Laboratory test results supply the foundation for most medical decisions. However, they are likely to feature more prominently in healthcare, given persistent trends in human health. These include ageing populations, higher rates of non-communicable diseases, and upticks in early-onset cancers, obesity, type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic and neurodegenerative diseases. Accuracy, fast turnaround times and access will always be the pillars of quality diagnostic testing. Yet, certain conditions within the healthcare landscape threaten that vital triad. Devising solutions to ensure these pillars remain intact will be essential to advancing human health worldwide. Over the past decade, the healthcare industry has faced a reverberating shortage of qualified professionals ' from lab technologists to nurses and doctors. Burnout fatigue among overworked staff is prevalent, and its ramifications are significant. In traditional diagnostic laboratories, for instance, mislabeled samples, transcription and other human errors compromise patient safety while driving up healthcare costs....
Biomedical and data scientists are being urged to join this monthâs CoronaHack to fast-track solutions that can help slow, monitor and diagnose the pandemic. The free online hackathon is being led by artificial intelligence consultancy, mindstream-ai.âYou will work collaboratively with top data scientists, biomedical researchers, vaccine specialists, startup founders and investors to develop innovative approaches to the current crisis,â the CoronaHack eventbrite page states.We are tracking information on online challenges, funding calls, and initiatives dedicated to tackling COVID-19. Sign up for our regular newsletters in the box below for all the latest on these and please share relevant details to colleagues and friends to help accelerate solutions....
At the end of March, I wrote about a preliminary study conducted by Stanford emergency physician Ian Brown, MD, that indicated that a significant number of people diagnosed with COVID-19 are also simultaneously co-infected with other respiratory viruses, including influenza or rhinovirus. "Currently, if a patient tests positive for a different respiratory virus, we believe that they don't have COVID-19," said Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD, associate professor of medicine and of biomedical data science at the medical school. "However, given the co-infection rates we've observed in this sample, that is an incorrect assumption."Now Stanford emergency department physician James Quinn, MD, and resident David Kim, MD, PhD, together with clinical virologist Benjamin Pinsky, MD, PhD, have extended this analysis to include more than 1,200 samples, collected from people from multiple sites in Northern California who were experiencing a cough, fever or other symptoms of a respiratory infection. They published their results yesterday in JAMA....
