The drive towards improving the delivery of and access to patient care and improving outcomes has been accelerated by COVID-19. Technology is being called upon to play a key role in that transformation.

Macadamian designs and develops digital health and connected medical device solutions to the MedTech, Pharmaceutical, and Healthcare Service Provider markets. We had a chat with Macadamian’s Director Emerging Technologies, Timon LeDain, to find out how the company has been adapting to the COVID-19 crisis.

1. Hello future-focused peers, we’re glad to have you by our side in our mission of shaping the future from home this year. Can you introduce us to your recent company plans and recent changes, if that’s the case, considering this world shift?

Macadamian continues to be more focused than ever on the healthcare sector and, in particular, the MedTech, Pharma and Healthcare Provider markets. With the rise of COVID-19 and its global impact, Macadamian leveraged our HealthConnect application development platform as a service to develop a portfolio of solutions to assist in business re-opening.

Macadamian QSuite offers both usage-based (SaaS) and custom-built, integrated desktop and mobile solutions designed to assist healthcare providers and enterprise organizations to manage staff health screening, client intake, queue management and workspace resource scheduling. QSuite offers four core applications designed to address the management of the front entrance as a health checkpoint, elevator, workspace resource allocation and client visits:

● HealthQ — COVID-19 Staff screening;

● InQ — Client in-take and queue management;

● MiQ — Workspace resource management;

● TraceQ — Client registry and contact management.

These solutions have found an immediate market fit within organizations in the healthcare provider, long-term care, manufacturing, health and wellness, municipal government, and with a range of associations from testing laboratories to media producers.

2. We noticed a considerable focus on AI lately, within dedicated webinars and projects at Macadamian. We want to hear more about the technologies you’re using and how they changed in recent years.

Interest in AI and machine learning (ML) is growing within the healthcare sector as a way of improving patient care and reducing clinician workloads. Companies like Microsoft and Amazon are democratizing AI by allowing product owners to leverage machine learning within their own solutions to drive customer value without needing to be a data scientist.

In healthcare, where there are strict compliance requirements around data privacy, we saw the potential for leveraging Macadamian’s HealthConnect PaaS to develop solutions that integrate ML and that can be used through the full life cycle of algorithm development. We recently partnered with Radiobotics, a Danish ML company, and Bispebjerg Hospital to validate an algorithm for assessing knee X-rays for osteoarthritis and other factors that automatically scans the image and drafts a report of findings that a radiologist can start from, rather than reviewing the X-ray and drafting a report from scratch. In Bispebjerg’s case, the volume of medical images continues to grow but there are not enough radiologists to be able to report on these in a timely fashion.

The Macadamian HealthConnect platform allows these algorithms to be run in the cloud with the ability to anonymize images automatically as they are uploaded and to securely share medical images with other collaborators so that they can validate the algorithm or build annotated image data to train new algorithms. By delivering this in the cloud, the tool can be used across large geographies, support multiple sites and stakeholders, and deliver a platform that helps to compare one algorithm against another.

That was essentially our impetus for creating the Macadamian AI Workbench. As a tool that facilitates upload and exchange of anonymized medical images and a way to compare different algorithms against the same set of source images to be able to determine the one that is most suitable for that provider’s needs. It also helps deliver a framework for new ML algorithm developers to build and test their algorithms with.

3. Historically, healthcare has been slow to adopt new technologies, but things have started to move faster lately. What are the most sought-after solutions from your point of view?

COVID-19 has definitely had an impact on healthcare. The key areas in which technology can help MedTech, Pharmaceutical and Healthcare providers are in the Improvement of clinical and business process related to workflows with respect to:

● Enhancing end-user (patient and physician) engagement,

● Adoption of / and enabling real-time and remote patient monitoring for existing products,

● Digitized or virtual clinical trials,

● Enabling Remote product support, training, and sales,

● Safe business re-opening.

AI also has a role to play in streamlining workflows to address in-efficiencies. According to a report by Phillips Healthcare (2020), the top three uses for AI in healthcare are in quality control (60%), customer care and support (44%) and monitoring and diagnostics (42%).

Macadamian is one of Techsylvania’s official partners for the 2020 edition. To learn more about them, visit https://www.macadamian.com/