Children living outside industrialized nations have limited access to health care, and many children with severe kidney dysfunction do not have access to dialysis. Some developing countries have access to manual peritoneal dialysis, which requires the placement of a catheter into the abdominal cavity every one to two hours, 10 hours per day. But supplies are expensive, and many countries lack the infrastructure needed to get large quantities of dialysis fluid to children’s homes.
“When you’re dealing with a chronic disease like diabetes, 90 percent of medical care is done by the patients themselves,” says Jeff Ruiz, vice president of diabetes service and solutions at Medtronic. The time people with diabetes spend in the doctor’s office each year pales in comparison to the time they themselves spend managing their condition each and every day.
That’s why Medtronic, the world leader in diabetes management devices, is focused on patient engagement and turning real-time data into actionable insights. “You can provide all the best devices and medications, but it’s up to the patient at the end of the day,” said Ruiz, speaking on Monday during a panel discussion at the 2015 Boston Children’s Hospital Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards. …
Kevin Cedrone presents AIR to the judges at the Innovation Tank
“These start-ups are really looking to change the world. [They won’t be] the next Uber or Facebook. [Instead] they will really affect lives in the pediatric space,” said Troy Carter, founder and CEO of the entertainment company Atom Factory and newly named guest shark on ABC’s “Shark Tank,” as he introduced the Innovation Tank at the Boston Children’s Hospital Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards.
Though each of the three participating innovations promised a tremendous impact on kids, the six judges agreed on the ultimate Innovation Tank winner and awarded a $30,000 investment to the Augmented Infant Resuscitator (AIR). …
Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, PhD, takes his audience on a tour of 60 years’ worth of successes in cancer. What does the future hold?
We’ve all heard the George Santayana quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But there’s another way of thinking about the lessons that the past holds for the future: Those who do remember the past can recapture and harness earlier feelings of energy, urgency and possibility to overcome new problems, now and in the future.
In taking the audience on a tour through the last 60 years of advances in cancer biology, genomics and treatment, Mukherjee highlighted the central role pediatrics played as the starting point for the cancer successes we see today. How, he asked, did children come to play such a central role? What can we learn from the successes in the 1950s and ’60s, when pediatric cancer started to evolve from a death sentence to a treatable, even curable disease?
And how, he asked, can we recapture and harness the energy and urgency of that time today?
Ken Mandl, MD, MPH, director of the Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program, is used to seeing the world through a different lens. In high school, he began clicking photographs with his camera and developing them in a darkroom in his basement. Now, he frames subjects through the lens of epidemiology and informatics—driving discovery and care transformation through big data, apps and large-scale federated research networks.
Though Bruce Zetter, PhD, Charles Nowiszewski Professor of Cancer Biology in Boston Children’s Hospital’s Department of Surgery, has had a lifelong passion for science, he once toyed with an alternate career—as an actor. But he stuck with his love for science and pursued a career in academic medicine. Countless patients, students, business partners and mentees have benefitted from that decision.
Nobody likes being confined to a hospital bed. Children especially can feel lonely, bored or scared in these situations. Hours feel like days, and they may not be able to fully understand or describe why they are there.
Child life specialists have long understood that tapping into playtime can bring up information about a child’s social and emotional needs that might not be revealed in more structured clinical assessments. But what if you cannot physically be in the room?
Carlos Dominguez is a technology evangelist, social media maven and a Senior VP at the IT company Cisco Systems, Inc. In this animated keynote presentation, he poses the question: how can health care organizations innovate in a world transformed by the web, social media and mobile phones, where “distance is dead,” knowledge is totally democratized and kids are born digital? Innovation isn’t luck, he contends, it’s a discipline that should work its way into an organization’s DNA.
You’ve got a great idea for a new medical device. After you’ve created the device and proved its usefulness in a clinical setting—a challenge in itself—the next step is getting your device to a commercial partner who can mass-produce and market it. Working through all of the regulatory hurdles, projecting the market for your product and figuring out your product’s long term potential can seem overwhelming.
On January 6, 2015, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., del Nido will lead a panel discussion at Boston Children’s about moving medical devices from idea to commercial partnership, …
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