Healthcare

Hands-up if you have WhatsApp on your phone 🙋 It's the most actively used app in the UK but it's still woefully underused by the charity sector. I've gathered up six examples of non-profits pushing the boundaries of WhatsApp. PS we run a Third Sector Geeks Group on WhatsApp bringing together 500 charity professionals passionate about digital, data and design 🤓 Comment 'geeks' and like the post if you would like to join 👇 Here's those 6 uses of WhatsApp: British Red Cross (NI): Crisis Coordination in Action 🌍 When tensions escalated in Northern Ireland, British Red Cross & International Committee of the Red Cross - ICRC didn’t send emails, they got a WhatsApp crisis cell up and running. Real-time analysis, quick updates, and a digital hotline for safety and frontline staff. No fluff, just coordination that could start (or stop) at the press of a button. Teams felt braced for whatever came next. Action for Children Parent Talk WhatsApp 👶 Ever tried calling for parenting help with a screaming toddler in the room? Sometimes text is the only answer. Action for Children’s WhatsApp service lets parents ping coaches for a judgement-free chat about sleep, diagnosis, education or whatever challenge comes next. Accredited. Award-winning. Actually used by real parents (and yes, it’s private). PANDAS Foundation Perinatal Mental Health Support 🗣️ For anyone struggling with postnatal depression, sometimes just saying “I need help” is tough. That’s why PANDAS Foundation’s WhatsApp channel is a lifeline. 8am-10pm, trained volunteers reply within the hour, all completely anonymous. We talk a lot about ‘meeting people where they are’ - PANDAS is doing that. Chesterfield Borough Council Housing Tenant Engagement 🏠 Dear social housing providers, nobody wants your PDF newsletter. Chesterfield’s WhatsApp channel broadcasts van visits, service updates, and even lets tenants vote on service changes. One-way, privacy-protected, and a real tool to understand how tenants want to shape their community, with minimum admin overload. Malawi Rural Health Workers Community Coordination 🩺 In rural Malawi, community health workers dodged isolation thanks to WhatsApp. Swapping stock info (“We’re out of polio vaccines”) or sharing best practice for malnutrition care - all handled via group chat. What started as an experiment ended up as their knowledge-sharing backbone. American Red Cross Red Cross Emergency Volunteer Management ⚡ Old way: “Ring every single volunteer to check who’s showing up.” New way: WhatsApp broadcast channel, volunteers reply with status, dispatch monitors in real time. The outcome? Response times dropped by 50%. ❓ Got an example to share? Comment 'geeks' below and like the post - I'll add you to our Third Sector Geeks WhatsApp Group. It's only open to professionals working in non-profits, community groups or social enterprises 👇 Edit: If we aren't connected send me a connection request so I can send the group join link.

I worked 20-hour shifts during my residency. Forget time for family and friends, I often didn’t even have time to shower or eat. So when most of my patients talk about stress taking a toll on their health, I understand. But what we often ignore is that stress acts as your body's alert system for perceived threats. It leads you straight into survival mode - causing lack of sleep, anxiety, and countless health problems. So here are 4 simple solutions to reclaim control: ▶︎ 1. The physiological sigh: This is one of the fastest ways to calm down. - 1 deep inhale through the nose - 1 short inhale to top up - 1 long exhale to empty lungs Just 2-3 cycles of this technique will release the maximum amount of CO2, slow your heart rate and relax you. ▶︎ 2. Mel Robin’s 5-second rule: To break the cycle of anxiety and change your stress habits, simply count down from 5. 5-4-3-2-1. This exercise will: - Activate your prefrontal cortex - Interrupt your habitual thought loops - Shift your brain from fight-or-flight to action mode ▶︎ 3. The filters test: If you want to reduce stress, you need to curate your thoughts. Whenever you have a negative thought, answer these 3 questions: - Is it true? - Is it kind? - Is it helpful? If any of the answer is no, discard the chain of thought immediately. ▶︎ 4. Conquer your fear of judgment: Caring what people think is costing you your health. Choosing attachment (fitting in) over authenticity (being yourself) sets you up for long-term health issues. So forget about others' opinions. Remember, being healthy > seeking approval. These techniques actually work as our brains tend to: - Ignore the high costs of our inaction - Understate the positive results of taking action - Exaggerate negative consequences of taking action. How do you manage your stress? #healthandwellness #workplacehealth #stress

This is another example of how pragmatic, unglamorous AI applications are often the most useful—using NLP to classify and route messages rather than Gen AI to answer them. Since the pandemic, doctors have been drowning in patient portal messages. So, naturally, when ChatGPT launched in late 2022, many of us thought, "Let’s use LLMs to generate drafts!" (Justin Norden, MD, MBA, MPhil and I soon wrote an article about this). Fast forward to 2025 and experience shows that ChatGPT isn’t great for drafting message responses. Studies out of Stanford and U of Colorado showed clinicians use only 12-20% of GPT-generated drafts, ignoring the rest. [doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.3201] [doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.38573] Additionally, a study from UCSD showed that PCPs using Gen AI drafts paradoxically spend 20% more time responding to messages. [doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.6565] Why? Because it’s much easier to type a response than edit an AI-generated response. (I also believe patients want to hear from their actual doctor, not a canned response). However, looking at the broader workflow, we see that one key challenge is getting the message to the right teammate. For example, doctors should only see clinical messages that only they can answer. We don't need to see messages about changing pharmacies, sending refills, or scheduling appointments, etc. Despite this, messages consistently route to the wrong teammates, leading them to pass around (forward) the message like a hot potato. (Often staff forward a message 5+ times before someone resolves it). So, I was excited to read this newly published NEJM AI article. [doi: 10.1056/AIoa2400354] Switchboard, MD and Emory University developed, fine-tuned, and deployed an NLP model to classify messages into one of the following categories: urgent, clinical, refill, scheduling, or forms. Next, they used the output to route the message to the right team member. For example, messages classified as “schedule” were routed to the scheduling group. Their model was 98% accurate for predicting message type. They also found that, compared to a control group, staff responded to NLP-processed messages 1 hour faster, resolved conversations 22.5 hours faster, and had two fewer touches. This shows the importance of applying AI to “solve” for the right workflow pain points. While NLP classifiers may be far less glamorous than Gen AI drafted responses, they are far more helpful.

Most #Hospitals Do Not Know Their Own Costs for Surgeries, MRIs or ER Visits... Activity-Based #CostAccounting Explained. The University of Utah Healthcare System Changed That and Implemented a Cost Accounting System So They Could #Measure What Each Hospital Service Cost. They Found that the #ER Cost $0.82 Per Patient Per Minute and #Orthopedic Surgery Cost $12 Per Patient Per Minute. By Better Measuring Their Costs, The University of Utah Hospital Was Able to #Lower Their Overall Costs by Costs by 0.5% While Their Peers #Increased Costs by 2.9%... a 3.4 Percentage Point Improvement. This Achievement Was Such a Success that One of the Most Famous Business School Professors in the World--Michael Porter from Harvard Business School--Flew to Utah to See It for Himself. Cost Accounting is a Basic Business Practice That Amazingly Most Hospitals Have Never Adopted.

Surgical robots cost $2 million. Beijing just built one for $200,000. Watch it peel a quail egg: Shell removed. Inner membrane intact. Submillimeter accuracy that matches da Vinci at 90% less cost. Think about that. Most hospitals can't afford surgical robots. Rural clinics? Forget it. Patients travel hundreds of miles for robotic surgery or settle for traditional operations with higher risks. Beijing's Surgerii Robotics just broke that equation. Traditional Surgical Robotics: ↳ $2 million purchase price ↳ $200,000 annual maintenance ↳ Only major hospitals qualify ↳ Patients travel or wait Chinese Innovation Reality: ↳ $200,000 total cost ↳ Same precision standards ↳ Reaches district hospitals ↳ Surgery comes to patients But here's what stopped me cold: Professor Samuel Au left da Vinci to build a network of surgical robots. Engineers from Medtronic and GE walked away from Silicon Valley salaries to build this. They're not chasing profit margins. They're chasing one vision: "Every hospital should have one." The egg demonstration proves what matters: Precision doesn't require premium pricing. The robot's multi-backbone continuum mechanisms deliver the same submillimeter accuracy whether peeling eggs or operating on hearts. What This Enables: ↳ Thoracic surgery in rural hospitals ↳ Urological procedures locally ↳ Reduced surgical trauma everywhere ↳ Surgeon shortage solutions The Multiplication Effect: 1 affordable robot = 10 hospitals equipped 100 deployed = provincial healthcare transformed 1,000 units = surgical access democratized At scale = geography stops determining survival Traditional robotics kept precision exclusive. Surgerii makes it accessible. We're not watching price competition. We're watching healthcare democratisation. Because that farmer needing heart surgery shouldn't die waiting for a $2 million robot his hospital will never afford. Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld for innovations that put patients before profit margins. ♻️ Share if surgical precision should be accessible, not exclusive. #healthcare #innovation #precisionmedicine

Imagine a health worker arriving at a community health center only to find that vaccines – which must be kept at the right temperature to be effective – have spoiled due to a lack of refrigeration. In regions with unreliable power, this is a harsh reality.  “Solar-powered” refrigerators are changing that.  These units (see the blue fridge in the photo below) connect to solar panels installed on clinic rooftops instead of relying on batteries or fuel, which keeps vaccines at the right temperature and ensures immunizations continue – even in the most remote areas or when power is disrupted, such as during cyclones and other climate-induced emergencies. Thanks to partners like Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and UNICEF, these innovations are making a real impact. Continued investment in solutions like this means fewer wasted vaccines and more children are protected from deadly diseases.  Read more about how these fridges are making a difference in countries like Malawi: https://lnkd.in/gWYKRQ87

Building a business in preventive health is hard. No one tells you this upfront. I learned it the hard way, first as a founder, now as an investor. You’ve chosen the harder game. Not because prevention doesn’t work, but because people don’t pay for it. Most wake up thinking about chai, parathas , deadlines, and school fees. Not long-term health. People today want instant gratification—sugar today, gym tomorrow. Curative health makes money because illness is urgent. No one postpones a bypass surgery or negotiates an ICU bill. But prevention? Everyone hunts for gym discounts, coupon codes for healthy food and thinks twice before paying for a fitness program. Hospitals & pharma companies thrive because they sell relief from suffering. And suffering is a guaranteed market—prevention is not. That’s why venture money chases curative health—it scales fast with clear unit economics, solving problems people can’t ignore. Asking someone to eat better, sleep more, and exercise for a payoff 5–10 years later is like selling an FD over a lottery ticket. So accept this reality and build accordingly. Yet, prevention is the hardest problem and the biggest untaped opportunity. #1 Healthcare in India will shift to prevention-not because people suddenly care, but because not caring is becoming too expensive. #2 Your market isn’t TAM, it’s WTM (willing-to-pay market). Everyone should care about health, but few will pay for it.To go mass-market, make it cheaper than chai and as seamless as WhatsApp. #3 If you’re selling prevention, reposition it. People don’t buy prevention. They buy status, performance, and convenience. Make it aspirational & competitive. #4 Trust in health isn’t built overnight. People won’t change their habits because you raised venture money. You’re in the business of delayed gratification. That means slow &sustainable growth. #5 If your product doesn’t make people healthier or keep them engaged long-term, the number of app downloads doesn't matter. Focus on retention, real outcomes and revenue—not GMV, DAUs or metrics to make a pitch deck look good. If you can do this, you won’t just build a business—you’ll change how India thinks about health. And that’s worth building for.

This is my face finishing the last pieces of my documentation after my #ER shift. It's a face of frustration after spending way too much time documenting in a less-than-intuitive, inefficient EMR. It's the face of frustration from endless clicks, digital pop-up blockades, and seek-and-find missions for clicking the correct checkbox in an electronic health record to simply discharge a patient. The ultimate price of this inefficiency: compromised patient care, delays, errors, skyrocketing stress for healthcare professionals, and an overall decline in the system's effectiveness. It's time to streamline our processes for the sake of our clinicians and, most importantly, our patients. The problem: EMRs were made as billing platforms with patient care and clinical workflows as secondary considerations. The solution: 1. Put frontline clinicians back in the boardroom to fix these inefficiencies. 2. Reduce and eliminate unnecessary administrative tasks. 3. Utilize trainers to perform frequent check-ins with clinicians to ensure clinicians use the best and most efficient documentation methods. 4. Leverage new technologies (like AI, dictation software, ambient listening software) to reduce screen and keyboard time for clinicians. 5. Create standardized workflows for documentation. The more ways to do the same thing, the more challenging it is to teach and build efficiencies across a team. 6. EMR companies should use practicing, specialty-specific clinicians to guide design decisions. #HealthcareSystem #ClinicianBurnout #TimeForChange Cerner Corporation Epic MEDITECH #EMR ABIG Health #frontlineclinicians #nurses #physicians #hospitals

Planet vs. Plastics - the theme for today’s #EarthDay calls for a 60% reduction in the production of plastics by 2040. An ambitious goal, but imperative, considering the tremendous damage done by plastic to human, animal, and all biodiversity’s health. Single use plastics, e.g., make for 60-95% of global marine plastic pollution. Time to ponder: What are the implications of healthcare versus plastics? The healthcare sector generates huge amounts of plastic waste daily: 25-35% of hospital waste, e.g., is plastics. Undoubtedly, the advent of plastics revolutionized the medical industry, improving access to healthcare: It is low in cost, durable, easy to process and sterilize. But how can we balance the critical role of plastics in healthcare with the need to protect health from the impacts of pollution? Our Fresenius Kabi colleagues working on enteral nutrition solutions demonstrate how to use less plastics with unchanged product quality. They produce bottles and bags with liquid nutrition for patients with malnutrition. In 10 years, the team has improved the container material to a degree that saves up to 1200 tons of plastic per year. The EasyBag, which is the lightest container, now saves 60% plastic in weight and produces 85% less waste in volume compared to tube feed bottles on the market. Reducing plastic brings savings in many parameters that are vital for climate change, like greenhouse gas emissions or primary energy consumption. The EasyBag uses up to 50% fewer non-renewable primary energy sources (compared to other containers for similar products) when it is disposed on a landfill. In general, the healthcare industry is a significant driver of global greenhouse gas and accounts for 5% of global CO2 emissions. So, our contributions to conservation and sustainability have a great impact! At Fresenius Group, we’re committed to reducing our carbon footprint by 50% until 2030. By 2040, we want to become climate neutral in our operations. Our global electricity consumption is one of the most important levers on our path to reducing emissions. Hence, we will gradually increase the purchase of electricity from renewable energies and introduce more energy-efficient solutions. I am sure that digitalization and AI will also help tackle climate change on many different levels. One of our Helios Kliniken GmbH clinics in Hamburg, e.g., tests the use of AI for building automation to save energy: A digital twin simulates the building's behavior and derives appropriate specifications for real operation, like heating, in a timely manner. Experts estimate the energy savings potential to be around 20%. AI-driven solutions will also be transformative regarding the broader demand for a healthy planet in the tradition of the #EarthDay movement. At the intersection of climate and health, AI's advanced data analysis and prediction capabilities will reveal the interlinkages – a prerequisite to address climate-related health challenges! #FutureFresenius

With changes in the Medicare Advantage risk model, slowed increase in Medicare Advantage county base rates, and downward pressure on Medicare star ratings—we are seeing broad evidence of retraction. Altogether, these changes amount to a significant cut to industry revenue. National carriers are announcing major cost cutting initiatives, withdrawals from unprofitable markets, and markedly slashing member benefits in an attempt to stay profitable. And some health systems are taking the unprecedented step of exiting Medicare Advantage (many of them non-profit) altogether despite the fact that 50+% seniors now use the program to access healthcare services. Taken together, some are calling these cuts “the great disruption.” Some observations: 1) Benefit “innovation” had gotten out of hand. To stay competitive and grab share, plans (including ours) were introducing unsustainable benefits that caught attention of members only to pull them back. This is going to stop. At least for now. (Traditionally unsexy) Benefit stability will win the hearts and minds of beneficiaries who will be tired of the yo-yo benefits they have experienced in our previously inflationary environment. If it’s too good to be true, it usually is and startups that funded growth through investment capital can’t do it forever. 2) Organizations that succeeded in Medicare Advantage risk through maximizing revenue capture will actually have to learn how to effectively manage care for older adults. This means providing rapid access to patients to help them avoid emergency rooms and hospital admissions. This means more proactive management of chronic conditions. This means managing their own utilization of low-value services. It’s a worthy challenge and time for put so-called high value healthcare organizations to the test. 3) As benefits come down to earth and there’s more parity, competition will be increasingly focused on effectiveness and service. Do you actually do what you say will do? Does your rhetoric match action? And this is a good thing. Service excellence along the value chain is what matters most to beneficiaries. It just hasn’t been what they valued most at point of purchase. Organizations that commit to radical consumer focus will win. 4) Brokers will be more important than ever to guide people to make good decisions about their plans. In an increasingly complicated marketplace (made more complicated by the IRA and changes to drug benefits), people who can help seniors truly understand their options and true out of pocket exposure will be critical. 5) Everyone partnering with everyone (brokers, plans, provider partners) is not a winning strategy. Deeper, narrowing partnerships will win the day. The “great disruption” will begin to play out this Annual Enrollment Period. Let’s just not forget that at the other end of everything we do is an older adult who relies on our service and care.