[Ed. note: Tune in to the livestream Monday at 9:30 a.m. ET] Can the inventors of Watson help save sick children in the developing world? A “cloud-based” pediatric learning module, conceived by Children’s Hospital Boston and built by IBM Interactive, is being beta-tested this year in 20 countries. Provisionally called Pediatrics without Walls, it will [...]
There are no best practices for turning patient’s genome sequence into information that a doctor can easily understand…and act on. Children’s Hospital Boston’s CLARITY Challenge calls on the genomics community to come up with those practices, and possibly help three families in the process. (michab37/Flickr) Personalized medicine, harnessing genomics to improve patient care, is a [...]
(Karl-Ludwig Poggemann/Wikimedia Commons) Recently, in the hospital cafeteria, I overheard a group of researchers discussing the upcoming availability of whole-genome sequencing to physicians. “We should devise a way to study how physicians will use this,” said one of them—underscoring the disruptive nature of the transformation that is currently happening in medicine. The ability to immediately [...]
Brian Rosman holds up a tablet app he and a team of Children's and MIT Media Lab staff developed over the past two weeks during the Health and Wellness Hackathon At 10 a.m. he’s directing two actors on set, at 10:34 a.m. he’s filling up a catheter and at 11:01 a.m. he’s gushing about the [...]
(Lars Plougmann/Flickr) Your child has been in the hospital and it’s discharge day. It’s a chaotic scene: You’re trying to take care of him and maybe his little sister who keeps running down the hall, while completing hospital paperwork and packing your bags. You’re finally out the door, in your car, kids strapped in and [...]
Many doctors feel unprepared to care for children with neurologic impairment. (Photo: Lindsey Hoshaw) Jay Berry, MD, MPH, shown here with patient Kyler Quelch, is a pediatrician and hospitalist in the Complex Care Service at Children’s Hospital Boston. He leads the multi-institutional Complex Care Quality Improvement Research Collaborative. As a general pediatrician, albeit one with [...]
There is no crystal ball to predict what side effects a new drug might cause. But a new mathematical model could help. (Bitterjug/Flickr) A major challenge in drug development is figuring out what might go wrong. During the development process, a new drug might be given to a few thousand people, maybe fewer if it’s [...]
Medicine is a balancing act; how much of a drug is too much? A group of compounds called EETs provide a clear example of the possible dangers of giving patients too much of a good thing. (chris grabert/Flickr) Usually when your doctor talks to you about lipids, he or she is talking about cholesterol (be [...]
Brian Rosman, the Robotic Surgery Research Fellow in the Department of Urology at Children’s Hospital Boston, contributed to this post. Children and parents connect with home robots that "embody" their health care provider. (Image submitted by a patient at Children's Hospital Boston) Robotic technology can take many forms. In the Department of Urology at Children’s [...]
Having blood drawn can be a very anxious thing for a child with autism. Ellen Hanson and her colleagues have developed an educational kit that they hope will make blood draws easier on kids, parents, and their doctors. Raising a child with autism is challenging, to be sure, but some situations can be more challenging [...]