Health > Healthcare | Hospital Aligns Vision & Mission

"Boston Medical Center has long understood that it takes more than just medicine to help patients get healthy. And now, with the creation of a vice president of mission, it will have a person dedicated to helping accomplish that goal.

Dr. Thea James, an emergency medicine physician, will take on the role of vice president of mission and associate chief medical officer, where she will be charged with coordinating programs outside the hospital to help patients overcome hurdles to health."

Expect to see more hospitals moving in this direction, if they haven't already. And that's a good thing! Health is way more than just health care.

Re: "Meet Dr. Thea James, Boston Medical Center's new executive on a mission", J. Bartlett, Boston Business Journal, 07/28/15

Teams Pitch Once More at Culmination of CIMIT/B-BIC Boot Camp, Sure to Not Be Their Last

The program ended as it had begun: with a pitch. Just as the teams had done on day one, except this time armed with loads more insight on the value of their innovative business concepts garnered from a combined 500 customer interviews, they assumed their place in front of a room full of strangers turned peers and mentors to present how, with their idea, patient care would be forever changed...[continue reading]

Read: Questionable Whether Artificial Sweeteners Are Worse Than Added Sugar

In summary: Questionable whether artificial sweeteners are linked to cancer. Added sugars aren't doing us any favors. Neither of which are revelations.

My own take: Naturally occurring sugars wrongly get a bad rap. Nutrition is misconstrued and oversimplified all the time in the media, even by the "experts". The title of this article misleads by omitting the "Added" part of this equation. Artificial sweeteners have been linked to rises in obesity and reinforced by the discovery of the underlying biomolecular mechanisms, which the author failed to mention. A more honest title would be "Questionable Whether Artificial Sweeteners Are Worse Than Added Sugar".

Re: "The Evidence Supports Artificial Sweeteners Over Sugar", A.E. Carroll, The New York Times, 07/27/15

Meeting & Mixing of the Minds at BU OTD’s Tech, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll

It was an evening full of collisions of all kinds at the Boston University Office of Technology Development’s 6th Annual Tech, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll (TDRR) held in the George Sherman Union on BU’s campus set along Boston’s Commonwealth Ave. Entrepreneurs, academic scientists, industry folks and funders from venture capital and government / non-profit entities alike mixed and mingled over the course of an eventful evening. Much of the action centered around “Funder Alley” – a row of booths and monitor displays that featured many of the area’s funders of upstart biotechnology...[continue reading]

A Nuanced View of the World of Drug Development & its Value to Society

It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to play audience to a preeminent biotech company’s chief executive (in Boston it’s more like every other day), so I couldn’t pass it up when I learned Genzyme CEO David Meeker, MD, would be sitting down with Boston Globe Life Sciences Reporter Robert Weisman for a “fireside chat” (hold the fire) hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Equally compelling was the thought provoking topic of conversation; “The Value of Drug Development: Can Society Afford Today’s New Wonder Drugs?” Given Dr. Meeker’s previous clinical and academic accomplishments as former Director of the Pulmonary Critical Care Fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic and Assistant Professor at Ohio State University, plus a variety of high-level managerial undertakings with Genzyme prior to becoming CEO, he seemed uniquely positioned to offer a nuanced take on the world of drug development and its value to society...[continue reading]

Leveraging Machine Learning Muscle at the Brigham & Women's Hospital iHub Idea Lab with Microsoft

The air was electric in the Shapiro Room at Brigham & Women’s Hospital (BWH), the setting for the BWH iHub Idea Lab with Microsoft on the evening of Monday, June 22nd. With innumerable ideas afloat on the topic of “Machine Learning in Healthcare,” it seemed it would be only a matter of time until lightning struck – in the form of a truly groundbreaking idea to improve population health and/or care management. Combining the clinical and technical acumens of members in attendance from the respective BWH and Microsoft communities, it appeared that the necessary parts were all in place, like a well-oiled Rube Goldberg machine, to harness the room’s bottled energy to propel forward real world solutions to some of healthcare’s most nagging problems...[continue reading]

Nine Teams Begin Commercialization Boot Camp, Canvas their Biomedical Business Concepts

On Day 1 of the CIMIT/B-BIC i-Corps Healthcare Commercialization Boot Camp, nine teams of innovators from a selection of the area’s most esteemed academic and medical institutions - including Boston Children's Hospital, Boston University, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Mass General Hospital, MIT and Yale - convened at Boston University to start the process of developing a commercialization roadmap for their projects. They shared their ideas in confidence, received valuable insight and feedback from expert mentors and coaches, and learned more about the commercialization road ahead...[continue reading]