GeekWire Health Tech

Amazon made headlines at the height of the pandemic for developing its own COVID-19 testing system for its workers. The same test is now available to the public for $40. You can order the test on Amazon.com, take it at home and ship it to Amazon to get your results. 

So what is it like to take Amazon’s COVID test? We decided to find out.

On this episode, GeekWire reporter Charlotte Schubert goes hands-on with Amazon&rsqu...

Amazon's move into healthcare is multifaceted, including COVID-19 testing, its Halo health band and service, cloud services for healthcare and life sciences, and even primary care for its employees.

A major motivation for the company: the sheer size of the healthcare market, and the massive problems to be solved.

"Amazon is a big company now, still with big growth ambitions, and so they need to tackle big markets," said John Rossma...

Before their son was born, Sanath Kumar Ramesh and his wife Ramya had normal first-time-parent jitters. Ramesh, who works for Amazon as a software engineering manager, was so excited to welcome his little boy. He was ready for the challenges and rewards of parenthood.

In August 2018, Raghav was born, and Ramesh’s life began changing in ways he’d never expected.

On this episode of GeekWire's Health Tech Podcast, we&rsquo...

The speed of the creation of vaccines for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 was a modern marvel. You might already have already gotten yours.

But what if vaccines and therapeutics could emerge even faster in response to the next pandemic. That’s one of the goals of a $5 million gift from Microsoft to the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine. 

On this episode, we talk wit...

Walter Isaacson has studied and written extensively about the physics and technology revolutions as the biographer of such figures as Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs. But after writing his latest book, he is convinced there's a far more momentous revolution in the works.

"The next few decades are going to be the era of biotech," he said in a GeekWire podcast conversation about his new book, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Ed...

To help people live, Mark Roth scrutinizes those who've come frighteningly close to dying. People who have been lost in the frozen wilderness in a Mount Rainier whiteout or stowed away in the wheel well of a trans-Pacific jet. People who have suffered massive heart attacks or body-crushing car wrecks.

Roth, a biochemist and cell biologist at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, sees a thread connecting these catastroph...

GeekWire editor Todd Bishop: On a cold, clear weekday morning last month, my quest to figure out whether I had COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic took me to my back porch, where a mobile phlebotomist drew my blood. It had been 10 months since I was sick, and I had already received a negative result on a standard antibody test. 

That earlier test was designed to detect the presence of the antibodies produced by the body...

A group of 14 U.S. health systems, representing tens of millions of patients across 40 states, will pool data using software developed by Seattle startup Truveta, leveraging artificial intelligence to search for medical breakthroughs and previously undetected patterns of inequity in healthcare.

The company, led by former Microsoft Windows chief Terry Myerson, gave new details about its origins and plans Thursday morning, saying it ...

GeekWire editor Todd Bishop: A few weeks ago, I started wearing a new health band. It regularly eavesdrops on my side of conversations, and it has a lot of opinions about them.

“You had three phrases that sounded annoyed, irritated or disgusted," a section in the app reported on a recent evening, recapping my daily interactions. Not only that, but I had "one phrase that sounded stubborn or condescending.”

Another featur...

To say that Dr. Brad Younggren has a unique perspective on COVID-19 would be an understatement -- because he actually has multiple perspectives.

Dr. Younggren is the chief medical officer at Seattle-based healthcare startup 98point6, which has seen interest in its on-demand virtual care service skyrocket amid the pandemic. He's also an emergency physician, and the medical director for emergency preparedness, at EvergreenHealth Medi...

Did you get really sick in the first few months of the year? Do you wonder if it was COVID-19? You're not alone. 

On the Season 5 premiere of the GeekWire Health Tech Podcast, we revisit the early days of the pandemic in an effort to figure out a mysterious illness, with help from experts at the University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and ZoomCare. We come away with a deeper understanding of the nuance...

The last time we caught up with Pillsy co-founders Jeff LeBrun and Chuks Onwuneme, three years ago, they were focused on their flagship product, a smart pill bottle that sounds an alarm if people forget to take their pills.

But that was just one example of the broader trend of remote patient monitoring -- technology that helps medical professionals keep tabs on the status of patients at home, day in and day out, not just during per...

GeekWire Health Tech Podcast subscriber, you're invited to join us at 1:30 p.m. Pacific this Thursday, May 21, for a live online discussion with Dr. Thomas Lynch, the new president of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. You may have caught my earlier conversation with Dr. Lynch on this podcast when he was just starting in the job, back in February. Of course, a lot has happened since then!

Register for the webinar here.

Sci...

In the world of diagnostic tests for COVID-19, there are two main approaches: PCR tests, which detect the presence of the live virus; and serology tests, which detect antibodies that indicate whether someone has recovered from the disease.

But could there be a third way? Two companies based in the Seattle region, Microsoft and Adaptive Biotechnologies, are working together to try to create a better diagnostic test. Joining us to ex...

We’re exploring the intersection of psychedelics, health care, mental health and even spirituality with a journalist who has been reporting on the topic for GeekWire, two entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on future legalization of psychedelics, and a physician scientist who uses a form of psychedelics as part of his practice of medicine and psychotherapy.

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SPOKANE, Wash. — If you showed up at an emergency room with a heart attack, you’d expect to receive some diagnostic tests like pulse, blood pressure and an EKG. You’d be surprised if medical professionals based their assessment only on how you looked, or how they perceived your behavior that day.

Yet, that is exactly how autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed. Dr. Georgina Lynch, an assistant professor at Washingto...

Much of the current focus in health care is rightly on the near-term challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. But beyond the current crisis, health care technology veterans are already seeing major changes that promise to become permanent realities -- from the sudden boom in telemedicine, to regulatory shifts impacting health care billing, to the use of location data to track the disease.

"Most interesting is what's going to happen whe...

On this episode: FindTheMasks.com,GetUsPPE.org and Masks 4 WA.

The coronavirus outbreak in Washington state has not yet reached the "peak" some public health officials anticipate but already ICU physicians like Mike Holmes are grappling with a dearth of necessary supplies.

Holmes described an "extreme shortage" of masks he and his colleagues at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle need to treat COVID-19 patients. "We are now reusing s...

A consortium of tech leaders — including Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Microsoft — today unveiled an AI-enabled database that’s meant to give researchers quicker, surer access to resources relating to coronavirus and how to stop it. GeekWire science editor Alan Boyle explains the initiative on this special episode of the GeekWire Health Tech Podcast. Read his story here.

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