What if the most useful information about heart function could be seized from the largely untapped volumes of data already generated through a range of healthcare encounters, mobile devices, and what patients themselves report, and synthesized together to provide vastly improved new diagnostic tools?

Two U-M projects, supported by NIH career development awards, will use data science and analytic methods to attempt just that, with the goal of improving the ability to detect these conditions earlier, more reliably, and less expensively.

Michigan Medicine’s Helen C. Kales, M.D., U-M professor of psychiatry, and her Program for Positive Aging (PPA) team have been at the forefront of innovation for dementia caregivers, providing reliable and well-evaluated information and training, creating support tools and studying how to enhance self-care.

“While still in its infancy, precision health is a milestone in human history,” writes Dr. Marschall Runge, U-M Medical School Dean and Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, in an article for RealClearHealth. Dr. Runge details the research methods and potential applications of precision health, which encompasses more than the field of precision medicine.

On Saturday, April 28, Michigan OPEN held its Spring Take Back Event, an opportunity for Michigan residents to safely dispose of unused prescription medicine at one of 27 locations in the state. The Spring 2018 event, co-sponsored by Precision Health, tripled the number of Take Back locations from the Fall 2017 event, and tripled the amount of opioids removed from Michigan communities; a total of over one ton of unused prescription medication was collected. A second-year U-M medical student and Michigan OPEN research assistant details her experience of the event in the Medical School’s Dose of Reality blog.

In the midst of a national crisis, mothers addicted to drugs struggle to get off them — for their babies’ sake, and their own.

The U.S. surgeon general has recommended that naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal drug, be widely available to consumers. But there are several barriers to consumers’ ability to acquire it.