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June 2016

How Telemedicine Is Transforming Health Care

After years of big promises, telemedicine is finally living up to its potential. Driven by faster Internet connections, ubiquitous smartphones and changing insurance standards, more health providers are turning to electronic communications to do their jobs—and it’s upending the delivery of health care. Doctors are linking up with patients by phone, e-mail and webcam. They’re also consulting with each other electronically—sometimes to make split-second decisions on heart attacks and strokes. Patients, meanwhile, are using new devices to relay their blood pressure, heart rate and other vital signs to their doctors so they can manage chronic conditions at home.

Telemedicine also allows for better care in places where medical expertise is hard to come by. Five to 10 times a day, Doctors Without Borders relays questions about tough cases from its physicians in Niger, South Sudan and elsewhere to its network of 280 experts around the world, and back again via the Internet. As a measure of how rapidly telemedicine is spreading, consider: More than 15 million Americans received some kind of medical care remotely in 2015, according to the American Telemedicine Association, a trade group, which expects those numbers to grow by 30% in 2016.

You May Soon Be Able to Watch Local Broadcast TV on the Internet

These days you can cut the cord and watch just about anything you want online. However, one key piece of the puzzle is still missing: live local channels. Yes, you can gain get these channels over the air with an antenna, but if you’re looking to watch online, well, not so fast, my friend. While there’s been a little progress in the area, with Sling TV offering ABC and FOX in select markets, and PlayStation Vue offering more locals in several markets, it’s still extremely fractured. Hell, even CBS All Access, the network’s official streaming service, doesn’t offer live local streams in 20 percent of the country. And in those areas where CBS offers cord cutters a live feed, licensing deals still keep you from watching the NFL and other popular programming with annoying blackouts.

However, a new player is entering the streaming game who seeks to change the way local channels are handled. Telletopia, a non-profit streaming service, plans on making live locals available with a 24/7 live stream via the Internet across the United States. This sounds eerily similar to what Aereo tried (and failed) to do back in 2014. However, Telletopia is different, going as far as to say their service was “the exact opposite of Aereo.” In essence, Aereo attempted to exploit a loophole in the law “that dealt with cloud DVR, not with retransmission of local broadcasts.” The company asserts that while “Aereo was attempting to disrupt the entire broadcast industry,” Telletopia wants to be “beneficial to broadcasters at all levels.” That said, there’s still one thing standing in their way: the law.

Hit Reset on Set-Tops

[Commentary] It’s time for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler to rethink the approach to promote competition in third-party navigation devices. But don’t take our word for it.

In the Senate, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Harry Reid (D-NV) agree there are problems with the proposal to give third parties access to multichannel video programming distributors’ set-top programming and subscribers’ data, and they don’t agree on much these days. FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who voted for the proposal, says the FCC needs to “find another way forward” to the goal she shares with Chairman Wheeler of more choice and lower prices. Cable operators also have said they want to move away from boxes and the expense of maintaining them. Chairman Wheeler recently signaled that, while he was not exactly endorsing it, the move was progress toward working with the industry to achieve his goal of more robust navigation device competition. We hope that progress bears fruit, and should signal to Hill Republicans to back off legislative gambits to tie the FCC’s hands via appropriations riders, which President Obama has signaled he would veto anyway. Sounds like cable’s proposal is a good starting point for that new path forward Commissioner Rosenworcel was talking about.

Summary: Behavioral study of expectation in media

[Commentary] We designed a study aimed to determine whether participants’ trust in the information contained within an online news article is altered by changing the brand of the article, by demographic factors, and by readership habits such as regularly accessing news online or in print. Given prior findings in analogous disciplines based upon expectation and trust in media, we hypothesized that participants would show more trust in older, established print publications known for investigative journalism, like The New Yorker, than they would in more recently established publications online, like Buzzfeed. Further, we expected that people who reported more journalism readership would be more aware of brands and, consequently, more willing to trust information from known sources.

We found that while, on average, participants were more likely to trust rather than not trust the publication in line with our hypotheses, participants who read the article in the Buzzfeed shell reported lower positive trust and higher negative trust, relative to those who read the article in the New Yorker shell. We found a trending similar result in the same direction when we examined the data in terms of informational content. There was no difference in reported trust from those who read the article in the New Yorker or Buzzfeed shells relative to the shell for the neutral publication, The Review, whose trust responses fell between the other two groups. Similarly, we did not find this relationship in bias reports for the protagonist or government or in writer credibility.

[Jenna Reinen is a postdoctoral psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at Yale.]

President Obama hints at a future in Venture Capitalism, and Silicon Valley is salivating

In seven months, President Barack Obama will leave the White House as president of the United States. He’s going to need a job. Recently, he hinted at the possibility of joining entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

President Obama said “had I not gone into politics, I’d probably be starting some kind of business,” said President Obama. “The skill set of starting my presidential campaigns—and building the kinds of teams that we did and marketing ideas—I think would be the same kinds of skills that I would enjoy exercising in the private sector. … The conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.” On hearing the news, Valley investors were quick to save the president a spot on Sand Hill Road. President Obama, of course, wouldn’t be the first Washington power player to make such a move. Former secretary of defense Colin Powell joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers in 2005, followed by former vice president Al Gore in 2007. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state under George W. Bush, teamed up with Khosla Ventures in 2012. Numerous Congressional representatives and government officials have found homes at venture firms in the Bay Area.

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