Algorithms for Innovation
Creative Solutions Transforming the Future
of Health Care
Below are the most recent questions we are considering. We'd like to cover questions through out the year, and invite you to Join in the conversation.
Most Recent Posts
How can we make health care affordable and accessible in developing countries?
Stanford University students looking for cost-effective ways to build inhalers for impoverished children in Latin America stumbled upon an unorthodox method during their research process:
Could supercomputers like IBM's Watson be a physician's new best friend?
Talk about TMI. One trillion devices are moving at breakneck speed, generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. In the world of medicine, information is doubling every five years. In 2010 alone, 700,000 new articles were catalogued by the National Library of Medicine.
How can we get better, cheaper therapies from bench to bedside?
Clearly, the drug development process is under significant stress. Vicki Seyfert-Margolis, Ph.D. former Senior Advisor for Science Innovation and Policy at the U.S Food and Drug Administration, recently visited the University of Utah Health Sciences to talk about some of the most significant challenges facing drug development and offer some possible solutions.
How can the FDA help speed up the drug discovery process?
If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, then our current drug development model is ripe for change. "If we want health care and medical products to be accessible, they have to be available at a price that is affordable," says Frank F. Weichold M.D., Ph.D., the Director of Critical Path and Regulatory Science Initiatives at the FDA. "And as such, we have to rethink how we develop drugs, how we develop products, and how we approve them."
Are on-site health clinics the health care solution for employers?
As health care costs continue their long arc upward, what's a company to do? According to an article in the Washington Post, companies employing 10 or more workers paid an average of $10,588 per employee for health care benefits last year. Facing unsustainable financial pressure to provide health care benefits to their employees, many employers are shifting the cost to their employees: requiring them to pay higher insurance premiums and deductibles or by reducing services in health care plans.