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Tag: Diabetes care

Rumor Check with Vida Health’s CEO: Buyer Sentiment on Virtual Care, At-Risk Models, Mental Health

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF Health

To hear Vida Health’s CEO Stephanie Tilenius talk about what she’s hearing from payers, providers, and employers about at-risk value-based models, the shift to virtual care, and the growing importance of mental health services as a culture-builder for businesses forced into a part-virtual-part-in-office world, you get a sense of how her past work leading the various payments and commerce businesses of Google, eBay, and PayPal probably comes in handy. For example, the shift to virtual care, she says, is, “like the Internet in 1999…It’s happening.”

We get an update on exactly how Vida Health is making it happen themselves, and how they expect their newly expanded at-risk model will help. Vida’s always been fees-at-risk on physical outcomes related to diabetes management, hypertension, etc. BUT the mental health side of their offering (which experienced 6000% growth year-over-year during the pandemic) is now at-risk on outcomes too. With so much happening across the industry to move to value-based models, we deep-dive with Stephanie to hear what she’s hearing from her clients, including client-and-investor Centene and hear about growth in the employer market where she sees a major shift in how employers are thinking about healthcare as the new sexy job perk. “Instead of snacks or transportation or other benefits,” says Stephanie. “It’s all about healthcare.”

THCB Spotlights: Jon Bloom, Podimetrics

By MATTHEW HOLT

This is a fun conversation with Jon Bloom, the CEO of Podimetrics. It’s one of a number of competitors trying to help prevent foot ulcers among people with diabetes. Some use socks, others use insoles, but Podimetrics’ approach is to use a SmartMat which looks like a weight scale and can tell whether a patient might be developing a foot ulcer and is therefore at risk for amputation. Last week Podimetrics and Kaiser Permanente released a study that showed SmartMat and wraparound/care management service showed great success in reducing hospitalization, ER visits and foot amputations. But Bloom thinks that there’s much more to the care of very sick & underprivileged people with diabetes, and we had a great discussion about that that might look like.

Glen Tullman, Livongo, Live with Jess & Matthew

Fresh off of a press junket that included talking to Jim Cramer on CNBC & hanging with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business News, Livongo Health’s Glen Tullman stopped by THCB to talk about the impact of #covid19 (& more) on health tech. Jessica DaMassa and Matthew Holt tag-team interviewed him on Weds 8th April. (Full transcript is below the video)

Here is the transcript:

Matthew:

Hi, this is Matthew Holt from The Health Care Blog.

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New Research Finds EHRs Improve the Quality of Diabetes Care

Two years ago in an address to Congress, President Obama declared his commitment to invest in electronic health records (EHRs), saying he thought it was perhaps the best way to quickly improve the quality of American health care. Just two years later, that hunch is proving true in Cleveland, Ohio.

New EHR Research Findings:

This week, the New England Journal of Medicine released research authored by my colleagues and me at Better Health Greater Cleveland showing that physician practices that use electronic health records had significantly higher achievement and improvement in meeting standards of care and outcomes in diabetes than practices using paper records.

Though most of us assumed EHRs would have some effect on patient care, we were delighted by what’s proving to be the reality in greater Cleveland. Just consider:

Care is better: Nearly 51% of patients in EHR practices received care that met all of the endorsed standards.

  • Only 7% of patients at paper-based practices received this same level of care– a difference of 44%.
  • After accounting for differences in patient characteristics between EHR and paper-based practices, EHR patients still received 35% more of the care standards.
  • Just fewer than 16% of patients at paper-based practices had comparable results.
  • After accounting for patient differences, the adjusted gap remained 15% higher for EHR practices.

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