KidsMD with Devin Nadar of Boston Children's Hospital

VFH Episode 12

In this episode, Teri welcomes Devin Nadar, the Partnerships Manager for the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator at Boston Children’s Hospital. If you have been following the voice first health scene you know that Boston is a hub for this type of innovation and Boston Children’s Hospital is certainly at the forefront of this.

Devin focuses on cultivating partnerships with industries, startup, and other innovative leaders. She started out working at Athena Health in Boston, an electronic medical record and billing company. Eventually she found an incredible opportunity at Boston Children’s Hospital to be a more integral part of the innovative ecosystem that they have, and to see an idea from its creation all the way through product development and launch.

Key points from Devin Nadar!

Boston Children’s Hospital is pushing the boundaries of what technology can do for the hospital and for patients.
They saw an opportunity with voice that is an exciting new medium where they could reach families at home.

KidsMD Skill

KidsMD was their first skill that was launched over two years ago. KidsMD is an Alexa Skill that provides trusted content from pediatric experts. It takes the Boston Children’s Hospital expertise and makes it available to patients in their home. It allows parents to be able to ask about common symptoms. It also integrates with a smart thermometer that takes a child’s temperature. Based on the temperature, and the child’s age and weight, you can get dosing recommendations for common medications.
To deal with potential liability issues, the users will hear disclaimers. The skill is a reference tool but it does not replace bringing a child to a physician.
The personal information is not stored in the skill. Once smart speakers are HIPAA compliant there will be many more opportunities for more applications.
KidsMD continues to have new users; there are usually about 200 unique users per week.
They have had over 100,000 interactions in that two year period.
They are in the process of releasing version 2 of KidsMD in the next couple of months.

Voice First Health Devin Nadar Quote 1

Flu Doctor skill

In collaboration with Seattle Children’s Hospital, the Flu Doctor skill was just released. This will provide answers to common questions around the flu vaccine, to help people better understand what the flu vaccine is, who should get it, and when.
There are a number of different videos and audio recordings to help answer common questions.
The skill will prompt users on different things one can ask, including an integration with vaccine finder to help people find the closest location to get the flu vaccine.
One of the opportunities Boston and Seattle Children’s Hospitals saw in this space was the ability to provide trusted pediatric information from a reliable source.
The skill is about empowering parents, and about empowering patients, and that will lead to healthier kids.
The timeline for developing the Flu Doctor skill was about 2 months.

Voice.Health Summit on October 17, 2019

Boston Children’s Hospital is hosting the Voice.Health Summit and it’s the official pre-event for the Connected Health Conference in Boston.
There will be experiential rooms, with live skills to simulate the patient at home, the patient in the waiting room, and the patient in the exam room.
It will be about understanding what is going on in voice technology, with lots of demos and hands-on experiences.