Jess and I are at Health 2.0 for Episode 95 of Health in 2 Point 00! To wrap up the conference, Jess and I talk about Jonathan Bush’s reappearance in health care on the stage at Health 2.0, with Firefly Health, with echoes of this direction in primary care by Tony Miller on the insurance panel. We talk about all the winners at Health 2.0, including the RWJF Challenge winners, Ooney with Prehab Pal and Social AI Impact Lab, and Omny who won Launch. My favorites from the conference were Indu Subaiya’s Unacceptables panel with two amazing speakers, Melissa Hanna, CEO of Mahmee & Joia Crear Perry, Founder and President of the National Birth Equity Collaborative. Catch highlights from Jess’s panel on social movements in health care as well! —Matthew Holt
Health 2.0: Why I’m (Freaking) Excited…and a (Bit) Concerned
By DAVE LEVIN, MD
The 2019 Health 2.0 conference just wrapped up after several days of compelling presentations, panels, and networking. As in the past, attendees were a cross section of the industry: providers, payers, health IT (HIT) companies, investors, and others who are passionate about innovation in healthcare.
Tech-enabled Services
One of the more refreshing themes of the conference was an emphasis on how health IT can enable the delivery of services. This is a welcome perspective as too often organizations believe that simply deploying technology will solve their problems. In my 30+ years in healthcare, I’ve never seen that work. What does work is careful attention to the iron triad of people, process, and technology. Neglect one of these and you will fall short of your goals. Framing opportunities as services that are enabled and enhanced by technology helps us avoid the common pitfall of believing “Tech = Solution” and forces us to account for process and people.
Provider Burn-out and Health IT
Several sessions focused on the impact technology is having on end-users, especially clinicians. One session featured a “reverse-pitch” where practicing physicians “pitched” to health IT experts on the challenges they face, especially with EHRs, and what they need in order to do their job and have a life. This was summed up elegantly by a physician participant as, “Please make all the stupid sh*t stop!” There’s increasing evidence that the deployment of EHRs is a major factor for clinician burnout and the impassioned pleas of the attendees resonated throughout the conference.
Other sessions explored how to we might address these problems with improvements in user-interface design, workflow, and interoperability. Demonstrations of advanced technologies like voice-driven interfaces, artificial intelligence, enhanced communications, and smart devices show where we are headed and hold out the promise of a more efficient and pleasing HIT for providers and patients.
Continue reading…Healthcare IT Has Failed Providers, but It’s Not Too Late to Redeem Ourselves
By GUS MALEZIS
It’s no secret that healthcare providers are among the hardest working of all professionals – their skill and intelligence are matched only by their creativity and commitment to their patients. But the healthcare IT sector, while it has made an effort to assist, has failed to support our providers – doctors, nurses and caregivers – with technology solutions that meet the increasing demands for better, faster, more efficient patient healthcare delivery. Instead, we have cast these providers in the dark, forcing them to function blindly, devoid of necessary information, pushing many of them to the brink of what they can withstand as professionals, pushing them to burnout.
The thing about providers is that, in addition to being hardworking, dedicated, and outstanding professionals, they are incredibly creative and innovative, willing to embrace new technologies and workflows – as long as they can add value to their patients. So how about we – the broader healthcare IT solutions vendor community – focus on delivering technologies that don’t force them to compromise care and efficiency for the sake of security, or compliance and access to data?
We need to do so to address an industry crisis. Physician burnout is on the rise, and it’s increasingly clear that overworked providers have reached the breaking point. They spend valuable minutes battling technology on virtual desktops, mobile devices, biomedical equipment, and clinical SaaS applications – typing in usernames and passwords, loading various apps, and more. All the while, standing beside a patient that is desperately seeking their assistance.
Right now, nearly one-half of all physicians (44 percent) report having feelings of burnout (according to Medscape‘s 2019 National Physicians Burnout & Depression Report). While these numbers should alarm everyone, what the healthcare IT industry should be especially concerned about is that a leading cause of this physician burnout are tools that hinder provider productivity. Instead of simplifying work for doctors and nurses, technology tools are having the opposite effect. Isn’t technology supposed to make things easier?
Continue reading…Remembering the Real Stakeholders: Patient Privacy Rights Comments to TEFCA Draft 2
By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD and DEBORAH C. PEEL, MD
TEFCA will succeed where previous national health information exchange efforts have failed only if it puts patients’ and families’, and/or their fiduciary agents, in control of health technology. This is the only path to restore trust in physicians, and to ensure accurate and complete data for treatment and research.
As physicians and patient advocates, we seek a longitudinal health record, patient-centered in the sense of being independent of any particular institution. An independent health record is also essential to enhancing competition and innovation for health services. TEFCA Draft 2 is the latest in a decade of starts down the path to an independent longitudinal health record, but it still fails to deal with the problems of consent, patient matching, and regulatory capture essential for a national-scale network. Our comments on regulatory capture will be filed separately.
We strongly support the importance in Draft 2 of Open APIs, Push, and a relationship locator service. We also strongly support expanding the scope to a wider range of data sources, beyond just HIPAA covered entities in order to better serve the real-world needs of patients and families.
However, Draft 2 still includes design practices such as the lack of patient transparency, lack of informed consent, and a core design based on involuntary surveillance. This institution-centered design barely works at a community level and leaves out many key real-world participants. It is wishful thinking to believe that it will work with expanded participant scope and on a national scale.
Health Innovation in Detroit | Paul Riser, Tech Town Detroit
By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH
What’s happening in health tech in Detroit? Paul Riser from the Tech Town accelerator says med device innovation and digital health applications are the area’s ‘sweet spots’ thanks to the area’s talent pool of auto industry engineers and R&D experts. Another unique opportunity for healthcare innovation that capitalizes on the Motor City’s proximity to Ontario? Easy access to emerging cannabis & CBD startups taking advantage of Canada’s legalization laws. Listen in to find out more…
Filmed at the Together.Health Spring Summit at HIMSS 2019 in Orlando, Florida, February 2019.
Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health.
Health Innovation in Seattle & the Pacific Northwest | Maura Little of Cambia Grove
By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH
In the Pacific Northwest, “accelerator-slash-think tank” Cambia Grove is quickly expanding as the region’s go-to healthcare innovation hub. Fully funded by Cambia Health Solutions, the organization is functioning as a neutral party to bring startups and healthcare system incumbents together to identify innovation priorities. What else is happening in health tech in Seattle, especially with a few of those famous big consumer tech companies headquartered up there? Tune in to find out!
Filmed at the Together.Health Spring Summit at HIMSS 2019 in Orlando, Florida, February 2019.
Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health.
What Keeps United Healthcare, Mayo Clinic & Medtronic Up At Night? | Shaye Mandle, Medical Alley
By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Medical Alley has been bringing together Minnesota’s biggest healthcare players for 35 years, leading collaborative conversations that include the largest health insurance company in the US, United Healthcare, and leading care innovators like Mayo Clinic and Medtronic. So what’s the word on the street…er, alley? Shaye Mandle, President & CEO of Medical Alley, dishes on the neighborhood gossip: the challenge of defining the cost of care delivery, who’s leading the conversation on innovation, and which neighbors are missed at this Minnesota party (looking at you Target and Best Buy — come on over!)
Filmed at the Together.Health Spring Summit at HIMSS 2019 in Orlando, Florida, February 2019.
Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health.
Health Innovation in Denver | Mike Biselli, Catalyst Health-Tech Innovation
By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Does the ‘serendipitous collision’ really work when it comes to advancing innovation in healthcare? Mike Biselli, Founder & President of Catalyst Health-Tech Innovation in Denver, Colorado is betting on this ‘chance.’ An ‘industry integrator’ housed in a 180,000 square-foot facility, Catalyst HTI is bringing together healthcare startups, academics, associations, patients, and providers to eliminate the disconnect between the incumbent ‘healthcare establishment’ and the innovation community trying to work with it. With so many different ecosystem players living under one roof, what new trends and ideas are emerging? Mike tells us all.
Filmed at the Together.Health Spring Summit at HIMSS 2019 in Orlando, Florida, February 2019.
Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health.
The Business Case for Social Determinants of Health
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
How can understanding the underlying social risks impacting patient populations improve health outcomes AND save health plans some serious per-member-per-month costs? You’re probably familiar with the concept of ‘Social Determinants of Health’ (SDOH) but Dr. Trenor Williams and his team at health startup Socially Determined are building a business around it.
By looking at data around what Trenor calls ‘the Significant 7’ social determinants (social isolation, food insecurity, housing, transportation, health literacy, and crime & violence) he and his team are working to help health plans intervene with their most vulnerable populations and bring down costs.
What kind of data is Socially Determined looking at? Everything from publicly available data on housing prices and air quality, to commercial datasets on buying preferences and more. Plus, with help from their health plan partners, they’re using clinical and claims data to create a complete picture of health care spend, utilization, and outcomes.
Trenor walks through some very specific examples in this interview to help illustrate his point. In one, Socially Determined was able to identify how Medicaid could better help asthmatics manage their asthma AND save a thousand dollars per affected member each month. Another project in Ohio identified that a mother with a history of housing eviction was 40% more likely to give birth to a baby requiring NICU care – opening up myriad opportunities for early intervention and the potential to positively impact the lifetime health of both mother and child.
As healthcare continues to realize its ‘data play’ – and look beyond the typical data sets available to healthcare companies – the opportunities for real and meaningful impact are tremendous. Listen in to hear more about what Trenor sees as the new opportunity for Social Determinants of Health.
Filmed at AHIP’s Consumer Experience & Digital Health Forum in December 2018.
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health.
Health Innovation in Nashville | Hayley Hovious, Nashville Health Care Council
By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Breaking down silos and talking about health tech’s biggest issues, Hayley Hovious of the Nashville Health Care Council explains how her organization is convening difficult conversations across the healthcare ecosystem by starting with the “burning platform.” What does that mean and how will addressing it head-on help improve healthcare in Nashville and beyond? Listen in to find out.
Filmed at the Together.Health Spring Summit at HIMSS 2019 in Orlando, Florida, February 2019.
Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.
Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health.
