Take a look at this video from the Worrell design firm, who took part in the recent Health 2.0 confab in San Francisco. They took some insights from following ER folks around and charting their workflow into designing a better way for people to interact with the health system from their homes. At about the 4-minute mark, they start discussing what kind of home health kit/device would work, and then there is a demo of a mother consulting about her child’s flu, and getting actual testing, care, and monitoring from a live nurse remotely, all from this kit. According to the member of the design team whom I spoke with, the kit shown is a real prototype, and all the technology used is currently available.

What this says to me in the frame of my discussion of change in healthcare: If the technology is all there, why don’t we do this already? Because in a fee-for-service system there is no billing code for remote care. But: We are going to see many more healthcare organizations move into ACO-like risk contracting relationships with customers. If the healthcare organization is at risk for the costs of the care for the family in the demo, treating them in the home through such a device (one device per family) could be far cheaper, faster, and more effective than getting them to come into an urgent care clinic — cheap enough that the healthcare organization would simply buy the devices and give them to the covered families.

So as major provider organizations move into risk-contracted relationships, actual medical care that would now be taking place in the built clinical environment would be taking place in the home, supported by a live nurse monitor in a dedicated environment at the clinic. The home becomes an extension of the clinic, not only for the chronically ill and frail elderly whom we now might tend with home care, but for the well family in primary care.

Patient safety is a movement within healthcare to reduce medical errors. Medical errors are a substantial problem in the healthcare industry, with a size and scope similar to car accidents: approximately the same number of deaths per year, about the same number of serious injuries. Personally I think working in patient safety is the simplest way for a geek to make a meaningful difference.

With that in mind I would like to promote a new developer contest sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), Partnership for Patients and hosted by Health 2.0: Ensuring Safe Transitions from Hospital to Home Challenge. As the name suggests, the contest is focused on the process of handing a patient over from an in-patient environment (in the hospital) to an out-patient environment (all the care that is not in a hospital).

I will be one of the judges for this contest and there are already enough “star players” submitting as teams in the contest that I know judging is going to be hard. The first prize is $25,000. That kind of money starts looking like seed-round funding rather than just a pat on the head. That is intentional on the part of both Health 2.0 and ONC. These contests are a way for ONC to find really amazing health IT ideas and help them transition into more substantial projects, with no strings attached. If you can prove to the judges that you have the best new idea and you can flesh it out well enough to make it clear that it has a chance of working, then you can walk away with enough cash to launch that idea. But don’t take my word for it.

Of course, even just submitting in the contest is a good way to get the attention of various investors.

Generally, the coordination of care in the United States is one of the greatest weaknesses in the system. Doctors here in the U.S. are generally well educated and held to high standards. As long as a doctor has a good understanding of your situation and has taken responsibility for your care, the U.S. healthcare system provides excellent care, on par with any other national system. The problem comes when a healthcare transition occurs, where a different doctor takes responsibility without necessarily getting all the needed information and sometimes without knowing that they are “on the hook” for care. Healthcare in the United States is coordinated via fax machines, and coordination for payment, which is sometimes associated with transitions of care, frequently uses ancient EDI standards. When this coordination fails things turn into a kind of communication comedy, which really would be quite funny except that there are sometimes tragic consequences. It actually helps to have a somewhat morbid sense of humor working in healthcare, since laughter, even inappropriate and macabre laughter, can help to manage the stress and pressure inherent in this high-stakes environment.

There are new standards and technologies available for the coordination of care during transitions that ONC is specifically encouraging in this contest, including the Direct Project, which is of course a favorite of mine (I am a sometimes-developer on the project).

These new technologies allow you rethink the basic assumptions in healthcare coordination, (i.e. Direct is basically “email that doctors can use without breaking the rules”) and should enable teams without extensive health IT experience to do something truly innovative.

More importantly, Partnership for Patients and ONC are providing specific guidance about content. Partnership for Patients is an HHS program that “partners” with hospitals and clinics that have committed to proactively reduce patient error and complications. The Partnership has very specific goals: “To reduce preventable injuries in hospitals by 40 percent and cut hospital readmission by 20 percent in the next three years by targeting those return trips to the hospitals that are avoidable.” This contest is only a small part of how they hope to achieve those goals.

CMS has released a patient checklist for hospital discharge, and the contents must be incorporated into winning contest submissions. But I can tell you from previous judging experience, thinking that “incorporate” = “regurgitate” is not a winning strategy. Instead, try to get your head around the complex hospital discharge phenomenon. PubMed is your friend. In my experience doing something amazing with one of the checklist items would be a better strategy then doing something derivative with all of the items. Doing something amazing with all of the items on the checklist would obviously win, but it may be impossible to do that well. (I’d be happy to be proven wrong on this.)

My day job is with the Cautious Patient Foundation (CPF). They hire me to write software to improve the communication between doctors and patients, which is part of their mission to provide software tools that enable patients to help reduce their own medical errors by being fully engaged, educated and aware. If the healthcare system were a highway the Cautious Patient Foundation would be a defensive driving course. CPF has a grant program that they use to fund innovations that impact patient safety. Contest participants are encouraged to submit their ideas to the Cautious Patient Foundation grant process. We are interested in innovative ideas that impact patient safety generally, not just in transitions of care. So if you have a winning patient safety concept that does not fit into this particular contest, we might be interested.

Moreover, there is nothing to stop you from submitting the same technology to one of the other Health 2.0 contests or even to another joint ONC/Health 2.0 contest. Many of these contests could easily be won by an application that does something with a patient safety impact. If you have a great idea for improving healthcare with software, just wait … there will eventually be a contest asking for just the kind of innovation you have.

All of this is to say: There is some real money in these developer contests. Traditional health IT experts who feel trapped can use contests to fund and promote their non-traditional ideas. Developers who are new to the field of health IT can use the contests as a way to break in and get attention for their ideas. Great ideas that improve the healthcare system can get traction, funding and attention. If you can get your great idea working and you submit it to one of these developers contests you can get some feedback.

Maybe your idea actually sucks, but if you knew why, then you could come up with a new idea that really would be great. In any case, it is pretty hard for a developer to just lose by participating in these contests. Worst case scenario is that is ends up being a free education. Who knows? You might be an important part of another developer’s free education.

No matter what, working on software that addresses patient safety issues is one of the few ways that a software developer can impact quality of life rather than convenience of life. These contests, especially the in-person code-a-thons, are fun enough that you might even find yourself forgetting that you are changing the world.

Fred Trotter is a recognized expert in Free and Open Source medical software and security systems. He has spoken on those subjects at the SCALE DOHCS conference, LinuxWorld, DefCon and is the MC for the Open Source Health Conference. This post first appeared at O’Rielly Radar.

He is co-author of Meaningful Use and Beyond. THCB readers can buy the ebook at 50% off until the end of November by mentioning “HITBlog.”

I recently attended the flagship Health 2.0 conference for the first time.

To avoid driving in traffic, I commuted via Caltrain, and while commuting, I read Katy Butler’s book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”

Brief synopsis: healthy active well-educated older parents, father suddenly suffers serious stroke, goes on to live another six years of progressive decline and dementia, life likely extended by cardiologist putting in pacemaker, spouse and daughter struggle with caregiving and perversities of healthcare system, how can we do better? See original NYT magazine article here.

(Although the book is subtitled “The Path to a Better Way of Death,” it’s definitely not just about dying. It’s about the fuzzy years leading up to dying, which generally don’t feel like a definite end-of-life situation to the families and clinicians involved.)

The contrast between the world in the book — an eloquent description of the health, life, and healthcare struggles that most older adults eventually endure — and the world of Health 2.0’s innovations and solutions was a bit striking.

I found myself walking around the conference, thinking “How would this help a family like the Butlers? How would this help their clinicians better meet their needs?”

The answer, generally, was unclear. At Health 2.0, as at many digital health events, there is a strong bias toward things like wellness, healthy lifestyles, prevention, big data analytics, and making patients the CEOs of their own health.

Oh and, there was also the Nokia XPrize Sensing Challenge, because making biochemical diagnostics cheap, mobile, and available to consumers is not only going to change the world, but according to the XPrize rep I spoke to, it will solve many of the problems I currently have in caring for frail elders and their families.

(In truth it would be nice if I could check certain labs easily during a housecall, and the global health implications are huge. But enabling more biochemical measurements on my aging patients is not super high on my priority list.)

Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot of cool stuff to see at Health 2.0; a lot of very smart people are creating remarkable technologies and tools related to healthcare. The energy, creativity, and sense of exciting possibility at a gathering like this is truly impressive.

And yet, most of the time I couldn’t shake the feeling that all this innovation seemed unlikely to result in what our country desperately needs, which is more compassionate and effective healthcare for Medicare patients and their caregivers.

The need to improve healthcare is particularly urgent for those seniors who have 3+ chronic diseases, or have developed cognitive and/or physical disabilities, since health issues seriously impact the daily lives of these patients and their caregivers. And of course, these patients are where most of the healthcare spending goes.

So here we have a group that uses healthcare a lot, and their problems are the ones who challenge front-line clinicians, healthcare administrators, and payors the most. And we love these people: they are our parents, grandparents, and older loved ones. Many of us are even taking care of them, sometimes to the detriment of our own health.

Knock knock. Who is listening? Where is the disruptive innovation we need to help elders, caregivers, and their clinicians?

Real impediments to the Health 2.0 Revolution

“Ready to Revolutionize Healthcare?” asks the Health 2.0 homepage.

Yes, I’m ready. But we’ve got a ways to go before these revolutionary tools can actually revolutionize the average older person’s experience with healthcare.

Why? Two key reasons come to mind.

1. Most solutions not designed with the Butlers in mind. As best I can tell, most innovators don’t have the situation of the Butlers in mind when they design their healthcare solutions. They neither understand the situation from the point of view of the Butlers themselves, nor do they understand the situation from the perspective of the front-line clinicians who could and should do better.

For instance, did the Butlers need games to maintain healthy behaviors and keep Mr. Butler walking and exercising after his stroke? Did they need for all interventions to be considered in light of “Healthspan” rather than “lifespan”?

(What is Healthspan for a slowly declining person with dementia and incontinence anyway? We geriatricians think of improving function, wellbeing, quality of life. And most importantly, of prioritizing the issues because you can’t possibly address them all so go with a combination of what matters most to the patient and what seems most feasible.)

And did the clinicians involved need predictive analytics to help them identify when Mr. Butler was at risk getting worse on some axis that the population health management gurus are worried about?

Which of these innovations will help patients, caregivers, and front-line clinicians establish an effective collaboration on mutually agreed-upon goals, and tailor healthcare to the patient’s situation and needs? How to convert population level processes regarding outcomes and cost-containment into real improvements in the healthcare experience of most elderly patients?

Finally, Medicare is the 600 pound gorilla in healthcare, both as a payer and as what most healthcare providers spend most of their time serving. You want to change healthcare? Change how we care for seniors. (And I don’t mean the healthy ones over-represented at AARP.)

2. Too many solutions to choose from. If you are a patient or caregiver, and decide to consider a new approach to weight loss, or timed toileting, or tracking a symptom: the number of approaches you could try – whether tech enhanced or no — is overwhelming. Especially if you research online.

If you are an individual clinician — or a smaller practice — and would like to consider a new and improved way of doing things: the choices are overwhelming. (A lot of primary care is provided by small practices; there’s obviously a trend towards consolidating but also some backlash.)

Now of course, big organizations have more resources with which to choose solutions for their providers, and big payers can choose solutions for individual patients and families. But unfortunately, when tools aren’t chosen by those who use them, users tend to end up with crummy user experiences.

There is probably an innovative way to work around this and make it possible for end-users to more easily find tools that are a good fit for them. But until those innovations become widely available, I think many in the trenches — patients, caregivers, and clinicians — may find that supposedly helpful innovations are actually not so helpful…a frustrating state of affairs when one is overwhelmed with the challenges of helping an aging adult in declining health.

Islands of relevance at Health 2.0

At an event as big as Health 2.0, there are of course pockets of activity relevant to the care of geriatric patients. There was a session on tools to help family caregivers (which covered two care coordination tools and two sensor/alert type tools) and another on nifty tech to help patients take their meds.

And of course, there was the justifiably popular Unmentionables panel, led by Eliza Corporation’s Alex Drane, which highlighted pervasive issues that affect health but that we tend to not talk about much. These include financial stress, relationship stress, and caregiving. (Good recap of the panel at Healthpopuli.com, and I LOVE that caregiving is high up on this list.)

Words to keep in mind

Alex reminded the Health 2.0 crowd that when it comes to helping with health, we must meet people where they are at. “Health is life; care, completely; empathy absolutely.”

As for me, I found myself thinking of a quote from Larry Weed and “Medicine in Denial.”

“The religion of medicine is not feats of intellect. The religion of medicine is helping to solve the problems of patients, and the compassion involved in the very act of care.”

Similarly, for those who evangelize digital health, and believe that new technologies will revolutionize healthcare, I would say:

The religion of healthcare should not be feats of technology. The religion of healthcare should be to help solve the problems of patients and caregivers, and the compassion involved in the very act of care.

And I’d also recommend they read “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” or something similar, while attending exciting conferences and planning to revolutionize healthcare.

Leslie Kernisan, MD MPH, is a practicing geriatrician, cautious techno-optimist, and enthusiastic caregiver educator. She hopes to someday be surrounded by cool tools and innovations that will make great geriatric care totally doable for all, especially primary care providers and family caregivers. She is a regular THCB contributor, and blogs at Geritech.org and at drkernisan.net.