By THCB STAFF

The Health Care Blog is working hard to bring readers more excellent content, but
the downside of that is great posts and podcasts quickly get buried. Here’s a quick list of Matthew’s top podcasts this year.

Adam Bosworth speaks about Google Health, Keas and everything By Matthew Holt

After a long period of time I’ve finally wrestled Adam Bosworth to
the floor and forced the microphone to his mouth. Adam of course is the
software guru (he’s one of the originators of XML) who went to Google
to start Google Health,
and spent much of 2007 talking about how he hoped Google Health would
change health care. He then left Google Health (several months before
it launched in March 2008) and at the very end of 2007 founded Keas. Adam has very strong views on health technology, data, PHRs.
HealthVault & Google Health, and much much more. Listen to the podcast.

Cisco’s Frances Dare talks about Congressional action on health IT By Matthew Holt

Frances Dare has seen the painfully
slow developments in many aspects of health IT since the 1990s, and has
an experienced view of what’s coming along at what pace. These days
Frances is a Director at Cisco focusing on health care, and more
recently she’s taken an active role in Cisco’s health care lobbying
efforts on Capitol Hill. Here’s the podcast.

Interview with Trizetto & Eliza By Matthew Holt

I spoke this morning with Gene Drabinksi, who runs the CareAdvance unit of Trizetto, and Alexandra Drane, President of Eliza. They recently announced a partnership that integrates the care
management aspects of Trizetto’s services with the automated phone
outreach provided by Eliza. It’s another step in the evolution of
phone-based contact and personalization in health care — which, the
careful THCB reader will have noted, I think is an important channel
for delivering and capturing health information. Of particular importance, is making useful that vast glob of data
stored within a health plan by communicating about it with the members.
It’s also always good to hear from some experienced and passionate
players, and Alex and Gene certainly fit that bill. Here’s the podcast.

Interview with Kerry Hicks, HealthGrades CEO By Matthew Holt

HealthGrades has been busy. The publicly traded, pure-play provider
ratings company is changing the way it offers ratings, it’s publishing
a book, and it’s starting to rate drugs. It’s not alone. Last week,
Consumer Reports announced it also is getting into the business of
rating hospitals and using a model developed in conjunction with the
Dartmouth crowd. Plus, there’s the CMS effort. Given the way that
ratings are evolving and HealthGrades’ partnership with Google, (more
to come on Google from me separately soon) last week was a great time
to talk with HealthGrades Chairman & CEO Kerry Hicks. (Sadly it was before the Consumer Reports announcement but fascinating nonetheless). Listen to the podcast.

Kaiser tiptoes into HealthVault & tells THCB about it By Matthew Holt

Kaiser Permanente signed an extensive pilot with Microsoft, allowing
its 159,000 employees to copy their online health records into
HealthVault. This is a big coup for Microsoft and a fairly ambitious
move for KP which to this point hasn’t said much publicly about the
data transferability it was going to provide for its members. This is a
clear signal. Assuming that the pilot is a success, presumably all
Kaiser members using My Health Manager (over 2 million now and heading
to 3 million at years end) will soon be able to move their data to
HealthVault. We are potentially seeing the first real example of mass
scale data interoperability onto a platform not connected to a health
care organization. And obviously, Google is playing in this same space
too. Kaiser gave me a pre-release interview with with Peter Neupert, Corporate VP of Microsoft Health Solutions Group and Anne-Lisa Silvestre, VP of Online Services at KP. Listen to the Podcast.

The Long Baby Boom By Matthew Holt

I had a great chat with health care futurist Jeff Goldsmith
about his new book, the Long Baby Boom. We discussed the policy and
cultural issues of retirement, Medicare, Social Security, immigration,
end-of-life care and meaning… Listen to the podcast.

Caring.com & Trusera — two Health 2.0 newbies talk By Matthew Holt

Two of the more interesting newcomers in the Health 2.0 scene
gathered around the electronic water cooler, which is THCB’s podcast
series, to talk about what they’re up to and why they are worth looking
at. Andy Cohen is CEO of Caring.com and Keith Schorsch
is CEO of Trusera. Some of you may have seen Keith at the March 2008
Health 2.0 Conference. Andy is providing content checklists and much
more for those who have sick or frail parents, which will be most of
us. Keith is providing a sophisticated place for story telling and
information exchange for those facing serious health conditions. Both
have serious ambitions. Interesting stuff — listen to the podcast.

Interview with Joseph Kvedar, Partners Center for Connected Health By Matthew Holt

Joseph Kvedar is the director of Center for Connected Health, which is part of the Partners HealthCare System’s empire in Boston (that’s Mass General and the Brigham for you old-schoolers). Joe emceed the conference I spoke at yesterday, and I stopped in for a quick chat with him this morning to get an update on the Center’s progress. We had time for a quick catch-up, in which he touches on the state of the EMR initiative at Partners, the wider role of Connected Health within Partners, and the state of their current pilots. Here’s the podcast.

Interview with Todd Cozzens, CEO of Picis By Matthew Holt

Todd Cozzens is the CEO of Massachusetts-based Picis, a
company that’s made a lot of headway in selling clinical automation
software to operating rooms, emergency departments and ICUs in American
hospitals and abroad. I got the chance to talk to him about what the
company does, the state of the health care IT business (he’s not too
worried about the big guys!), whether public money should buy IT for
health care, and who was going to win the Superbowl. To find out
everything — including whether Todd’s forecast matched the actual
score. Listen to the podcast.

Interview with Carol’s Tony Miller By Matthew Holt

One of the most interesting new Health 2.0 companies is Carol–a
Minnesota start-up that is aiming at the heart of the health care
system. It’s trying to create "care packages" that will in the end (if
it works) change how people buy care, and how providers organize to
deliver it. Ambitious and very interesting stuff. In one of the first
interviews with Carol CEO Tony Miller since their launch last
week, I asked him what the company was hoping to do and why he felt
that they had a shot at changing the world! Here’s the interview Part 1 & Part 2.

Silverlink and IncentOne By Matthew Holt

Those of you regular THCBers are by now probably bored with me going on about the problems (and opportunities) with incentivizing people in health care to do the right thing. So today Silverlink which does automated voice recognition inbound and outbound calling (FD–they’re a THCB advertiser/sponsor) announced a deal with IncentOne, which, surprise surprise, runs incentive programs. That was interesting enough to get me to bite, so I got Stan Nowak, CEO Silverlink & Michael Dermer, CEO IncentOne, on the phone for a quick podcast to explain what they’re going to do together.

TECH: Drugs & technology–Allscripts and SafeMed By Matthew Holt

To finish off the last but not least of my HIMSS interviews, here are two companies that both announced being part of the Google ecosystem on the Thursday of HIMSS. One is well known and a leader in ePrescribing and EHRs (even though it’s had a tough year on Wall Street and won the HISSIE for most likely to be acquired!) That’s Allscripts of course, and I was able to grab a quick chat with head marketing honcho Dan Michelson and talk with Jamie Stick, IS Director from one of their star clients, Central Utah Clinic in Provo, Utah. I also got the chance to meet a much smaller company called SafeMed. Rich Nossfinger & Ahmed Ghouri hasve built a very very sophisticated rules and processing engine which can interpret drug data and embed that decision support into patient specific indications. Listen to the SafeMed podcast.

TECH: Location tracking, RadarFind’s view By Matthew Holt

I’m still hot on location tracking. The idea is that if you can locate devices like pumps and wheelchairs and eventually staff and patients, hospitals should become much more operationally efficient. But this market which is now 4–5 years old has yet to take off. Part of the reason is that WiFi based systems don’t seem to work as well as advertised, and infra red or others that need new networks are too expensive. Stephen Jackson is CTO of RadarFind, which has a new system which plugs into the electrical system and uses that to move its tracking data around. It seems cheap, easy and effective. Too good to be true? Let Stephen convince you in this podcast.

Microsoft speaks health care By Matthew Holt

Microsoft has made some big strides in health this past year. You can easily argue that a) its search has outpaced Google (following the acquisition of Medstory), b) that it’s making strides in the provider market with the renamed Amalga (although that’s leading to a strategic question about whether they’re really going to be a serious player on the inpatient EMR side there) and c) finally that HealthVault legitimizes the whole PHR market. Microsoft will be at pains to tell you that HealthVault is not, though, a PHR. What is it? And what about the rest of those questions? Listen to my interview with Chris Sullivan (US Provider Solutions) and Grad Conn (HealthVault) to find out…

Interview with Newt Gingrich By Matthew Holt

The controversial and not-shy-with-his-opinions former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has been very active in recent years promoting the automation of health records and EMRs. But he’s never been a great pains to stress how that would get done from a policy perspective. I was glad to get a few minutes with him because I was able to get straight to that question. And on that topic it appears that Newt has become a fan of government mandates and directed government spending. I think you’ll find this podcast fascinating, although it’s short.

Interview with ICW’s Jeremy Coote By Matthew Holt

ICW is a German-based  consumer facing record company, that is dominant in Germany and several Eastern European countires. Over here, they decided that their skills lie in integrating data from disparate systems, very much a Health 2.0 trend (which is why they’re a Health 2.0 Conference sponsor). They also announced a major open source initiative with Agfa and Sun this morning — which will hopefully give a boost to open source in health care (which thus far has been a somewhat small and lonely community). Here’s my podcast with ICW America CEO Jeremy Coote.

American Well’s Roy Schoenberg By Matthew Holt

After I saw how Roy Schoenberg, of American Well, views the future of patient-to-physician communication, I’ve been waiting to bring it to you on THCB and the Health 2.0 Blog. And finally I was able to get him to tell me about it. Here’s the podcast.

Interview with Michael O’Neil GetWellNetwork By Matthew Holt

Michael O’Neil, the founder of GetWellNetwork, had an episode of cancer relatively early in his adult life and although he was the recipient of great medical care from one of our nation’s leading academic medical centers, he was also very upset about the quality of the in-room patient experience. The result is a new system of using the TV to improve patient care in hospitals. You can hear much more about the idea in the podcast.