism. For example, the payload would be the malicious code, the carrier an email message, and the exploit mechanism something to take advantage of a vulnerability in a particular mail client. Another example would be script downloaded from a web page, taking advantage of a web browser exploit.
Replication
The virus’s primary purpose is to replicate – to make copies of itself. SARS-CoV-2 does this by infecting cells (in the lungs, stomach, and other areas of the human body), then using the cell’s own mechanisms to make copies of its RNA and make new virus particles.
Computer viruses have the same primary purpose of replication. They want to infect as many hosts as possible. Once in a computer system, they make multiple copies of themselves and transmit out to new hosts. It is this self-replication capability that defines this as a virus.
Identification and Testing
The gold standard for identifying viruses is the whole genome sequence. This maps the full sequence of the chemical components of the RNA (made up adenine, uracil, guanine, and cytosine; abbreviated as A, U, G, and C), and results in a very long string of these four letters. That is excellent for precise identification, but not so good for testing. Due to mutations, what we know of as SARS-CoV-2 is actually a collection of hundreds of different strains of the same fundamental virus, each with their own slightly different sequences (more on this later).
To test for the virus, researchers instead concentrate on relatively small portions of the full sequence. This way, they can extract samples from a potentially infected human, amplify the RNA in the sample to obtain enough to test with, and then compare that against the portion of the full sequence. That is the RT-PCR test.
Computer virus researchers work similarly. The payload of the virus itself is a sequence of computer code that can be expressed in binary, or more commonly in hexadecimal notation. Computer viruses are often intentionally self-encrypted and randomized (we call these polymorphic viruses) to avoid whole sequence detection. Nowadays, these are by far the most common form of computer virus seen.
Researchers extract portions of the sequence that don’t change and use pattern matching techniques to detect those partial sequences in suspicious samples. We call these ‘signatures,’ and they can be effectively used to detect known viruses in suspicious samples.
Immune Response and Vaccination
The human immune system has a component known as the ‘adaptive’ immune system. The system works by identifying portions of viruses already in the body, and creating antigen-specific cells designed to identify, remember, and attack that specific antigen. These cells protect against future infections of the same virus and can survive in the body for some time (months, or years, typically). This is why after you’ve had the measles once, for example, you usually don’t get it again. Vaccinations work by purposely injecting the body with antigens that will generate such an adaptive immune response, to protect you from future specific infections.
Computer anti-virus systems store databases of signatures of known viruses. When your computer receives a new file, it can scan it, look for a match against those signatures, and take action if a match is found (quarantine, etc.). Such signature-based systems are the computer equivalent to the body’s adaptive immune system.
Innate Immune Response
Another component in the human immune system is known as ‘innate.’ This system can detect what is not ‘you’ (what is ‘foreign’) and attack the invader. It relies on the antigen’s chemical properties and doesn’t need to have previously seen that specific antigen.
For computer anti-virus, this is extremely hard to achieve well. The capability to detect and block previously unknown viruses is what differentiates good anti-virus systems from the poor. Various techniques are used, but mostly revolve around a) decoding the virus code to the rawest form, b) detecting suspicious encoding or exploit behavior, and c) using emulation or sandboxing techniques to see what the virus does when executed. Looking at behavior, rather than code sequences.
Mutations and the Future
RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 are very poor at accurate replication, and sometimes the copies made are not perfect. Base pairs get flipped. Portions of the sequence are lost. Parts of other viruses are incorporated. Before long, you are dealing with bad copies of bad copies of a bad copy. It is like the story of a million monkeys with a million typewriters, eventually producing the works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes these viral mutations are beneficial to the virus, but most often not. Whatever the outcome, these mutations are the way the virus adapts to further its goal of replication.
Thankfully, we do not see the same with computer viruses. A computer virus can and does make perfect copies of itself, 100% of the time. Sure, we have self-encrypting polymorphic computer viruses, and randomizing fragments are often introduced, but the core code of the virus is not changed, and certainly not randomly. Perhaps in time, we will see this, but with today’s non-forgiving computer CPU architectures, it is unlikely to be a successful approach.
Of course, given enough monkeys and enough typewriters, anything is possible. Perhaps they can even improve on Shakespeare. Before that day comes, however, make sure you are prepared. Subscribe to a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) that can adapt, and protect you from cyber threats.
