News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel

News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel
Sign In

Apple May Be Developing Mobile Device Technology to Monitor User’s Health and Transmit Data in Real Time

Industry analysts speculate that Apple might be planning to enter the EHR and healthcare related markets by transforming mobile technologies into gateway devices connected to providers’ EHR systems and patient data

Imagine a mobile device that monitors vitals while connected in real-time to healthcare providers, electronic health records (EHR), and clinical laboratories. One that measures the physical condition and emotional state of the user by casting light onto skin, and then records and transmits it with a swipe of the touch screen. Would such an innovation change how patients expect to interact with their providers? And how physicians, anatomic pathologists, and medical laboratories receive data from their patients? Certainly.

This is why US patents recently granted to Apple have caught the attention of industry analysts. Some speculate that the tech giant is planning to enter the mobile healthcare monitoring device, EHR, and healthcare data storage markets, as reported at Becker’s Health IT and CIO Review and Patently Apple.

How this would affect medical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups remains to be seen. But where Apple goes, industries follow. Thus, it’s worth following the company’s activities in the healthcare market.

Bringing Clinical Data, Medical Laboratory Test Results, to iPhone

Mobile devices launched the era of consumer-grade fitness wearables. It’s not uncommon for a smart phone or watch to capture and store a range of health data generated by users. This can include everything from heart rate and sleeping patterns to dietary logs and fertility tracking. But, to date, much of that healthcare data is user generated and does not integrate in any meaningful way with the majority of EHR systems. Nor does it enable communications with primary care providers or diagnostic services—such as medical laboratories or pathology groups.

This may soon change.

According to a CNBC report, a unit at Apple is “in talks with developers, hospitals, and other industry groups about bringing clinical data—such as detailed lab results and allergy lists—to the iPhone, according to a half-dozen people familiar with the team.”

The report states that Apple:

·       “Wants the iPhone to become the central bank for health information;

·       “Is looking to host clinical information, such as labs and allergy lists, and not just wellness data; and,

·       “Is talking with hospitals, researching potential acquisitions, and attending health IT industry meetings.”

Christina Farr, the report’s author, predicts that Apple could be preparing to apply its music industry model to the healthcare industry by, “Replacing CDs and scattered MP3s with a centralized management system in iTunes and the iPod—in the similarly fragmented and complicated landscape for health data.”

Former National Coordinator of Health IT for the Department of Health and Human Services, Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, rather enthusiastically noted the significance of the move, stating, “If Apple is serious about this, it would be a big f—ing deal.”

At a special event in September, Apple COO Jeff Williams (above) announced Stanford Medicine’s Apple Heart Study, which uses “data from Apple Watch to identify irregular heart rhythms, including those from potentially serious heart conditions like atrial fibrillation,” and, according to Williams, “notify users.” This is just one of several healthcare-related study collaborations Apple is exploring. It is not known if Apple is looking to collaborate with medical laboratories. (Photo copyright: Apple.)

Apple’s History with Healthcare Related Technology

Taken as a single event, these speculations might not convince industry leaders. However, Apple’s long-term investments and acquisitions show a clear trend toward integrating healthcare data into the Apple ecosystem.

Healthcare IT News noted that from 2014 to 2017 Apple:

·       Unveiled three different APIs—HealthKit, ResearchKit, and CareKit—designed to help capture, analyze, communicate, and integrate healthcare data with the Apple iOS and watchOS ecosystems;

·       Hired several MDs, including: Stephen Friend, MD; Rajiv Kumar, MD; Mike Evans, MD; Ricky Bloomfield, MD; and Sumbul Ahmad Desai, MD; and,

·       Engaged with the Argonaut Project and Health Gorilla (a centralized hub of healthcare data and information) suggesting a shift from wearables and basic device-based biometrics toward in-depth reporting, interoperability, and access to third-party healthcare data repositories—such as those in a person’s EHR or medical laboratory portal.

The Future of EHRs or Another Failed Attempt at Innovation?

Apple isn’t the only company to attempt such a system. Other efforts include Microsoft’s Health Vault and Google’s now shuttered Google Health. Another CNBC article notes that Amazon is also researching healthcare related options. “The new team is currently looking at opportunities that involve pushing and pulling data from legacy electronic medical record systems,” stated Farr. “The group is also exploring health applications for existing Amazon hardware, including Echo and Dash Wand.”

However, where most services fail to gain traction is user engagement. After all, if a system isn’t widely used or fails to offer benefits over existing systems, patients and service providers are not likely to go through the process of switching systems. Speaking with CNBC, Micky Tripathi, President and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative notes, “At any given time, only about 10% to 15% of patients care about this stuff. If any company can figure out engagement, it’s Apple.”

According to comScore, 85.8-million people over the age of 13 already own an iPhone in the US. The upcoming facial recognition features on Apple’s iPhone X might also provide the added security needed for those questioning the safety of their data. Should Apple succeed, communicating data between clinical laboratories, physicians, and patients might be both convenient and fast. More importantly, it might be the universal platform that finally provides health data access across the entire care continuum, while simultaneously improving access to providers and empowering healthcare consumers.

Of course, this is a few years from reality. But, we can speculate … would innovative medical laboratories have their patients’ lab test data hosted in the Cloud in such a way that patients and providers could access it securely, along with other protected clinical records?

Imagine how this would enable patients to have their complete medical record traveling with them at all times.

—Jon Stone

Related Information:

Could Apple Be Taking a Bite Out of EHRs?

Could Amazon or Apple Actually Make a Dent In the EHR Market?

Apple Extends Its Reach into Healthcare

Electronic device that computes health data

Apple Is Quietly Working on Turning Your iPhone Into the One-Stop Shop for All Your Medical Info

Wait! What? Amazon and Apple Eye Building EHRs

Apple Is Working with This Small Start-Up to Change How We Track Our Health

Timeline: How Apple Is Piecing Together Its Secret Healthcare Plan

Amazon Has a Secret Health Tech Team Called 1492 Working on Medical Records, Virtual Doc Visits

With Apple Consulting Argonaut Project on Health Records, Interoperability Could Get the Push It Needs

Apple Enlists Help of Startup Health Gorilla to Add Diagnostic Data to iPhones

UCLA’s Ozcan Labs Develops Portable Smartphone DNA Detection System That Performs as well as Clinical Laboratory Testing

Mobile point-of-care (POC) smartphone-based nucleic acid assay allows for quick turn arounds and accurate information in any healthcare setting, including resource limited and remote environments 

DNA detection might soon be accomplished with the use of a smartphone. That’s the goal of a research effort at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). If this effort succeeds, it would give medical laboratories a new tool to use in genetic testing.

Clinical laboratory equipment is becoming more effective even as it shrinks in size and cost. One such device has been developed by Ozcan Laboratory Group, headed by UCLA professor Aydogan Ozcan, PhD. It is a portable, smartphone-based mobile lab with sensitivity and reliability on par with large-scale medical laboratory-based equipment.

Ozcan Lab’s portable DNA detection system, according to a UCLA press release, “leverages the sensors and optics of cellphones” and adapts them to read and report the presence of DNA molecules. The sensor uses a new detector dye mixture and reportedly produces a signal that is 10 to 20 times brighter than previous detector dye outputs.

This new system improves upon the optical detection abilities of current point-of-care nucleic acid tests (POCTs) and, according to a study published in the American Chemical Society’s ACS Nano, the device is able to “retain the same robust standards of benchtop lab-based tests.”

Go Anywhere Technology Improves POC Testing

Nucleic acid detecting assays are crucial tools anatomic pathologists use to identify pathogens, detect residual disease markers, and identify treatable mutations of diseases. Due to the need for amplification of nucleic acids for detection with benchtop equipment, there are challenges associated with providing rapid diagnostics outside the clinical laboratory.

The device developed by Ozcan Labs (above) is a “field-portable and cost-effective mobile-phone-based nucleic acid amplification and readout platform [that] is broadly applicable to other real-time nucleic acid amplification tests by similarly modulating intercalating dye performance. It is compatible with any fluorescence-based assay that can be run in a 96-well microplate format, making it especially valuable for POC and resource-limited settings.” (Caption and photo copyright: American Chemical Society.)

Using the new mobile POC nucleic acid testing system developed by Ozcan et al, pathologists can effectively step away from the lab to perform rapid POC testing and accelerated diagnostics onsite, rather than needing to transport materials to and from a central laboratory. The mobile testing assay enables pathologists to carry a medical laboratory with them into the field, or into limited-resource or decentralized testing environments, without sacrificing quality or sensitivity. And according to the ACS Nano article, at a relatively low-cost compared to benchtop nucleic acid testing equipment.

In an article published in Future Medicine, Ozcan and Hatice Ceylan Koydemir, PhD, a post-doctoral researcher in electrical engineering at UCLA, comment on the growing interest in mobile POC diagnostics, stating that smartphone-based devices and platforms have the potential “to be used for early detection and prevention of a variety of health problems.”

According to the article, smartphone-based sensing and imaging platforms have been developed to:

  • Analyze chemicals and biological specimens;
  • Perform advanced cytometry and bright-field/fluorescence microscopy;
  • Detect bacterial contamination;
  • Image nano-sized specimens;
  • Detect antimicrobial drug resistance; and
  • Analyze enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA)-based testing.

Smartphones, according to Ozcan and Koydemir, have been adapted to a range of biomedical measurement tools, “have the potential to transform traditional uses of imaging, sensing, and diagnostic systems, especially for point-of-care applications and field settings,” and can provide speedy results.

A ‘Highly Stable’ and Sensitive System

The proof-of-concept study of Ozcan Lab’s new smartphone-based detection system and new detector dye mixture was led by Janay E. Kong, PhD in bioengineering at UCLA, with the help of Ozcan and fellow professors Dino Di Carlo, PhD, professor of bioengineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA, and Omai Garner, PhD, associate professor of clinical microbiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

According to an article in Bioscience Technologies, the new smartphone DNA detection system addresses issues with detection of light emitted from intercalator dyes, which are normally “too subtle and unstable for regular cellphone camera sensors.” The new system uses loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) to amplify DNA in connection with a newly developed dye that uses hydroxynaphthol blue (HNB) as an indicator.

The inclusion of HNB into the dye, according to the original research study, “yields 20 times higher fluorescent signal change over background compared to current intercalating dyes,” making the results bright enough for smartphone camera sensors without “interfering with the nucleic acid amplification process.” The original study reports that the digital LAMP system and use of the HNB intercalating dye, in fact, provided “significantly enhanced performance compared to a benchtop reader with standard LAMP conditions.”

Ozcan labs shows no signs of slowing down their development of mobile POC diagnostic devices. The development of these smartphone-based tools may provide unique and much-needed equipment for clinical pathologists given the rising interest in mobile healthcare worldwide.

Amanda Warren

Related Information:

UCLA Researchers Make DNA Detection Portable, Affordable Using Cellphones

Mobile Phones Create New Opportunities for Microbiology Research and Clinical Applications

Highly Stable and Sensitive Nucleic Acid Amplification and Cell-Phone-Based Readout

Cellphone System Makes DNA Detection Affordable and Portable

UCLA Device Enables Diagnosis of Antimicrobial Resistance in Any Setting; Could Save Lives Lost to Antimicrobial Resistant Bacteria

UCLA Researchers Develop Lens-Free Smartphone Microscope, Pathologists May Be Able to Take the Clinical Pathology Laboratory Just About Anywhere

Smartphone “Dongle” Achieves Capabilities of Big Clinical Laboratory Analyzers: Diagnoses Three Diseases at Once from Single Drop of Blood

New Fast, Inexpensive, Mobile Device Accurately Identifies Healthcare-Acquired Infections and Communicates Findings to Doctors’ Smartphones and Portable Computers

Pathologists and Researchers Predict Development Trajectory for Biomarker-based Molecular Diagnostics in Support of Translational Medicine

Tiny, Simple-to-Use Lensless Microscope Might Soon Find a Place in Pathology

Startup Oscar Health Finds Big Partners in Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic and Nashville’s Humana Inc.

Two different deals aim to bring a new style of healthcare insurance to individuals and small businesses

Designed to be a new model for health insurance, the much-watched Oscar Health (Oscar), founded in 2012, has just inked deals with both the Cleveland Clinic and Humana, Inc. What makes Oscar worth watching by pathologists and clinical laboratory managers is that the innovative insurer was founded and is run by Gen X and Gen Y (Millennial) executives.

Oscar Health is billed by its Millennial cofounders as a new type of health insurance—one that “curates” or coordinates members’ care with the help of health information technology (HIT) on the Internet, a smartphone app, and personalized services by concierge teams. So, it is interesting for pathologists and medical laboratory leaders to note that New York-based Oscar is partnering, through two different deals, with well-established Cleveland Clinic and rival Humana to enter the Ohio and Tennessee healthcare markets.

As Dark Daily reported in a previous e-briefing, Oscar aims to leverage sophisticated technology solutions and data to challenge complexity and costs associated with traditional healthcare insurance. An approach no doubt driven by the modern thinking of the company’s young founders. We alerted lab leaders that the insurance startup could be the latest example of technology’s power in the hands of Gen Y and Gen X entrepreneurs.

And while Oscar has reportedly experienced financial challenges, it is moving forward with the widely publicized new partnerships, as well as additional plans to expand insurance coverage in more states. Therefore, it’s important for clinical laboratory professionals to follow Oscar, which soon could be a healthcare payer of clinical laboratory and anatomic pathology services in more regions of the country.

Why Is Oscar Teaming Up with Cleveland Clinic, Humana?

In short, Cleveland Clinic is making its debut into the health insurance market with Oscar. And Oscar is moving into Ohio on the coat tails of this nationally prominent healthcare provider. The co-branded Cleveland Clinic/Oscar Health insurance plan will be offered to northeast Ohio residents in the fall for coverage effective Jan. 1, according to a Cleveland Clinic news release.

“This is a rare opportunity to work with the Cleveland Clinic to deliver the simpler, better, and affordable healthcare experience that consumers want,” said Mario Schlosser, Oscar’s Chief Executive Officer and cofounder in the news release.

 

Josh Kushner (left) and Mario Schlosser (right) cofounded Oscar Health, a New York-based health insurer that employs computer technologies, a mobile app, and concierge-style healthcare teams to provide members with a modern health plan experience and easy access to quality healthcare providers. (Photo copyright: Los Angeles Times.)

The coverage will be sold on and off the Ohio Affordable Care Act state exchange. Here’s what consumers will receive, noted statements by the Cleveland Clinic and Oscar Health:

  • Access to primary care providers affiliated with the Cleveland Clinic, and an Oscar Health concierge team (a nurse and three care guides) that can refer patients based on their needs to other providers in the care continuum;
  • Virtual care visits enabled by Cleveland Clinic Express Care Online and Oscar’s Virtual Visits;
  • Smartphone technology to make it possible for members to explore their health needs, find options, and review costs.

“We are looking to build a new relationship among payers, providers, and patients. This relationship goes beyond the traditional approach of getting sick and seeing the doctor,” noted Brian Donley, MD, Cleveland Clinic’s Chief of Staff.

In an article on the partnership, Forbes suggested that narrow healthcare networks like the Cleveland Clinic/Oscar model might be just what the ACA exchanges need to remain operational.

However, a Business Insider article suggests that Oscar—already active in New York, Texas, and California health exchanges—could be adversely affected by a successful replacement of the ACA, currently being debated by Congressional lawmakers.

Nevertheless, Alan Warren, PhD, Oscar’s Chief Technology Officer, told Business Insider that the Cleveland Clinic/Oscar Health insurance plan would go forward even if Obamacare did not.

Formal Rival Humana Now Oscar’s Partner in Small Business Insurance

Meanwhile, the partnership with Humana takes Oscar, which launched Oscar for Business in April, 2017, further into the small business health insurance market. Humana and Oscar will sell commercial health insurance to small businesses in a nine-county Nashville, Tenn., area effective in the fall, according to a joint Oscar/Humana news release.

“The individual market was a good starting point. But it was clear from the beginning that the majority of insurance in the US is delivered through employers,” Schlosser stated in a New York Times article.

As to who does what, Beth Bierbower, Humana’s Group and Specialty Segment President, explained in an article in the Tennessean that Humana will contract with hospitals and doctors for small business insurance, while Oscar’s technology solutions will help small businesses and their employees manage healthcare benefits and gain access to providers. “These people [at Oscar] are on to something,” she noted. “They are doing something a little different. Maybe this is a situation where one plus one, together, might equal three.”

Future Growth Planned by Oscar

The New York Times called Nashville “a new step for Oscar,” and noted that it follows Oscar’s recent loss of $25.8 million during the first three months of 2017—47% less than Oscar lost during the same period in 2016. Since its inception, however, Oscar has raised $350 million in investment capital, much of it from Silicon Valley investors.

Also, Oscar’s small-business health insurance plans, which started in the spring in New York, might launch in New Jersey and California as well, an Oscar spokesperson stated in a Modern Healthcare article that also reported on Oscar’s intent to increase individual plans sold in the ACA Marketplace from three states to six in 2018.

Clinical Laboratories Benefit from Increased Consumer Access to Health Providers

Could Oscar succeed with its new Cleveland Clinic and Humana partners? Possibly. Both deals are pending regulatory approval as of this writing.

In any case, the whole idea of making insurance more palatable for consumers is something clinical laboratories, which are gateways to healthcare, should applaud and support. It is good to know that insurers like Oscar are using technology and personal outreach to ease consumers’ access to providers and help them explore options and costs.

—Donna Marie Pocius

Related Information:

Cleveland Clinic, Oscar Health to Offer Individual Health Insurance Plans in Northeast Ohio

Introducing Cleveland Clinic Oscar Health Plans

Oscar Health Partners with Cleveland Clinic on Obamacare Exchange

Oscar Health Partners with Cleveland Clinic

Oscar Health to Join Human in Small-Business Venture

Humana Oscar Health Pilot Small Business Insurance Partnership in Nashville

Oscar and Humana Team up to Sell Small-Business Plans

Insurance Start-Up Oscar Seeks to Shake Up Healthcare Through Its App

Gen Y Entrepreneurs Launch Oscar, A Consumer-Friendly Health Insurance Company in Bid to Disrupt Traditional Health Insurers

 

 

MedStar Health/Uber Collaboration Shows How Providers Can Use Existing Technology to Proactively Improve Patient Care; Might Be a Similar Opportunity for Medical Laboratories

Estimates are that more than three million people miss healthcare appointments each year due to transportation issues; that is true for patients with clinical lab test orders who never visit a patient service center

Patient no-shows, missed appointments, and rescheduling impact not only clinical laboratories and pathology groups but the entire healthcare community in lost time and wages. So, critical is scheduling that patient portal and electronic health record (EHR) developers focused first on implementing those technologies before moving on to billing and other aspects of health information technology (HIT). If patients don’t arrive at their appointments on time, everyone loses.

Thus, Internet and smartphone application (app) developers continue to refine and improve their scheduling software. Now, other companies outside of traditional healthcare also are capitalizing on this opportunity.

One such innovative company is Uber, a San Francisco-based transportation service company created in 2009 that enables people to order a local driver pickup via a free smartphone app. Last year, Uber began collaborating with MedStar Health, the largest healthcare provider in Maryland and Washington, DC, to help address the issue of missed appointments.

Getting Patients to Their Appoints is Half the Battle

An article in the Washington Business Journal noted that estimates place the cost of missed healthcare appointments as high as $150-billion per year in the US alone. And research published by the Journal of the Transportation Research Board suggests that up to 3.6-million people miss or delay appointments annually due to transportation issues. These exorbitant costs, combined with the necessity for patients to receive timely care, are compelling healthcare providers to develop innovative strategies to deal with missed appointments.

All of this is of interest to clinical laboratories, because a substantial number of patients who get medical laboratory test orders from the physicians never come to a patient service center to have their specimen collected. Not only does this mean that the patient (and his or her physician) won’t get the needed lab test results, but it means that the lab loses the opportunity to be paid for performing the tests that were wanted by the patients’ physicians.

“Half our battle is getting the patient to the appointment,” stated Pete Celano, Director of Consumer Health Initiatives for MedStar Institute for Innovation, Healthcare Dive reported. Celano, along with other representatives of the Uber/MedStar Health collaboration, spoke at the Connected Health Conference last December. Lindsay Elin, Director of Federal and Community Affairs at Uber and Daniel Hoffman, Chief Innovation Officer for Montgomery County in Maryland, joined Celano in discussing their shared experiences and insights with the collaboration during a session titled “Cities That Promote Health.”

“For patients who can afford it, we say ‘Please uber if and as you want to,’” Celano stated. “It could be less expensive to go to Georgetown University Hospital for example on an uber from most places than to park there, if we even have parking spots available.”

Uber/MedStar collaboration may be especially beneficial for patients with disabilities

The Uber/MedStar collaboration may be especially beneficial for patients with disabilities who want to use the Uber to get to healthcare appointments. The Uber Accessibility website features a host of helpful instructions and tools to get patients started using Uber. (Photo copyright: ABC News.)

In the past, MedStar utilized local taxi services to diminish the amount of missed appointments. Celano stated that such services could be cost-prohibitive, cumbersome, and unable to meet the needs of patients who required assistance. Now, Internet technology, such as smartphone apps, can be used by providers in innovative and clever ways to improve the patient experience.

That’s the thinking behind encouraging patients to request an Uber driver for transportation to medical appointments. The pick-up is easily requested through a free smartphone app. Healthcare providers may also arrange and manage transportation for patients who do not own a smartphone. Patients also can order an Uber driver online by selecting the Uber icon on MedStar’s homepage.

The Power of Going Door-to-Door

The partnership has been successful. Celano stated that the cost of an Uber trip is about 60% of the cost of a cab in the DC area and patients can arrange for a car inside an hour time frame. MedStar also can cover the Uber transportation fee for patients with medical and financial needs.

“People ask me how it’s going and I say it’s all about the power of going door-to-door,” Celano stated in the Healthcare Dive article. He added that keeping scheduled appointment times can result in better outcomes for patients as well.

A CrossChx report titled, “The Cost of Now Shows” notes that the most common reasons for patients to miss scheduled appointments are:

  • Lack of transportation;
  • Amount of time between scheduling and the actual appointment;
  • Emotional obstacles; and
  • Believing that medical professionals do not respect patients.

Elin stated that other healthcare providers have expressed interest in utilizing Uber for patient transportation and that Uber has established a team to work solely with healthcare providers. Additionally, Uber’s uberASSIST program trains drivers to work with riders who may require specialized attention, such as senior citizens and the disabled.

“We firmly believe [that] with partnerships with healthcare providers, senior centers, [and] transit agencies we can do even more and reach more people,” Elin stated.

Taking Proactive Steps to Better Patient Care

The Uber/MedStar collaboration shows how internet technology and smartphone apps can be used by healthcare providers in clever ways to improve patient experience. Additionally, it should be understood as a market development that shows how a healthcare provider, attempting to deliver integrated care, recognizes that it must take proactive steps to get certain patients with chronic diseases to their appointments to manage them proactively and help prevent an acute event.

Clinical laboratory leaders should see this story in both dimensions. And then use those insights to identify how they might collaborate with high-tech companies to deliver lab services in different ways that help achieve better patient outcomes.

—JP Schlingman

 

Related Information:

‘It’s Door-to-Door’: MedStar, Uber Detail Partnership’s Progress

Insight: Tackling Healthcare’s Costly Problem of Missed Appointments

Why MedStar Health Just Teamed Up with Uber

Accessibility at Uber

Cities That Promote Health

MedStar Health Pays for Patients in Need to Get Uber Rides to Appointments

Cost-Effectiveness of Access to Nonemergency Medical Transportation: Comparison of Transportation and Health Care Costs and Benefits

Multi-channel Smartphone Spectrometer Enables Clinical Laboratory Testing Quickly and Accurately in Remote Regions

UCLA Device Enables Diagnosis of Antimicrobial Resistance in Any Setting; Could Save Lives Lost to Antimicrobial Resistant Bacteria

In studies, the automated microbial susceptibility testing device for smartphone performed with 98.2% accuracy, meeting FDA criteria

Imagine doing antimicrobial susceptibility testing outside a clinical laboratory. That’s the goal of researchers on the West Coast who are developing a smartphone-based diagnostic device with the capability of performing this type of point-of-care testing (POCT).

This new mobile POCT device is under development at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). It promises to bring antimicrobial susceptibility testing—a routine procedure in the most medical laboratories—to remote, resource-limited areas of the world.

The device, which attaches directly to a smartphone, contains an automated diagnostic test reader that examines the body’s antimicrobial resistance, according to a UCLA news release. (more…)

;