Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday September 28 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are futurist Jeff Goldsmith: author & ponderer of odd juxtapositions Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard); and patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson).

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday August 31 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are the small but mighty pairing of Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard); and patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson).

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

This is the last of the classics that THCB will run to celebrate our 20th birthday. And we are finally tackling the most important of questions. Is what we call this thing one word or two? Back in 2012 Michael Millenson had the definitive answer–Matthew Holt

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

A recent contributor to this blog wondered about the correctness of “health care” versus “healthcare.” I’d like to answer that question by channeling my inner William Safire (the late, great New York Times language maven). If you’ll stick with me, I’ll also disclose why the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is not abbreviated as CMMS and reveal something you may not have known about God – linguistically, if not theologically.

The two-word rule for “health care” is followed by major news organizations (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) and medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine). Their decision seems consistent with the way most references to the word “care” are handled.

Even the editorial writers of Modern Healthcare magazine do not inveigh against errors in medical care driving up costs in acutecare hospitals and nursinghomes. They write about “medical care,” “acute care” and “nursing homes,” separating the adjectives from the nouns they modify. Some in the general media go even farther, applying the traditional rule of hyphenating adjectival phrases; hence, “health-care reform,” just as you’d write “general-interest magazine” or “old-fashioned editor.”

Most importantly of all, the Associated Press decrees that the correct usage is, “health care.” That decision is not substantive – there is absolutely no definitional difference between “health care” and “healthcare,” despite what you might read elsewhere — but stylistic. As in The Associated Press Stylebook.

The AP is a cooperative formed back in 1846 by newspapers to share reporting via a wire service. Today, the AP calls itself the backbone of global news information, serving “thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television, and online customers….On any given day, more than half the world’s population sees news from the AP.” When that news arrives in text format, its spelling is determined by the AP stylebook. Which means a few billion people see the spelling, “health care.”

A stylebook? Isn’t spelling determined by dictionaries? Perhaps, but when you’re sharing content on deadline across the world, it helps if everyone agrees to refer to, say, the Midwest, not the Mid-West, and to use other common linguistic conventions.

Stylebooks differ. The AP would say that health care is two words; the Chicago Manual of Style, popular in academia, would write that as 2 words, but agree with the premise.

So why isn’t that the end of the issue? Because conventions are not set in concrete. For example, at the time the Internet first became popular, the AP preferred the term “Web site” over “website” because the World Wide Web is a proper name. A successful lobbying campaign on behalf of the lower-case form helped persuade the AP to adopt the new spelling in its 2010 stylebook update.

When Modern Hospitals changed its name to become Modern Healthcare back in 1976, it did so in part to seem, well, modern. It hadn’t been that many years, after all, since airplanes were flown by air lines, not airlines. Then, in the business-oriented 1980s, “healthcare system” became a convenient linguistic upgrade of the dowdy “hospital” that had gobbled up ownership of doctors’ offices providing outpatient (not out-patient) care.

At the same time, a growing number of companies decided to make this expansive new word part of their proper name or, at the very least, their style sheet. For instance, HCA, founded in 1968 as Hospital Corporation of America, today describes itself as “the nation’s leading provider of healthcare services.” The Reuters news service, heavily involved in business news, now uses “healthcare” in its stories.

The 2001 Institute of Medicine report Crossing the Quality Chasm provides a snapshot of the term’s transition. The report declares, “Between the healthcare we have and the care we could have lies not just a gap, but a chasm.” The author of that ringing statement is the Committee on the Quality of Health Care in America.

However, I think a tipping point for fusing “health” and “care” was reached with the federal legislation setting up the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality at the end of 1999. AHRQ was a renamed and refocused version of the old Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, created in 1989. AHCPR, in turn, had almost been named the Agency for Health Care Research and Policy until an alert Senate staffer realized that the abbreviation would be pronounced, “ah, crap.”

Speaking of abbreviations, Tom Scully, the first administrator of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, once explained to me why it is known as CMS, not CMMS. It seems that Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson wanted an agency name with a catchy three-letter abbreviation, like FTC or CIA, to replace the old HCFA (Health Care Financing Administration). So a legal opinion was obtained from the HHS counsel that employing an ampersand to separate the words “Medicare” and “Medicaid” permitted the use of the CMS designation. Some might suspect this Solomonic ruling of caving in to a bit of pressure from above.

Which brings us to God. Some years back, the AP decided that while “God” would remain capitalized (the pope was not similarly blessed), the second reference would be “his,” not “His.” As influential as the AP might be in this world, those concerned with a Higher Authority still write about God as if He were something more than an ordinary man.

I keep waiting for the AP editor who made that decision to be struck down with lightning by the Deity. But, on the other hand, She may have a sense of humor.

Michael Millenson is a Highland Park, IL-based consultant, a visiting scholar at the Kellogg School of Management and the author of “Demanding Medical Excellence: Doctors and Accountability in the Information Age”.

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday August 17 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are futurist Jeff Goldsmith: medical historian Mike Magee (@drmikemagee); policy expert consultant/author Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1); and patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson);

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

In 1767, as American colonists’ protestations against “taxation without representation” intensified, a Boston publisher reprinted a book by a British doctor seemingly tailor-made for the growing spirit of independence.

Talk about “democratization of health care information,” “participatory medicine” and “health citizens”! Every Man His Own Physician, by Dr. John Theobald, bore an impressive subtitle: Being a complete collection of efficacious and approved remedies for every disease incident to the human body. With plain instructions for their common use. Necessary to be had in all families, particularly those residing in the country.

Theobald’s fellow physicians no doubt winced at the quotation from the 2^nd-century Greek philosopher Celsus featured prominently on the book’s cover page.

“Diseases are cured, not by eloquence,” the quote read, “but by remedies, so that if a person without any learning be well acquainted with those remedies that have been discovered by practice, he will be a much greater physician than one who has cultivated his talent in speaking without experience.”

Translation: You’re better off reading my book than consulting inferior doctors.

To celebrate Americans’ independent spirit, I decided to compare a few of Dr. Theobald’s recommendations to those of his 21st-century equivalent, “Dr. Google.” Like Dr. Google, which receives a mind-boggling 70,000 health care search queries every minute, Dr. Theobald also provides citations for his advice which, he assures readers, is based on “the writings of the most eminent physicians.”

At times, the two advice-givers sync across the centuries. “Colds may be cured by lying much in bed, by drinking plentifully of warm sack whey, with a few drops of spirits of hartshorn in it,” writes Dr. Theobald, citing a “Dr. Cheyne.” Dr. Google’s expert, the Mayo Clinic Staff, proffers much the same prescription: Stay hydrated, perhaps using warm lemon water with honey in it, and try to rest. Personally, I think “sack whey” – sherry plus weak milk and sugar – sounds like more fun.

Dr. Google sensibly advises treating a sprain by applying ice to it. In Dr. Theobald’s time, when the absence of reliable refrigeration meant ice wasn’t always available, a remedy attributed to “Dr. Sharp” was both more complex and fragrant: “After fomenting with warm vinegar, apply a poultice of stale beer grounds, and oatmeal, with a little hog’s lard, every day till the pain and swelling are abated.”

In Every Man His Own Physician herbal remedies abound. To remove warts, for example, Dr. Theobald, citing “Dr. Heister,” recommends “rubbing them with the juice of celandine.” Surprisingly, Dr. Google agrees. A search for “celandine” and “warts” quickly unearths an article in a public health journal concluding that celandine can, indeed, cause viral dermal warts to disappear.

Even more unexpected is what at first glance seems sure to be a spurious claim about cancer. Dr. Theobald writes that “Dr. Storck of Vienna greatly recommends the use of hemlock in cancerous cases and gives several surprising instances of its success.” Shockingly, Dr. Google essentially agrees, revealing that ground hemlock contains paclitaxel (Taxol), used as a chemotherapy drug.

But just like excessive Googling can be hazardous to your health, so, too, can Every Man His Own Physician. “Head-Ach”? Attributed to “Dr. Haller,” we get this remedy: “Apply leeches behind the ears and take twenty drops of castor in a glass of water frequently.” Aspirin, anyone?

Similarly, while acknowledging that diabetes cannot always be cured, Dr. Theobald’s prescription, taken from “Dr. Mead,” gives pause: “Take of the shavings of sassafras two ounces, guaiacum one ounce, licorice root three ounces, coriander seeds, bruised, six drachms; infuse them cold in one gallon of lime-water for two or three days, the dose is half a pint three or four times in a day.”

As recounted by historian Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, one consequence of the nation’s revolutionary success was a growing sense that ordinary people could not trust elites. In an analysis that sounds uncomfortably familiar, Wood writes that assaults on elite opinion and the celebration of “common ordinary judgment” resulted in a dispersion of authority in which knowledge and truth “had to become more fluid and changeable.”

While we should certainly celebrate the type of democratization of medical information symbolized by Every Man His Own Physician (which would be reprinted for decades), as well as the online information outlets available today, availability does not guarantee reliability. As with democracy itself, where the people and their leaders need to see themselves in a partnership, a trusting doctor-patient partnership remains crucial.

Michael L. Millenson is president of Health Quality Advisors LLC,an author and a visiting scholar at the Kellogg School of Management. He can be reached at michael@healthqualityadvisors.

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday June 29 at 1PM PT 4PM ET are futurist Jeff Goldsmith: medical historian Mike Magee (@drmikemagee); and patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson).

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday June 15 were double trouble futurists Jeff Goldsmith and Ian Morrison (@seccurve); patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson); Suntra Modern Recovery CEO JL Neptune (@JeanLucNeptune); and policy expert consultant/author Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1). Lots of discussion about United and their hold on the US health care system, the continued hype around AI, and where the rubber is meeting the road or not on health equity.

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

BY MICHAEL MILLENSON

If you ask ChatGPT how many procedures a certain surgeon does or a specific hospital’s infection rate, the OpenAI and Microsoft chatbot inevitably replies with some version of, “I don’t do that.”

But depending upon how you ask, Google’s Bard provides a very different response, even recommending a “consultation” with particular clinicians.

Bard told me how many knee replacement surgeries were performed by major Chicago hospitals in 2021, their infection rates and the national average. It even told me which Chicago surgeon does the most knee surgeries and his infection rate. When I asked about heart bypass surgery, Bard provided both the mortality rate for some local hospitals and the national average for comparison. While sometimes Bard cited itself as the information source, beginning its response with, “According to my knowledge,” other times it referenced well-known and respected organizations.

There was just one problem. As Google itself warns, “Bard is experimental…so double-check information in Bard’s responses.” When I followed that advice, truth began to blend indistinguishably with “truthiness” – comedian Stephen Colbert’s memorable term to describe information that’s seen as true not because of supporting facts, but because it “feels” true.

Take, for example, knee replacement surgery, also known as knee arthroplasty. It’s one of the most common surgical procedures, with nearly 1.4 million performed in 2022. When I asked Bard what surgeon does the most knee replacements in Chicago, the answer was Dr. Richard A. Berger. Berger, who’s affiliated with both Rush University Medical Center and Midwest Orthopaedics, has done over 10,000 knee replacements, Bard informed me. In response to a subsequent question, Bard added that Berger’s infection rate was 0.5 percent, significantly lower than the national average of 1.2 percent. That low rate was attributed to factors such as “Dr. Berger’s experience, his use of minimally invasive techniques and his meticulous attention to detail.”

With chatbots, every word in a query counts. When I changed the question slightly and asked, “What surgeon does the most knee replacements in the Chicago area?”, Bard no longer provided one name. Instead, it listed seven “of the most well-known surgeons” – Berger among them – who “are all highly skilled and experienced,” “have a long track record of success,” and “are known for their compassionate care.”

As with ChatGPT, Bard’s answers to any medically related question include abundant cautions, such as “no surgery is without risk.” Yet Bard still stated flatly, “If you are considering knee replacement surgery, I would recommend that you schedule a consultation with one of these [seven] surgeons.”

ChatGPT shies away from words like “recommend,” but it confidently reassured me that the list it provided of four “top knee replacement surgeons” was based “on their expertise and patient outcomes.”

These endorsements, while a stark departure from the search engine list of websites to which we’ve become accustomed, are more understandable if you think about how “generative artificial intelligence” chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard are trained.

Bard and ChatGPT both rely on information from the Internet, where individual orthopedic surgeons often have a high profile. Specifics about Berger’s practice, for instance, can be found on his website and in numerous media profiles, including a Chicago Tribune story relating how athletes and celebrities from all over the country come to him for care. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know the extent to which the chatbots are reflecting what the surgeons say about themselves versus data from objective sources.

Courtney Kelly, director of business development for Berger, confirmed the “over 10,000” surgical volume figure, while noting that the practice placed that number on its website several years ago. Kelly added that the practice only publicized an overall complication rate of less than one percent, but she confirmed that about half that figure represented infections.

While the infection data for Berger may be accurate, its cited source, the Joint Commission, was not. A spokesperson for the Joint Commission, which surveys hospitals for overall quality, said it doesn’t collect individual surgeon infection rates. Similarly, a Berger colleague at Midwest Orthopaedics who was also said to have a 0.5 percent infection rate had that number attributed by Bard to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Not only couldn’t I find any CMS data on individual clinician infection rates or volumes, the CMS Hospital Compare site provides the hospital infection rate only for a combination of knee and hip surgeries.

In response to another question I asked Bard, it gave the breast cancer mortality rates at some of Chicago’s largest hospitals, albeit carefully noting that the numbers were only averages for that condition. But once again its attribution, this time to the American Hospital Association, didn’t stand up. The trade group said it does not collect that type of data.

Digging deeper into life-and-death procedures, I asked Bard about the mortality rate for heart valve surgery at a couple of local hospitals. The prompt reply was impressively sophisticated. Bard provided hospital risk-adjusted mortality rates for an isolated aortic valve replacement and for mitral valve replacement, along with a national average for each (2.9 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively). The numbers were attributed to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), whose data is seen as the “gold standard” for this kind of information.

For comparison purposes I asked ChatGPT about those same national mortality rates. Like Bard, ChatGPT cited STS, but its death rate for an isolated aortic valve replacement procedure was much lower (1.6 percent), while the mitral valve death rate figure was about the same (2.7 percent).

Before dismissing Bard’s descriptions of the care quality of individual hospitals and doctors as hopelessly flawed, consider the alternatives. The advertisements in which hospitals proclaim their clinical prowess may not quite qualify as “truthiness,” but they certainly select carefully which truths to tell. Meanwhile, I know of no publicly available hospital or physician data that providers don’t protest is unreliable, whether from U.S. News & World Report or the Leapfrog Group (which Bard and ChatGPT also cite) or the federal Medicare program.

(STS data is an exception with an asterisk, since its performance information on individual clinicians or groups is only publicly available if the affected clinicians choose to release it.)

What Bard and ChatGPT are providing is a powerful conversation starter, one that paves the way for doctors and patients to candidly discuss the safety and quality of care and, inevitably, for that discussion to expand into a broader societal one. The chatbots are providing information that, as it improves, could finally trigger a public demand for consistent medical excellence, as I put it in book examining the budding information age 25 years ago.

I asked John Morrow, a veteran (human) data analyst and the founder of Franklin Trust Ratings how he would advise providers to respond.

“It’s time for the industry to standardize and disclose,” said Morrow. “Otherwise, things like ChatGPT and Bard are going to create pandemonium and lessen trust.”

As author, activist, consultant and a former Pulitzer-nominated journalist, Michael Millenson focuses professionally on making health care safer, better and more patient-centered.

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

Live and in-person once again, HIMSS 2023 attracted more than 30,000 attendees to the exhibit halls and meeting rooms of Chicago’s sprawling McCormick Place. Although no one person could possibly absorb it all, below are some harbingers of the health care future that stayed with me.

Size Doesn’t Count. Exploring the remote byways of the cavernous exhibition areas, it became clear that it’s not the size of the booth, but the impact of the product that counts. At a pavilion highlighting Turkish companies, for instance, R. Serdar Gemici stood in front of a kiosk that might fit into a walk-in closet.

The display listed an impressive roster of clients for a chronic care management platform, prompting me to stop to learn more. The smartphone user interface for “Albert,” the namesake product of Albert Health, the company Gemici co-founded and leads, immediately impressed me as one of the simplest and yet comprehensive I’d seen. (Indeed, the company website boasts of the “world’s simplest health assistant.”) Albert Health has begun working with England’s National Health Service and large pharmaceutical companies, though I found myself wondering how the name resonates in the Turkish- and Arabic-language versions the company touts.

Another far-off cluster of kiosks hosted a company called Dedalus, which promised an interoperable, whole-person care platform. A demo included a graphic showing a breadth of holistic personalization and collaboration capabilities I’d not seen elsewhere. It turns out that while Dedalus only entered the U.S. market in late 2021 – which explains why, as the nice woman showing me the presentation noted, Americans mostly haven’t heard of it – Italy-based Dedalus Global’s software and services are used in more than 40 countries by over 6,700 health care organizations.

Oh.

Size Does Count. When I sat down with Dr. Jackie Gerhart, Epic’s vice president of informatics, and Seth Hain, senior vice president of research and development, at their very large and very busy booth, I had in mind Epic CEO and founder Judy Faulkner’s reputation as a tough, my-way-or-the-highway businesswoman. But Gerhart and Hain were so nice and down-to-earth, earnestly extolling the company’s culture of collaboration, that it was initially as disorienting as watching Elon Musk help a little old lady across the street. (A colleague assured me that, yes, this is actually the way many Epic employees act.)

Nonetheless, Epic remains a 500-pound gorilla, with a third of the hospital electronic health record (EHR) market. Its Cosmos platform, containing records from over 184 million patients and 7 billion encounters in all 50 states, is the largest integrated database of clinical information in the nation. The company is currently working to integrate Microsoft’s ChatGPT generative AI with Cosmos’s data visualization capabilities, which presents fascinating possibilities.

Ask around, though, and you’ll discover that not all hospitals are comfortable with Epic’s control of information. There will certainly be competitors, perhaps including the Mayo Clinic Platform.

A colleague related that many years ago big tech firms marketing their own EHRs warned prospective customers that choosing Epic meant relying on a company that might not be around very long. Instead, those competitors aren’t. Underestimating all those nice (and perhaps some not-so-nice) people at Epic would be a serious mistake.

Who’s Your Daddy? So, DeloreanAI, you appear to be just one more small vendor promising to apply predictive analytics to help prevent and treat chronic disease. And you, Medeanalytics, at a neighboring kiosk in the Innovation Pavilion, how do you expect your revenue cycle management product to compete with the big guys? Wait – you’ve both got Optum (2022 revenues: $183 billion) “white labeling” your technology? Never mind.

Digital Health Has a Johnny Appleseed. “Johnny Appleseed” (the nickname of John Chapman) famously planted apple trees across the American frontier. Israel’s Eyal Zimlichman, a physician and researcher, is doing much the same globally with ARC (Accelerate, Redesign and Collaborate), the center for digital innovation he launched at Sheba Medical Center in 2019. ARC brings together top-tier medical centers (like Mayo and Mass General Brigham in the U.S.), researchers, start-ups, investors and established companies from 16 different countries to plant the seeds that allow health system redesign to grow and flourish. ARC affiliates have been responsible for a total of 179 patents and 221 trade licenses.

Zimlichman, who heads ARC and also oversees Sheba’s innovation and transformation efforts, presented to a HIMSS forum on quality and patient safety, topics close to my heart. (Disclosure: In 2013, I co-authored an academic paper with Zimlichman.) He spoke about artificial intelligence (AI) advances enabling real-time clinical decision support during surgery; sensitive alerts to prevent medication errors and falls; and reducing deaths from intracranial surgery.

ARC wants to establish a “Future of Health” community that will “impact the course of global health through shared belief and collective wisdom,” Zimlichman said.

As the Yiddish expression goes, “From your mouth to God’s ears.”

People to Watch (1). Jean Drouin, MD, MBA, founder and chief executive officer of Clarify Health, volunteered to help out in Nelson Mandela’s South Africa straight out of college and, while still in his early 30s, helped redesign England’s National Health Service as head of strategy for NHS London. As befits that background, Drouin believes that building and automating effective processes provides the foundation for improving health care outcomes. A quality improvement culture, he told me, “always emanates from having strong underlying processes and systems that enable them.” To help organizations operating in a value-based care environment make that happen, Clarify’s platform provides access to data covering over 4 billion patient care journeys.

People to Watch (2). The National Committee for Quality Assurance, better known as just NCQA, is an independent nonprofit firmly ensconced in the Washington policy community. But Dr. Bradley Ryan, NCQA’s first chief product officer, comes from a very different world, having worked for McKinsey and IMS Health and co-founded a health tech company. Ryan is frustrated by the persistence of poorly collected, non-standardized health data that obstruct efforts to make care better. (Many others are, too, as these experts recently vented.) “I’m passionate about the way we evolve quality improvement,” Ryan told me. His goal is to reinvent NCQA’s plan and provider measurement for the digital age in order to improve data accuracy, trustworthiness and usability.

People to Watch (3). Vibhor Gupta, a veteran oncologist and entrepreneur, presented at the Microsoft booth about his newest company, Pangaea. Pangaea applies AI to the unstructured data in physician notes in order to identify undiagnosed or miscoded patients having one or more of 4,000 “hard-to-diagnose” conditions, including complications of cancer. “More than 50 percent of codes are incorrect,” avers Gupta, before diving into why Pangaea’s unsupervised AI can dig out data conventional natural language processing cannot. The easy path, of course, is finding patients for drug company clinical trials, but when I speak to Gupta afterwards, it’s clear he’s equally committed to improving everyday patient care.

People to Watch (4). Before there was an Intermountain Healthcare, a physician informatics pioneer named Homer Warner developed digital patient monitoring systems at what was then Latter-Day Saints Hospital way back in the 1960s. I’d chronicled Warner’s achievements in my book, so naturally I was interested in talking to Mona Baset, Intermountain’s vice president of digital services. Baset came to health care from financial services, where a consumer orientation is imperative. “We need to get Intermountain to the point where it’s an amazing experience, and the experience is the advantage,” she told me. “Amazing” health care experiences? I’m skeptical, but perhaps with Baset we can bank on it.

People I Could Barely Watch. A HIMSS plenary session entitled, “Healthcare Disruption: Accelerated Opportunities for Care Delivery Alternatives” should have been an episode of the TV game show, To Tell the Truth, in which you have to guess which contestant’s story is true.

Was the real disrupter Andrea Walsh, chief executive officer of Minnesota-based HealthPartners, who declared, “Our commitment is to bring care to people where they are at”? Maybe.

Was the disrupter Deborah Di Sanzo, president of Best Buy Health? Trick question! Only if you think “care delivery” means physically delivering and setting up medical equipment. “We can make a difference in the plumbing role,” Di Sanzo insisted, while perhaps thinking to herself, “I used to run a division of IBM!”

Or was the disrupter Tim Barry, chairman and founder of VillageMD, who described the significant changes to the delivery of primary care his company has already implemented, as well as plans to spread its model to multi-specialty care?

“One of the things we have to acknowledge as a health care system,” he said, “is that not everyone can win.”

You mean disruption is disruptive? Barry’s the one telling the truth!

Technology Like Mom? I was due to a meet a colleague for lunch at a restaurant a few blocks from McCormick Place, but I wasn’t sure which exit in the massive complex would point me in the right direction. As I stood on the third floor of the central concourse, Google Maps had the answer: “Go down the staircase,” it directed me, with a map showing that I would then go out the door, cross the street and turn right.

Google can see that I’m standing next to a staircase inside a building?! Yup.

Someday soon there could be an app whose detailed spoken directions include adding that I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute to leave for lunch, not to mention lamenting that I wasn’t dressed warmly enough given the temperature outside.

This, of course, would be MomGPT.

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday March 30th at 1PM PT 4PM ET are Olympic rower for 2 countries and DiME CEO Jennifer Goldsack, (@GoldsackJen); patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson); benefits expert Jennifer Benz (@Jenbenz); and our special guest health economist & Chief Research Officer at Trilliant Health, Sanjula Jain @sanjula_jain.

If you’d rather listen, the “audio only” version is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels — Matthew Holt