Lifeboat Foundation

Visits with a 24/7, co-payment-free telemedicine program established by Penn Medicine for its employees were 23% less expensive than in-person visits for the same conditions, according to a new analysis published in the American Journal of Managed Care.

Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found that the per-visit costs for the telemedicine program, called Penn Medicine OnDemand, averaged $380 while in-person encounters in primary care offices, emergency departments, or urgent care clinics during the same timeframe cost $493 to conduct, a $113 difference per patient.

“The conditions most often handled by OnDemand are low acuity—non-urgent or semi-urgent issues like respiratory infections, sinus infections, and allergies—but incredibly common, so any kind of cost reduction can make a huge difference for controlling employee benefit costs,” said the study’s lead researcher, Krisda Chaiyachati, MD, an adjunct assistant professor of Medicine at Penn Medicine, who previously served as medical director of Penn Medicine OnDemand and now is the physician lead for Value-based Care and Innovation at Verily. “This research shows the clear financial benefits when hospitals and health systems offer telemedicine services directly to their own employees.”

Enter Kim’s class, 2.74 (Bio-Inspired Robotics).

According to Kim, researchers need to understand this cognitive bias, this tendency toward anthropomorphism, in order to even begin developing robots that can help humans with their physical movements. While Kim’s research interest is in building robots that could help people, such as the elderly in an aging population with fewer young people to perform services, such advancement is not even possible without understanding biology, biomechanics, and how much we don’t understand about our own everyday movements.

“One big thing students should learn in this class is not necessarily to understand how we move our body but the fact that we don’t understand how we move,” Kim says. “One of our ultimate goals in robotics is to develop robots that help elderly people by mimicking how we use our arms and legs, but if you don’t realize how little we know about how we move, we cannot even start tackling this problem.”

Google announced the general availability (GA) of generative AI services based on Vertex AI, the Machine Learning Platform as a Service (ML PaaS) offering from Google Cloud. With the service becoming GA, enterprises and organizations could integrate the platform’s capabilities with their applications.

With this update, developers can use several new tools and models, such as the world completion model driven by PaLM 2, the Embeddings API for text, and other foundation models in the Model Garden. They can also leverage the tools available within the Generative AI Studio to fine-tune and deploy customized models. Google claims that enterprise-grade data governance, security, and safety features are also built into the Vertex AI platform. This provides confidence to customers in consuming the foundation models, customizing them with their own data, and building generative AI applications.

Customers can use the Model Garden to access and evaluate base models from Google and its partners. There are over 60 models, with pals for adding newer models in the future. Also, the Codey model for code completion, code generation, and chat, announced at the Google I/O conference in May, is now available for public preview.

As biological singularity genes grow so will leisure activities grow and blossom. Even now tricking is a show of the real human potential in movement. Just shows us that the future is much brighter everyday with new activities that push the human potential and humans will have even greater heights of human abilities when the biological singularity genes can make us soar to new abilities.

Sixteen of the best tricking athletes came to Atlanta and battled head to head for the winning title.

Continue reading “Freestyle Tricking Battle | Red Bull Throwdown 2014” »

Volvo’s new small electric SUV delivers luxury, range, and speed for a very reasonable price. Take a dive into the affordable EV that arrives in 2024.

In a breakthrough study led by Columbia researchers and involving a global team of aging experts, a discovery reveals that the nutrient taurine, which is naturally produced within our bodies and also found in various foods, has a significant role in driving the aging process in animals.

Whew. Now we don’t need new physics.

The Discovery of a Volcanically Active Exoplanet. Perhaps a bit like Mustafar in Star Wars? For more info, see my blog at Big Think — with direct link at:

Posted on Big Think.

A human brain-to-brain interaction experiment lets one man’s thoughts control another person’s movements.