By Adam Wong, ONC and Abdul Shaikh, NCI

ONC and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are challenging app developers to create new tools to help cancer survivors. The new Crowds Care for Cancer: Supporting Survivors Challenge is asking app developers to create new tools meant to help survivors manage their care after they have completed cancer treatment.

HHS has had a series of developer contests that have spawned the creation of tools and apps to help patients and doctors better manage care. Some past app challenges include:

• the Million Hearts Risk Check Challenge
• the Blue Button Mash Up Challenge, and
• the Ensuring Safe Transitions Challenge.

Cancer patients need more care coordination

The number of cancer survivors in the United States is currently estimated at 14 million people. With improvements in cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment, as well as the aging of the United States, this number is expected to rise.

While celebrating advances in cancer care, there remains a need to help patients manage their health after they have completed their primary treatment. Cancer survivors experience a host of physical and psychosocial long-term and late effects of the disease, and it’s the treatment of this that requires coordinated follow-up care.

Despite significant progress in cancer treatment, the complex and often fragmented state of end-of-treatment care may lead to harmful breakdowns in patient-provider communication. This can result in unmet health care needs. Better communication, data exchange, and care coordination have been shown to help the patients.

Continue reading “New Developer Contest: Create a Cancer Survivor Tool”

By Missy Krasner

You probably saw some of the headlines last week where Box announced that is supporting HIPAA and HITECH compliance, signing Business Associate Agreements, (BAAs) and integrating with several platform app partners such as  Doximity, drchrono, TigerText, and Medigram to help seed its new healthcare ecosystem.  I also announced that I was formally advising Box on their healthcare strategy.

I was drawn to Box because of all the lessons I learned at Google building a consumer-directed, personal health record (PHR), Google Health. Google Health allowed you to securely store, organize and share all of your medical records online and control where your data went and how it was managed. It was unlike the other PHRs in the industry that were tethered to the provider or payor or part of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.

Sound good? Well, it was in theory. The big issue with Google Health was aggregating your data from the disparate sources that stored data on you.  We had to create a ton of point-to-point integrations with large health insurance companies, academic medical centers, hospitals, medical practices and retail pharmacy chains. All of these providers and payors were covered entities in the world of HIPAA and were required to verify a patient’s identity before releasing any data to them electronically. It was a very bumpy user experience for even the most super-charged, IT savvy consumer.

Continue reading “Box Picking Up Where Google Health Left Off”

By Matthew Holt

At Health 2.0 we have a natural bias toward the innovator, the entrepreneur, and the developer. Health care is largely broken, and those upstarts have the potential to fix it. But it’s by no means easy. Part of what we’re doing at our upcoming Health:Refactored conference is helping developers get access to APIs and other technical entrees into health care data (such as the SHIN-NY or HealthVault).

But as Paul Levy pointed out in a recent post about Epic’s domination of the large hospital system EMR market, and as Jonathan Bush hilariously detailed in a talk at last week’s TEDMED, health care’s money and data and power are still locked up in huge institutions that don’t have it in their business plans to give up that position — whatever their mission statements might say.

Francois de Brantes’ book The Incentive Cure details in a fun way how hard it is for providers to do the right thing, and how in the absence of changing incentives, most of the things that seem to make sense for better health (like holistic patient management, care variation reduction, better informed patients and providers) actually make worse sense for health care institutions. Which means that the dam is still holding back the torrent of ideas and solutions from innovators, entrepreneurs and developers. We know (broadly) what to do but we can’t do it. It’s the worst of times.

But two things are changing. One is that we at least recognize the problem. The system may be an addict, but it knows it’s one, and so does the taxpayer and the patient. So that first step has been taken. The second change is the flood of new technologies outside of, and now inside of health care, that can help us get through the next 11 steps. Todd Park says this is the best time ever to be a tech entrepreneur in health care. So is this the best of times? Eventually it’s up to all of us to make it so.

Nine months ago New York Digital Health Accelerator‘s program began. Now it’s time for demo day, when eight companies get to show off their progress to date. NYDHA is run by the Partnership Fund for New York City and the New York eHealth Collaborative and was designed for growth-stage companies developing products for providers and patients in the care coordination, patient engagement, and health care analytics fields.

Who: NYDHA’s first class of eight companies:

ActualMeds’ software supports team-based medication management and reconciliation for high risk patients taking multiple drugs to reduce their drug related hospitalization and readmissions.

Aidin helps patients make the right choice of post-acute care providers by providing them with ratings and reviews on local rehab centers and nursing homes.

Avado partners with healthcare businesses to provide a platform that allows clinicians and patients to securely communicate, track, and manage health information.

Continue reading “Attend New York Digital Health Accelerator’s First Demo Day”

By Andy Oram

Over four years of Congresses, Sage Bionetworks has drawn together leading thinkers and doers throughout the fields of genetic research and drug development. For two days each year, the conference floor is colonized by clumps of eagerly networking PhDs from academic, pharma, government, non-profits, biotech firms, and patient advocacy groups–people who often glide from one domain to another within this tight-knit cohort.

A cohort, certainly, we can characterize this group of attendees, sharing as they do a mysterious language drawn from years of research most of us will never understand. But is it a community? That will be tested over the following year as Sage Bionetworks lets go of the Congress. Founder Stephen Friend says it is up to others to create the next Congress, and its success or failure will be a measurement of the sweat and passion that Friend and Sage have put into attempts to build a community.

Why should a reader look further at this struggle among a tiny elite, rather than clicking on the next article? Well, first, if you’re one of the 48% of Americans who took a prescription drug this month, you should be concerned about where new breakthrough drugs will emerge. If you visit this web site because you want a more responsive health care system that can match patients to treatments more quickly and cheaply, recognize that new methods are important nowhere as much as at the foundation of the system where new treatments are discovered. And if you are just curious about the potential for global cross-institutional teams and loose networks connecting experts with ordinary members of the public to find creative solutions to old problems, this article will provide insights.

Don’t get too close, you don’t know what I have

The premise on which Friend founded Sage is that research and drug development have stagnated and cannot progress without more collaboration and data sharing. Therefore, with all due regard for the presentations at the recent Sage Congress on cancer research projects and other individual experiments, the real theme of the conference is in the keynotes about open source, the use of social media, and crowdsourcing. The challenge of this community–if we find that it has indeed become a community–is to analyze and deal with the particular challenges that genetic research and drug development inject into trends toward open collaboration.

Continue reading “Open Research For Open Cures: A Report From Sage Congress”

By Graeme Ossey

We are excited to announce the finalists of the Shire ADHD Transitions Challenges! The five finalists submitted innovative ideas for web or mobile apps that will help young adults, who are entering college or the workforce, manage their medication and help them conquer daily organizational and life management challenges. Let’s meet the finalists!

• The ActionsHero App works the way that the ADHD brain works best; fast-paced, fun and with instant rewards. It takes time management to the next level in an integrative, fun way that keeps people actively involved on a daily basis and moving forward in small steps. Breaking down tasks into 8 areas of life helps maintain important priorities and gives the balanced outlook often missing in schedule planning.

• ADHDGo will provide developmentally appropriate help to young people with ADHD through social support opportunities, practical life skills, expert information and self-management tools as they transition from adolescence through college and ultimately to the working world. The product utilizes a single convenient mobile website that is available anywhere at any time via desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet.

• GenR Media has created the Life Balance Zone – College Life app. The app contains 4 main zones that are designed to support the student throughout their time in college – Planning Zone, Study Zone, Resource Zone, Reward Zone. Features like required study time and morning check-ins are built in the app to help the student balance their life in college and stay on track and reward him/her extra study breaks, playing a brain game featured in the app, or using small reward gift cards given by friends or family.

Continue reading “Finalists in the Shire ADHD Transitions Challenge”

By Dave Whitlinger

This Saturday we opened voting to the public, giving the people a chance to select the designs they like best for the Patient Portal for New Yorkers. The Patient Portal will be a highly secure website allowing New Yorkers to log in to access their own medical records, with the same ease and efficiency with which they have accessed their financial transactions for years.

Since we expect patients to use the Patient Portal regularly (in order to find out about recent lab results or prescriptions, or just as a reminder to schedule their next physical) we aim to create an interface that is both pleasant to look at and easy to use.

In January of this year, we opened a challenge that invited designers and software developers to submit prototypes for what that interface should look like. And now that the best of those designs are in, we are letting the public—those who will ultimately use the portal—rank the ones they like the most. Voting will be open until April 23rd, and we ask that you take a look and help us determine the interfaces you find the clearest, most straightforward and user-friendly.

Continue reading “The Public Votes! Votes for Health Care!”

By Andy Oram

It’s heavy tech time at THCB. Health 2.0 is running a developer conference called Health:Refactored on May 13-4, and a big topic there will be the opening of APIs from Microsoft, Intel, Walgreens, NY Health Information Network, MedHelp, Nuance and more. What’s an API, why does it matter for health care? Funny you should ask but Andy Oram from O’Reilly Radar wrote an article for THCB all about it!–Matthew Holt

As the health care field inches toward adoption of the computer technologies that have streamlined other industries and made them more responsive to users, it has sought ways to digitize data and make it easier to consume. I recently talked to two organizations with different approaches to sharing data: the SMART platform and the Apigee corporation. Both focus on programming APIs and thus converge on a similar vision off health care’s future. But they respond to that vision in their own ways. Differences include:

• SMART is an open source project run by a medical school and is partially government-funded; Apigee is a private company.
• SMART tries to establish a standard; Apigee accepts whatever APIs its customers are using and bridges between them.

Continue reading “Two Contrasting Approaches to Health Care’s API Revolution”

By Wil Yu

Do we live in times of barbarism?

While I imagine many reading this would disagree that we live as a primitive culture based on our technological progress, I contend that how we operate as a community may be vastly improved in supporting the health and well-being of everyday citizens. Furthermore, I believe that one day we’ll look back on ourselves as society and marvel at how primitive the tools were to improve the health of communities.

On a daily basis, our individual health is driven by countless decisions. Where we shop for food, how we commute, where we choose to live and spend our time outdoors are all contributors to our health and wellbeing. Each of these actions can be improved—optimized so they contribute to a maximum level of health—if adequate data is available.

Continue reading “Healthy Community Data Summit — A Call to Action”

THCB founder Matthew Holt is reporting live from HIMSS 2013 in New Orleans. Matthew’s first guest is Ben Chodor of Happtique. We’ll then hear from Matthew on his walking tour of the floor as he drops in on a few companies, including Kareo, CareCloud, Wellness Layers, and more…

Watch the live stream here: http://www.livestream.com/hibc.