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Health & Biotech
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates a projected shortfall of 10 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low-and lower-middle income countries,
However, WHO said countries at all levels of socioeconomic development face, to varying degrees, difficulties in the education, employment, deployment, retention, and performance of their workforce.
“The chronic under-investment in education and training of health workers in some countries and the mismatch between education and employment strategies in relation to health systems and population needs are contributing to continuous shortages,” the WHO said.
“These are compounded by difficulties in deploying health workers to rural, remote and underserved areas.”
In Australia the Skills Priority List (SPL) 2023 report showed that more than four in five health professional occupations (82%) were in shortage in 2023.
As pressure builds on healthcare systems globally, innovative digital solutions are being increasingly developed to reduce the burden of workers in this critical field.
From remote monitoring of maternity patients to digital pathology solutions and digital tools to diagnose ADHD/autism here’s some of the companies on the ASX we’ve noticed tackling a growing shortage of healthcare workers.
Much has been reported on the shortage of maternity services globally, including Australia and, in particular, in rural areas. While not designed to replace healthcare providers, HMD’s HeraCARE platform helps them to manage their maternity patients remotely.
The platform includes personalised care plans via a mobile app and a smart kit of connected devices including HMD’s clinically validated, in-home foetal and maternal heart rate monitor HeraBEAT.
It aims to ensure expectant mothers are engaged, informed and well-supported and enables healthcare professionals to provide quality care with early detection and prevention of potential risks.
“HeraCare and everything that comes with it such as the HeraBEAT, blood pressure monitoring and so on comes through a care provider who may be a public hospital, private doctor or clinic so it’s not something a mum can go and buy off the shelf,” managing director and CEO Anoushka Gungadin told Stockhead.
“This is continuity of care complementing what a doctor would be doing. So it’s building efficiency and continuity of care between visits with each visit also optimised because all the measurements are done ahead of time.”
OIL’s technology could address concerns about a growing shortage of pathologists in Australia and globally, which could delay medical test results.
The company’s pioneering slide-free, biopsy-free technology has been miniaturised to enable clinicians and pathologists to diagnose cancers and precancerous conditions in real-time, removing the need for time consuming tissue biopsies, sample collection, specimen processing, and traditional use of glass slides.
CEO and managing director Dr Camile Farah – himself a trained clinician and pathologist – said the OIL platform could help reduce the bottleneck in pathology testing.
“Our real-time digital pathology imaging devices and integrated cloud-based telepathology platform have been developed to work in a fashion similar to how radiologists are now using teleradiology as standard of care,” Farah said.
“Our hardware and software solutions will allow pathologists to receive digital images from clinicians and surgeons in real-time, streamlining their workflow and allowing them to get through their caseload in a much faster manner.
“Our digital solutions remove the need for time consuming laboratory preparation, and turn a standard computer screen into a reporting microscope that can be accessed anywhere in the world giving pathologists complete flexibility in how and when they interpret the images, just like radiologists do with CT and MRI scans.”
In addition to OIL’s telepathology platform and imaging hardware, the company is creating AI algorithms aimed at assisting both clinicians and pathologists with their work, speeding up their diagnoses and increasing their accuracy.
Farah said that real-time digital pathology is the way of the future with significant advances over current analogue techniques used in commercial pathology laboratories.
“A move to digital is a key component in addressing labour shortages in pathology,” he said.
Specialising in innovative medical imaging software solutions, M7T aims to improve the efficiency and workflow for radiologists, other clinical staff and healthcare organisations.
M7T’s enterprise imaging solution comprises enterprise data management, enterprise diagnostic viewing and departmental workflow applications.
The company’s enterprise data management solution consists of a vendor neutral archive (VNA) and data administration tools to enable for the fast storage, access, retrieval and viewing of images across a healthcare network with connectivity to the cloud.
It’s eUnity enterprise diagnostic viewing technology is an image viewing solution that makes images accessible on any workstation.
“This, together with Mach7’s departmental workflow applications, offers healthcare professionals consolidated access to all patient images and data, ensuring radiologists and clinical staff have timely access to the right information to diagnose and treat patients,” the company said.
Morgans healthcare analyst Scott Power likes to describe M7T as “like the baby brother” of ProMedicus (ASX:PME), which is also aiming to improve efficiency in healthcare.
“Mach7’s software helps improve the efficiency of medical image management which creates efficiencies for both the radiologist along with the workflows and operations of the hospital system,” Power said.
IMR is the global lead in developing and manufacturing MRI-compatible devices for cardiac ablation procedures. Cardiac ablation, performed by an electrophysiologist, involves guiding a catheter into the heart to ablate the tissue causing an arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat).
Currently, the US$8bnpa cardiac ablation market relies on X-ray guidance to locate treatment areas within the heart.
However, ablation procedures using X-ray has limitations. An X-ray doesn’t capture heart tissue detail and exposes patients and physicians to repeated radiation.
They are time consuming to perform and a lack of visibility makes it difficult to ensure the entire arrhythmia-causing area is treated, resulting in a first-time success rate as low as 50% and often requiring multiple procedures.
The biotech is bringing the superior imaging of MRI to cardiac ablations with higher first time success rates and faster procedures. It’s cardiac ablation devices are the only ones worldwide that are proven safe and effective within the magnetic field of an MRI.
IMR is currently undertaking its Vision-MR Ablation of Atrial Flutter (VISABL-AFL) pivotal clinical trial supporting US FDA approval of its products, which it hopes to achieve in 2025.
In Europe, where the company has already received regulatory approval for AF, it’s about to start the VISABL-VT clinical trial for its second indication, ventricular tachycardia.
“What may have taken several hours in the x-ray lab took less than an hour to perform using Northstar in the iCMR,” said Amsterdam University Medical Centre Dr Marco Götte.
With its origins at Princeton University the digital healthcare company is leveraging smartphones, computer vision, AI and machine learning to improve the efficiency of diagnosing neurodevelopmental conditions, including ADHD and autism.
The App has the potential to become a valuable clinical tool for diagnosing autism and/or ADHD, significantly reducing the time it takes for families and patients to receive a diagnosis.
The platform uses advanced smartphone sensors to measure subtle changes in sensory responses, focusing on the brain’s reaction to unexpected sounds.
The approach leverages the known phenomenon that individuals with ADHD and autism often exhibit different responses to unexpected sounds, such as blinking more frequently or differently compared to neurotypical individuals.
CEO Henk-Jan Boele (MD PhD) said the platform could be a “game changer” in the field of neurometrics and diagnostic testing for conditions such as autism and ADHD.
Boele, who holds a medical degree and is a successful neuroscientist at Princeton University and Erasmus MC, said one of the challenges in diagnosing autism and ADHD was the absence of definitive medical tests.
He said diagnostic evaluations rely on subjective observations from clinical experts, schools, and families which can take time.
At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While HeraMED, Blinklab and Optiscan are Stockhead advertisers, they did not sponsor this article.
Disclosure: The author held shares in Mach 7 at the time of writing this article.
Health & Biotech
Health & Biotech
Health & Biotech
