Tag: health equity

Supporting innovations in cancer treatment and prevention for our nation’s most vulnerable

Feb 13, 2024

By KAT MCDAVITT and LESLIE KIRK

Innsena has made a $100,000 contribution to CancerX , making Innsena the public-private partnership’s first Impact Supporter.

Why? There are few conditions in which the disparity in innovations benefiting underserved communities is more apparent than in the treatment and prevention of cancer.

Patients without insurance are more likely to present with more advanced cancers, and the cancer death rate for people of color is significantly higher than for white patients. More people die from cancer in rural communities than in urban settings.

In CancerX, we found a community of partners taking on hard problems to equitably deploy innovative solutions that can reduce the risk of, and cure cancer for all patients. Even—and especially—when financial incentives do not otherwise exist for the private sector to solve those problems.

Innsena is committed to improving equitable access, treatment and outcomes for the most vulnerable among us. We focus on supporting improved outcomes for Medicaid members and underserved communities. The disparity caused by the absence of incentives and funding for innovators to enter the Medicaid market can’t be overstated.

But innovators, and the investors who fund these pioneers, are exactly what our industry needs to change health outcomes in underserved communities.

We decided that, if the incentives to innovate in cancer care for vulnerable populations don’t exist, then we would create them. Our financial commitment to CancerX is a step forward that we hope will start a broader movement.

Our team’s $100,000 contribution will help the team at CancerX to accelerate programs underway—including its effort to improve equity and reduce financial toxicity in cancer care and research—and to more rapidly launch new initiatives.

We’re particularly proud to support the public-private partnership’s efforts to improve equity and reduce financial toxicity. Cancer deaths are inequitably distributed across the United States—and those patients who do survive are 2.5 times more likely to declare bankruptcy than those without disease.

Likewise, a key component of CancerX is a start-up accelerator for companies bringing more digital solutions for the treatment and prevention of cancer, with special attention given to organizations that focus on disadvantaged populations. We’re honored to support the start-ups selected for the first CancerX accelerator cohort with both mentorship and financial support.

And to that end, as individuals, we’ve gone one step further to support start-ups focused on preventing and curing cancer for vulnerable patients. We’ve also partnered with Ben Freeberg and his team at Oncology Ventures to ensure that digital health start-ups innovating for all patients in the oncology space have funding available to advance their causes.

Innsena is joining more than 150 organizations already working together to make a difference for all patients in the prevention and treatment of cancer. CancerX is co-hosted by the Moffitt Cancer Center and Digital Medicine Society, alongside the US Department of Health and Human Services Office for the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health.

We need more innovators working to improve care for the underserved. Join us in supporting CancerX. As a community we’ll make a difference.

Kat McDavitt is President and founding partner of Innsena. Leslie Kirk is CEO and managing partner of Innsena.

SPM-Creative Learning Exchange, Portland, OR (& virtual), July 16

May 23, 2023

As you may know I am on the board of the Society for Participatory Medicine (SPM) which is trying to promote a new partnership between patients and the health care system.

On June 16 at 8am-1pm PST SPM is hosting a Creative Learning Exchange in Portland, OR at OHSU. The topic is Advancing Health Equity Through Participatory Medicine and there’ll be patients, clinicians and other leading crucial discussions about how to move health equity forward.

If you are in Portland please come join the meeting and if you can’t get there, it will be broadcast online. (There’s a nominal cost for tickets but no one will be turned away if they can’t afford it) Click here to find out more.–Matthew Holt

Future of Big Data in Health? LexisNexis® Risk Solutions Says Next-Gen Tokenization & Health Equity

Oct 25, 2022

BY JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Data-juggernaut LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is making a big data play in healthcare, launching a new capability that allows for unprecedented accuracy in the kind of de-identified data that payers, providers, and pharma are clamoring to use for everything from cutting admin expenses to improving patient outcomes and health equity.

Jeff Diamond, President & General Manager of The Health Care Business of LexisNexis® Risk Solutions and Andrea Green, Director of Healthcare Strategy, SDoH, drop in for a chat about all things VERY big data, including this concept of “next-gen tokenization” which leverages LexisNexis’s massive amount of consumer data as a way to connect data “personas” to create a much more accurate, actionable, and longitudinal view of a patient.

The thing to understand is just how much health data LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is working with and who they are working with it for: 90% of commercial payers in the US; 8 of the Top 10 pharma manufacturers; 10 of the Top 10 retail pharmacies; and hundreds of hospital systems.

So, how is this data “turned” into insightful and actionable information that appeals to this top-tier clientele? Jeff and Andrea walk through use case after use case that demonstrate the ‘business of healthcare’ applications of the LexisNexis data processing platform (think patient safety, risk stratification, claims analytics, provider directory, etc.) with special emphasis on how their new analytics suite, focused on Social Determinants of Health data, is helping with such clinical initiatives as improving diversity in clinical trials and providing predictive insights about patients who might need mental healthcare support. The data comes to life in this one. Watch now!

Medicare Advantage Is a Superior Program (Part two)

Jan 18, 2022

By GEORGE HALVORSON

Former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson has written on THCB on and off over the years, most notably with his proposal for Medicare Advantage for All post-COVID. He wrote a piece in Health Affairs last week arguing with the stance of Medicare Advantage of Don Berwick and Rick Gilfillan (Here’s their piece pt1, pt2). Here’s a longer exposition of his argument. We published part one last week so please read that first. This is part two – Matthew Holt

Medicare Advantage is better for the underserved

The African American and Hispanic communities who were particularly hard hit by those conditions and by the Covid death rates have been enrolling in significant numbers in Medicare Advantage plans.

The sets of people who were most damaged by Covid have chosen in disproportional numbers to be Medicare Advantage members. Currently 51 percent of the African Americans on Medicare are in Medicare Advantage plans and more than 60 percent of the Hispanic Medicare members will be on Medicare Advantage this year.

That disproportionate enrollment in Medicare Advantage surprises some people, but it really should not surprise anyone because the Plans have made special, direct, and inclusive efforts to be attractive to people with those sets of care needs and have delivered better care and service than many of the new enrollees have ever had in their lives.

The Medicare Advantage plans have language proficiency support competencies, and language requirements and capabilities that clearly do not exist anywhere for fee-for-service Medicare care sites. A combination of team care, language proficiency, and significantly lower direct health care costs for each member has encouraged that pattern of enrollment as well.

The $1600 savings per person has been a highly relevant factor as more than twice as many of the lowest income Medicare members — people who make less than $30,000 a year — are now enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans.

Medicare Advantage’s critics tend to explicitly avoid discussing those enrollment patterns, and some of the most basic critics actually shamelessly say, with what must be at least unconscious malicious intent in various publications and settings, that the Medicare Advantage demographics for both ethnicity and income levels are a clone for standard Medicare membership. Those critics have said that there is nothing for us to learn or see from any enrollment patterns or care practices based on those sets of issues.

Many people who discuss Medicare Advantage in media and policy settings generally do not focus on or even mention the people in our population who most need Medicare Advantage — the 4 million people who are now enrolled in the Special Needs Plans.

Special Needs Plans for Dual Eligibles

The Special Needs Plans take care of low-income people who have problematic levels of care needs and who very much need better care.

Selfish Much?

Sep 7, 2021

By KIM BELLARD

In a week where we’ve seen the bungled Afghan withdrawal, had Texas show us its contempt for all sorts of rights, watched wildfires ravage the west and Ida wreak havoc on a third of the country, and, of course, witnessed COVID-19 continue its resurgence, I managed to find an article that depressed me further. Thank you, Aaron Carroll.

Dr. Carroll – pediatrician, long-time contributor to The New York Times, and now Chief Health Officer of I.U. Health — wrote a startling piece in The Atlantic: We’ve Never Protected the Vulnerable. He looks at the resistance to public health measures like masking and wonders: why is anyone surprised?

Some of his pithier observations:

“Much of the public is refusing. That’s not new, though. In America, it’s always been like this.”
“COVID-19 has exposed these gaps in our public solidarity, not caused them.”
“America has never cared enough. People just didn’t notice before.”

Wow. What was that about Texas again?

Some of Dr. Carroll’s examples include our normally lackadaisical approach to influenza, our failure to recognize the dangers we often pose to immunocompromised people, our paltry family and sick leave policies, and our vast unpaid care economy. He could have just as well pointed to our (purposefully) broken unemployment system or the stubborn resistance to Medicaid expansion in 12 states (Texas again!), but you probably get the point.

Everyone likes to complain about our healthcare system – and with good reason – but it is not an abyss we somehow stumbled into. It’s a hole we’ve dug for ourselves, over time. We may not like our healthcare system but it is the system we’ve created, or, perhaps, allowed.

Health insurance was once largely community-rated, spreading the risk equally across everyone to protect the burden on the sickest, until some insurers (and some groups) figured out that premiums could be cheaper without it. Use of preexisting conditions and medical underwriting also served to protect the less vulnerable, until ACA outlawed those practices.

Bias, Before First Breath

Jun 2, 2021• 5

How structural racism and implicit bias impact America’s babies, even prior to birth

By ELLIE STANG

Becoming a new mother in America is more dangerous for some mothers than it should be. Each year, 700 women die in childbirth or from pregnancy-related causes in the United States, the highest number of any developed nation.

Health inequities in America mean that overwhelmingly, Black women and their infants are the ones impacted: Black mothers are 243% more likely to die from pregnancy than white ones. These discrepancies are wide ranging: American Indian and Alaska Native women are also 2x more likely to experience an adverse outcome as compared to their white counterparts. Too many of our mothers are dying of preventable causes. The CDC estimates that 70% of maternal deaths are avoidable – which helps underscore the urgent need to create tangible change.

Recent forces have helped shine a long overdue spotlight on the Black maternal mortality crisis in America. In April, the Biden Administration released a proclamation during Black Maternal Health Week, and planned legislative changes to address implicit bias in healthcare and apply funding where it is truly needed. Congress is fielding the “Momnibus” bill, which would fund grassroots organizations at the community level, actively establish bias training programs, and fill gaps created by social determinants of health (SDOH). Late last year, the HHS released an action plan to reduce maternal mortality and adverse outcomes by 50% in five years.

It is heartening to see action finally being taken: our mothers deserve more. At the same time, while we champion standardized and equal access to care for all of our mothers, we cannot overlook the newest cry in the room: the infant’s. Even before drawing her first breath, a baby girl’s future will be irrevocably shaped by structural racism and socioeconomic factors way beyond her control.

That’s why, to address health inequities, we must begin with our babies. Despite great advances in NICU technology and managed healthcare, infant mortality is on the rise – and it disproportionately affects Black babies. Today, black infants are twice as likely to die as their white counterparts.

The Social Context and Vulnerabilities that Challenge Health Care in the San Joaquin Valley of California

Feb 4, 2020

By ALYA AHMAD, MD

Call it what you want, white privilege and health disparity appear to be two sides of the same coin. We used to consider ethnic or genetic variants as risk factors, prognostic to health conditions. However, the social determinants of health (SDOH) have increasingly become more relevant as causes of disease prevalence and complexity in health care.

As a pediatric hospitalist in the San Joaquin Valley region, I encounter these social determinants daily. They were particularly evident as I treated a 12-year old Hispanic boy who was admitted with a ruptured appendix and developed a complicated abscess, requiring an extensive hospitalization due to his complication. Why? Did he have the genetic propensity for this adverse outcome? Was it because he was non-compliant with his antibiotic regimen? No.

Rather, circumstances due to his social context presented major hurdles to his care. He had trouble getting to a hospital or clinic. He did not want to burden his parents—migrant workers with erratic long hours—further delaying his evaluation. And his Spanish-speaking mother never wondered why, despite surgery and drainage, he was not healing per the usual expectation.

When he was first hospitalized, his mother bounced around in silent desperation from their rural clinic to the emergency room more than 20 miles from their home and back to the clinic, only to be referred again to that same emergency room. By the time he was admitted 2 days later, he was profoundly ill. The surgeon had to be called in the middle of the night for an emergency open surgical appendectomy and drainage. Even after post-operative care, while he was on broad-spectrum intravenous antibiotics, his fevers, chills and pain persisted. To avoid worrying his mother, he continued to deny his symptoms. Five days after his operation, he required another procedure for complex abscess drainage.

“Public Charge” is a Public Health Disaster in the Making

Mar 1, 2019• 5

By PHUOC LE MD

I was born in a rural village outside of Hue, Vietnam in 1976, a year after Saigon fell and the war ended. My family of four struggled to survive in the post-war shambles, and in 1981, my mother had no choice but to flee Vietnam by boat with my older sister and myself. Through the support of the refugee resettlement program, we began our lives in the United States in 1982, wearing all of our belongings on our backs and not knowing a word of English.

Though we struggled for years to make ends meet, we sustained ourselves through public benefit programs: food stamps, Medicaid, Section 8 Housing, and cash aid. These programs were lifelines that enabled me to focus on my education, and they allowed me to be the physician and public health expert that I am today. Looking back, I firmly believe that the more we invest in the lives and livelihoods of immigrants, the more we invest in the United States, its ideals, and its future.

So, when I first learned of the current administration’s plan to make it harder for immigrants with lower socioeconomic statuses to gain permanent U.S. residence, the so-called changes to the “Public Charge” rule, I felt outraged and baffled by its short-sightedness.
Continue reading…

Make Hackathons Fair Again

Oct 17, 2018• 3

By FRED TROTTER

On Oct 19, I will begin to MC the health equity hackathon in Austin TX, which will focus on addressing healthcare disparity issues. Specifically, we will be using healthcare data to try and make an impact on those problems. Our planning team has spent months thinking about how to run a hackathon fairly, especially after the release of a report that harshly criticized how hackathons are typically run.

A Wired article written earlier this year trumpets a study called “Hackathons As Co-optation Ritual: Socializing Workers and Institutionalizing Innovation in the ‘New’ Economy,” which criticizes the corporate takeover of hackathons. Hackathons are inherently unfair to participants according to these two sociologists.

They argue that hackathons have become a way for corporations to trick legions of technologists into working for free. To a sociologist, that looks like exploitation, and it is hard to see how they are wrong.

After reading the article, I was struck by how many things about typical hackathons are backward:

Hackathons romanticize workaholism and celebrate insomnia – With hackathons typically running 24-72 hours straight, sleep is for the weak. Those who don’t sleep are seen as heroes.
Junk food is the only option – Most hackathons provide unhealthy snacks, high in fructose and low in protein. Participants are expected to fuel their unpaid work sprints with sugar and caffeine. These are frequently the only eating options available.
Healthy work patterns ensure that there are breaks. Opportunities to chat, or walk and take a break from work. And the idea of encouraging people to get up and move, let alone stretch, is unheard of at these hackathons. Hundreds of geeks, unable to shower, or leave the room, can create a pretty bad smell.
Judging is at best arbitrary, and in some cases completely rigged, with winners sometimes chosen in advance.

On occasion, I have seen harder stimulants used. Although I have never seen anyone on cocaine win, it does make for super-engaging project presentations. The presentations were not good, mind you, just engaging… In the “Holy Moses, this guy is about to present when he is clearly high AF” sense.

Advancing Health Equity in the Digital Age

Apr 20, 2014• 17

By Karen DeSalvo, MD & J. Nadine Gracia, MD

During National Minority Health Month, we acknowledge the potential for health information technology (health IT) – from electronic and personal health records to online communities to mobile applications – to transform health care and improve the health of racial and ethnic minorities.

Lack of access to quality, preventive health care, cultural and linguistic barriers, and limited patient-provider communication are factors that aggravate health disparities.

By increasing our investment in health IT policies and standards, we can help improve the quality of health care delivery and make it easier for patients and providers to communicate with each other – a huge step toward addressing the persistence of health disparities.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found in 2012 that African Americans and Latinos are more likely to own a mobile phone than whites and outpace whites in mobile app use, using their phones for a wider range of activities.

The study showed that African Americans and Latinos use their mobile phones more often to look for health information online. This has very important implications for personal management of health and interaction with the health care system.

However, barriers to widespread adoption of health IT remain.

For example, a 2014 consumer engagement report found that minorities were less likely to adopt online patient portals to access their health information than were non-Hispanic whites.