Just thought that I’d share this photo taken by @drjmob at the Partnership for Patients meeting today. (P4P is a safety initiative kicked off by HHS a few weeks back). Here’s patient data advocate (and BFF of Health 2.0) Regina Holiday getting to grips with CMS head Don Berwick. In fact they had remarkably similar experiences with spouses who endured terrible hospitalizations made worse by incomplete data and poor provider team communication. Here’s Regina’s story from her blog and here’s Don’s (starts on Page 20 of Escape Fire but read the whole thing if you haven’t before). It’s an unlikely couple–the pre-school teacher without a college degree and the Harvard policy wonk. But they share a human experience both are working hard to eradicate.
Lost in the Mckinsey mire
It’s a good week for Bob Kocher, a key architect of the ACA, to be leaving Mckinsey and moving into the word of venture capital. There’s lots of fuss in wonkdom about whether Mckinsey’s survey of employers was statistically correct and peer reviewed or more of a push poll. There’s lots of fuss even apparently within the firm about the validity of the estimate that 30% of employers (or is it employees) will be moved over to the exchanges. But despite ballyhoo over the Mckinsey report, because in 2009 the White House got stuck into the mantra that “if you like your insurance you can keep it” the fact that it’s good to get employers out of providing health insurance has been missed. If you have insurance from an employer that puts you in the exchange it’s a fair bet that your coverage was anyway going to move to levels worse than that mandated by the government. And the levels of coverage and behavior of the plans in the exchange which will hopefully actually be enforced–with the threat of being booted out being a motivator. And as we all know employers are the worst purchasers of health care out there and need to be got out of the game. That was what the very sensible Wyden-Bennet plan did, but as the collective stupidity of the nation’s unions and chambers of commerce is very high, we ended up with the ACA instead. Oh well, welcome to America.
It’s THCB’s Health Wonk Review
It’s Thursday morning. Fresh off the digital presses. It’s finally here. THCB (after a long absence) is back hosting Health Wonk Review….
Health IT Dept
We start close to home with huge news for THCB’s sister organization Health 2.0. (FD-Matthew Holt THCB’s Founder is also Co-Chairman at Health 2.0). And the news is that the world has gone crazy for Challenges, and that HHS and ONC (they of the billions for EMRs) are joining in, and funding a huge series of challenges for tech innovation in health care. Over at Health 2.0 News Matthew and Health 2.0 CEO Indu Subaiya explain Heath 2.0’s role in Investing In Innovation or i2.
And if that wasn’t enough, the entire health data wonk world is descending physically or virtually on Rockville, MD this morning for the Data-Palooza inspired by HHS’ CTO Todd Park. If you don’t know about Todd you should read this great profile by Simon Owens in The Atlantic. But THCB published Todd’s piece about the Data-Palooza (or more formally the Health Data Initiative Forum) a fraction ahead of the HHS blog, so we’re linking to it here. It includes information about what, who and how you can see it live–and if you care about health and tech and data, how can you miss it?
Of course, i2 and HDI is not all that’s been announced in tech this week. Inspired by Steve Jobs’ iCloud keynote this week in San Francisco, Dr. Jaan Sidorov at the Disease Management Care Blog ponders the healthcare potential of Apple’s ballyhooed mobile operating system.
Despite the boom over the past few years in new technologies and services targeting healthcare, many new services are not doing as well as the experts have predicted. (Note LOTS more HWR below the jump)
Ryan’s “vouchercare” is a false choice
Paul Krugman spends time today ripping Paul Ryan once more. Ryan’s plan is to limit government spending way off into the future (starting with people who are now 55) by giving them a flat Medicare voucher and then telling them to try it on for size in the individual insurance market. The joke is that there is a rational way to try to introduce some consumer-choice competition into Medicare. Essentially there are two alternatives to dealing with the mess that is Medicare. One–try to manage Medicare spending both with a global budget (the IPAB) and with specific restrictions on care that’s delivered that’s wasteful or unnecessary (via changes in FFS payment). That’s essentially the route the ACA goes. Two, give recipients a voucher that lets them choose between competing entities that can’t charge more than the value of the voucher and actually are mandated to compete on the correct things (outcomes, service, etc) like they do in Holland and in Alain Enthoven’s theories. That’s rational managed competition under a global budget, and the winners in that would look more like Kaiser and Group Cooperative than today’s insurers. Ryan’s idea is just to subsidize the dysfunctional private marketplace and to repeal the minor restrictions the ACA puts on health insurers while he does it–a sure-fire recipe for disaster.
There is of course another alternative. Just to let Medicare continue to spiral out of control on both costs and the quality of services it provides, and Ryan’s plan basically does that without a safety net
The NYTimes gets sensible on privacy
Today I got pretty depressed. I saw a link that 13 tech companies were funding a seminar put on by Deb Peel’s Patients Privacy Rights.org (and no I’m not helping with a link) It’s a big pity that sensible companies have been pressured into funding that organization and worse that somehow despite the gibberish Peel has spoken in so many places she’s accepted as being the main face of consumer concerns about privacy. Of course I’ve had my say about her in the past. However I was a little heartened by this Milt Freudenheim NY Times article which after decrying the “epidemic” of personal health information violations had both David Brailer and Wes Rishel basically saying, 1) yes there will be breaches, 2) no, that’s not a reason not to go electronic and c) we need a system that bans the illegitimate use of the data–rather than punishes the accidental breach. And no Deb Peel in sight. Well done NYT.
Medicare should pay less & differently
Easy to say. Rita Redberg from UCSF points out in the NY Times that Medicare pays for loads of procedures that we know are a waste of money. After all the COURAGE trial a while back showed that stents were a waste of money, and we put in more stents now than when the data were released. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise–we ignore the evidence all the time in making health care decisions. Brian Klepper in his wonderful but probably ineffective crusade to abolish the RUC shows that CMS (and therefore Medicare’s) payment methodologies are fundamentally flawed–yet we can’t fix them either. So it’s easy to say Medicare should pay less and pay differently but the political will is just not there yet. It’s lucky the Chinese are so generous.
High costs cut drug use…and not in a good way
This pretty interesting study from Avalere Health confirms what several others have shown. If you add a user fee to any medical procedure people use less of it. And of course their decision to use it less is not based on whether it’s medically necessary or not; it’s based on how much it costs and what their income is. The difference with this study is that it’s about the use of expensive cancer drugs which are increasingly oral, now that oncologists aren’t being rewarded as much for delivering them via infusion. Co-pays of $500 or more saw “abandonment” rates of 25% or more. Other factors creating increased rates of abandonment included lower income (duh) and whether the patient was covered by Medicare or commercial insurance. The study was (of course) funded by a gaggle of drug companies. They didn’t fund the (non-existent) parallel study of which of these drugs actually did the cancer patients any good, but it’s not logical that cost should be the determinant of whether a drug–especially presumably a life-saving one–gets used.
Maybe there really is mobile health after all
OK, I’m kidding–but Ford Motor Co is excited enough about its new collaboration with WellDoc that it wanted to fly me to Detroit to take a look at it. (I declined–perhaps they should move their headquarters to San Tropez). Welldoc is a pretty interesting Web & iPhone based diabetes management tool (here’s a interview video I did with CSO Chris Bergstrom last February). Now Ford has put it in the car. Apparently they believe that it’ll interact with pollen counts and automatically turn on the AC (or at least this is what the “Wheels” blogger on the NYTimes took away from the meeting). But what is interesting is that they’ve integrated the speech to text version of Ford’s Sync–which is the internal bluetooth system that allows people to talk to their car. It’s experimental, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see this in many more cars–at least by the time I buy my next new one in 2024.
Sorry, been busy!
You may have noticed that I haven’t been hanging around THCB much this week so far. Well I have a great excuse. This is my wife Amanda and our new daughter Colette. She was born on Sunday at 6 am and mom and baby are doing very well!
Where is there mHealth, really?
Health 2.0 aficionados will know that I’ve been railing against the term “mobile health” or “mHealth” for about three years. Health 2.0 is simply the next thing in health technology, and will remain so (whatever that might be). Sure we have a definition, but it’s about what’s happening not how it happens. Calling something mHealth traps it to a device, in particular a cell phone, and ignores the rest of the ecosystem of the technology and culture that the cell phone is but one part of–that’s the concept we call “unplatforms.” mHealth is like talking about cooking in the kitchen and only talking about the fridge. It’s damn important but you need a stove, a sink and more to make it all work.So if you have a mHealth strategy, as Susannah Fox might quote LOLcats, “URDoin it Rong”.
However, the place where it makes sense to talk abut mHealth is where there are only cell phones, and that place is large tranches of the rural developing world. This came up for me twice yesterday. once in a long chat with DataDyne‘s Joel Selanikio who has a really cool product called EpiSurveyor that works not via SMS but via an app on simple phones and enables very cheap and easy data collection. The other was in a high profile announcement by Johnson & Johnson (a major funder of text4baby btw), which via its Babycenter subsidiary is introducing–with USAID, State Department & the mHealth Alliance– $10m program supporting the use of cell phones for maternal health in developing countries.
So for the health worker in the rural Bangladeshi village, lets have an mHealth strategy. For those of us in the developed world, we need an overall strategy to deal with data and applications–whatever devices they are using.
