Withings Health Solutions, the business-to-business division of the connected health company Withings SA, is launching two cellular-connected devices that allow patients to measure their weight and blood pressure at home and immediately transmit the results to a health care provider. The products – the Body Pro smart scale and the BPM Connect Pro at-home blood pressure monitor(BPM) – are being marketed directly to health professionals, as well as researchers and chronic disease management companies, for distribution to patients to use at home.

Mckesson Corp. has brought together several oncology organizations, life sciences companies, and patient advocacy groups to increase understanding of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and leverage targeted therapies to improve outcomes. The Molecularly Informed Lung Cancer Treatment in a Community Cancer Network: A Pragmatic Consortium (MYLUNG) study will observe and analyze 12,000 community-based, metastatic NSCLC patients to learn more about barriers to molecular testing for targeted therapies, how those therapies are being used, and to expand opportunities for participation in clinical trials.

Varian Medical Systems Inc. has invested $10 million in and inked a collaboration agreement with Cota Inc., a Boston-based curator of oncology clinical data. The radiation oncology company will now offer its customers access to Cota’s oncology real-world analytics and data curation services, which aggregate electronic health record (EHR) data to yield meaningful insights.

An artificial intelligence machine learning model that mines electronic health record data could help physicians fight the opioid epidemic by targeting non-opioid pain treatments to patients experiencing severe pain after surgery, according to new research presented at the Anesthesiology 2020 annual meeting.

TORONTO – Toronto-based Oncall Health Inc. has raised CA$7.9 million (US$6 million) in series A funding to help health care organizations lessen COVID-19’s impact on their EMR and other operational programs. An even more ambitious goal, said CEO Nicholas Chepesiuk, is to streamline delivery of virtual health care across a range of small to large U.S.-based organizations “in a way that makes sense for their brand and their workflow.”

TORONTO – “With COVID-19 it’s not been an easy time to raise capital.” In virtually the same breath Joshua Liu, CEO of Toronto-based health-tech startup SeamlessMD Inc. credited the pandemic with nudging investors to spend CA$4 million (US$3 million) to grow his company’s cloud-based patient engagement app, boosting a library of digital plans for surgery, cancer and chronic care and adding machine learning-based risk prediction to remote patient monitoring.

Deep Lens Inc.’s artificial intelligence trial screening and enrollment platform, Viper, will be integrated with Franciscan Health Cancer Center's electronic health record to enable matching of cancer patients with suitable clinical trials starting at diagnosis over the next month. By working together, the two Midwest-based organizations hope to increase the number of patients benefiting from clinical trials and overcome some of the challenges to participation posed by the pandemic.

Real-world evidence (RWE) and clinical trial data might seem to bear little resemblance to each other, but Naomi Aronson, executive director for clinical evaluation at the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, said there are problems common to both. The most significant of these is an absence of validated outcomes measures for many conditions, measures Aronson said are “desperately” needed in order to make an appropriate coverage determination.

The support for permanent changes to Medicare coverage of telehealth has risen drastically in the months since the COVID-19 pandemic began, but Krista Drobac of Sirona Strategies said on a July 23 webinar that stakeholders will have to help make the case that telehealth is cost effective. That cost effectiveness argument may be absolutely crucial if any of the related legislative proposals are to stand up to budget scoring in a time of skyrocketing U.S. budget deficits, she said.