​Ten startups from the Taiwan Tech Arena (TTA) will participate in the program's first Global Innovation Pitch Showcase, produced in partnership with Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley's highly competitive global startup accelerator. Silicon Valley VCs, angel investors and industry professionals will attend the virtual event. Interested investors may register to join the pitch Showcase here.

TTA, funded by Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology, is focused on building a vibrant tech ecosystem of Asian startups. Each year, they select a cohort of up to 30 startups to participate in the TTA Silicon Valley accelerator, with eight of the startups participating with SkyDeck as part of its Global Innovation Partners program. This event marks the first time TTA is producing a pitch showcase with SkyDeck.

"We are proud to connect the outstanding Taiwanese tech talent with the impressive entrepreneurial community of Berkeley SkyDeck," said the TTA Silicon Valley office. "Since 2016, we have brought more than 150 innovators from Taiwan to the U.S. to build strong international relationships and connections and attract investment. And it's noteworthy that most of the startups' businesses stem from academia. To date more than half of these Taiwanese startups have raised money. With the new Showcase, we're thrilled we can share their talents, ideas and innovations on a global stage."

SkyDeck's Global Innovation Partner Program serves as a bridge for global startup teams as they participate in the SkyDeck entrepreneurial ecosystem and bring their ideas to the U.S. market. A limited number of startups from outside the U.S. are selected to participate in the partner program alongside the SkyDeck Batch (cohort) and Pad-13 (incubator) teams.

"Working closely with TTA has been a wonderful experience for all of us," said Caroline Winnett, Executive Director, Berkeley SkyDeck "Not only are the teams from Taiwan getting an immersive learning and networking experience at SkyDeck, they will return home ready to launch and create economic opportunities in their communities. We look forward to helping jumpstart these startups here in the U.S. and then seeing how they grow."
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The Aug. 19 Showcase will feature the following startups:

• AESOP: AESOP aims to reduce medication errors and billing errors, thus enhancing patient safety and optimizing revenue with AI-powered technologies.

Reference: yahoo finance

A study has demonstrated the international transferability of a Taiwanese artificial intelligence model for detecting medication errors in EHR systems in the United States.

The study was jointly conducted by Taiwan-based medical AI startup Aesop Technology, Taipei Medical University, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Its results were announced last week in a press release.

WHY IT MATTERS

The "biggest challenge" in data-driven medicine is the successful implementation of data-driven applications in clinical practice from local to global settings without compromising patient safety and privacy, according to Dr Yu-Chuan Jack Li, a professor at Taipei Medical University.

The study, whose findings were published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research - Medical Informatics in January, found good transferability of Aesop's machine learning model in the EHR systems of two training schools under Harvard Medical School – Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.

A federated learning (FL) approach was applied to the model which enhanced its performance. The said approach is an emerging technique that addresses the issues of isolated data islands and privacy. 

"FL provides the solution by training algorithms collaboratively without exchanging the data itself," Dr Yu-Chuan said. 

"The study has shown that the model trained by federated learning achieves remarkable performance comparable to the other two models trained by individual data sets," Aesop Technology co-founder and CEO Jim Long also said.

Incorporated in Aesop's MedGuard system, the AI medication safety model was trained using the 1.3 billion prescription data set from the National Health Insurance Administration in Taiwan.

In the statement, Aesop said its system can "immediately" provide adaptive suggestions to help doctors better complete their prescriptions. The AI model has since been expanded to eastern and western hospitals in the US.

THE LARGER TREND

Despite the wide adoption and optimisation of EHR systems in US hospitals, those systems still pose risks given varying safety performance, according to a 2020 study by researchers from the University of Utah and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Medical errors are costing the US around $20 billion each year, leading to over 250,000 deaths. These can occur at any stage of the medication process with errors in prescribing happening half of the time.

The use of an AI system in preventing medication errors was already validated as early as 2017 by researchers at Harvard Medical School. In the same year, MedAware, the Israel-based startup which developed the algorithmic system, raised $8 million to scale its AI-powered solutions.

ON THE RECORD

"Reducing medication errors at the source is crucial. However, to help physicians be better informed and make better decisions, they need more accurate suggestions and alerts. This is where machine learning can help to make better decisions and improve patient safety and quality of care," said Dr David W. Bates, Chief of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Reference: MobiHealthNews

​New study paves the way for collaboration on artificial intelligence modeling and medication error reduction globally

Researchers at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Taipei Medical University, and Aesop Technology, a Taiwan-based startup, announced today the results of a new joint study into the international transferability of machine learning (ML) models to detect medication errors. The results were recently published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research - Medical Informatics.

Working to Reduce Medication Errors

Medication errors are a growing financial and healthcare burden that results in economic costs of around US$ 20 billion and more than 250,000 deaths annually in the U.S. alone.

Medication errors can occur during any stage of the medication process, including prescribing, dispensing, administration, and monitoring, with errors in prescribing accounting for 50% of the total.

When medicating patients, physicians go through complex decision-making processes to accurately write a prescription. First, they must clearly define the patient's problem and list the therapeutic objective before selecting an appropriate drug therapy based on age, gender, and possible allergies. They must also consider dosing, drug-drug interaction, potential discontinuation of the drug, drug cost, and other therapies — and all of these need to be done instantly and simultaneously.

"Reducing medication errors at the source is crucial. However, to help physicians be better informed and make better decisions, they need more accurate suggestions and alerts. This is where machine learning can help to make better decisions and improve patient safety and quality of care," said Dr. David W. Bates, Chief of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

For technology to assist in solving these problems, it is critical that machine learning understands these variables. For this to be successful, data must be properly collected, organized, and maintained.

Taiwan is one of the world's few countries with a centralized and well-structured electronic health records (EHRs) system organized by Taiwan's National Health Insurance Administration. This gives it a competitive edge in developing medical AI systems that use machine learning based on medical record data.

The Future of Healthcare: Global Collaborative Intelligence

The study was conducted in partnership with Harvard Medical School, Taipei Medical University, and Aesop, the first federated learning model for preventing medication errors that are optimized by combining models from multiple countries.

"Our AI model for medication safety has been trained by one of the world's largest prescription databases, 1.5 billion well-coded prescriptions from the U.S. and Taiwan, to learn the association between diagnosis, medication, and complex prescribing behavior of doctors from different countries. The study has shown the model trained by federated learning (FL) achieves remarkable performance comparable to the other two models trained by individual data sets," said Jim Long, CEO, and Co-founder of Aesop Technology.

Through implementing, the system can immediately provide adaptive suggestions to help the doctor better complete the prescription whenever physicians prescribe diagnoses or medications that cannot be explained. The new model has been deployed in several hospitals and has since been expanded to the eastern and western United States to catch medication errors before they make an impact.

"Data-driven medicine demands huge and diverse medical data sets. The biggest challenge is successfully implementing data-driven applications in clinical practice, from local to global, without compromising patient safety and privacy. FL provides the solution by training algorithms collaboratively without exchanging the data itself." said Dr. Yu-Chuan Jack Li, President-elected of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and Distinguished Professor of Taipei Medical University.

The result is a breakthrough in the international transferability of medical AI. It demonstrates a way to provide practical data-driven prescribing support to improve patient safety in the U.S., even though it could be challenging to obtain data to develop these systems locally.

Referred from: BENZINGA