Year: 2017

Big Names, Big Ideas at Health 2.0 Fall Conference

Sep 27, 2017

By HEALTH 2.o SPONSORED POST

The Annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference has harnessed the creativity and passion of health care’s brightest professionals to tackle the industry’s most intractable problems and leverage technology-enabled solutions to drive more compassionate, more accessible patient-centered care.

Check out the full agenda of our eleventh show, Oct. 1-4, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Our killer line up of speakers covers the full spectrum of healthcare, and includes:

Innovative leaders, including Jason Pyle, CEO of Base Health; Simon Kos, CMO of Microsoft; Aashima Gupta, Global Head, Healthcare Solutions, Google; Brian Otis, CTO of Verily Life Sciences; Daniel Kraft, Founder and Chair of Exponential Medicine; and Jeff Margolis, CEO of Welltok.

Policymakers, such as HHS CTO Bruce Greenstein; ONC National Coordinator Don Rucker; former ONC Director David Brailer; and former U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra.

Patient advocates, including Dave DeBronkart (e-Patient Dave) and Patient Power President Andrew Schorr.

Representatives from more than two dozen major health systems, including UPMC, Mount Sinai, Dignity Health, UCSF, and more!

Major healthcare investors, including Providence Ventures, Merck Ventures, GE Ventures, and more!

Check out our full line up of speakers.

Limited amount of tickets are available. Register Today to secure your place at the Fall Conference-event starts this Sunday.

Graham-Cassidy is Dead. It’s Back to the Drawing Board. Why Not a Two-Tier System?

Sep 27, 2017• 14

BY BRIAN JOONDEPH, MD

Remember back in 2012 when then Vice-President Joe Biden told us, “Bin Laden is dead, General Motors is alive”? The good old days. Also around the time Senators John McCain and Lisa Murkowski promised to repeal Obamacare. Along with a bunch of other Republicans seeking reelection to Congress.

Fast forward to 2017. The new catchphrase is “GOP is dead, Obamacare is alive.” At least their credibility is dead. Buried in the rubble of broken campaign promises. Not only Obamacare repeal, but also tax cuts, immigration enforcement, balanced budgets, reduced spending, and so on.

Repeal and replace, as a promise was simple enough on the campaign trail. We heard this promise in 2010, when voters gave the House to Republicans. We heard it again in 2012, when voters gave them the Senate. Despite controlling Congress, Obamacare remained alive and well. Candidate Donald Trump, along with most Republican members of Congress, promised repeal and replace last year.

Eight months into the Trump administration, Obamacare is still kicking. Congress had three bites of the apple this year and each time came up with a worm instead. This week was their third attempt to fix Obamacare. Not the promised repeal, instead only financial window dressing to keep Obamacare alive in some shape or form.

How health IT organizations are using security as a competitive advantage

Sep 26, 2017• 4

BY ANDREW HICKS SPONSORED CONTENT

When speaking with our health IT clients, I’m hearing a distinct shift when it comes to cybersecurity. They no longer view it as an IT cost; they understand how it can facilitate growth, create competitive advantage and build trust in their products and brand.

Their executive management is on board with this thinking, too. They don’t want to hear about fear, uncertainty and doubt when it comes to data breaches, hacks and cyber threats, but rather how cybersecurity can help ‘protect the house and the product’ while at the same time enabling the business, customers and partners.

As more products and services in the healthcare continuum are connected, the need to proactively address cybersecurity increases. And as more consumer and business information is generated and shared, data privacy becomes a critical business requirement. This explains why we’re seeing forward-thinking health IT organizations moving to a new model of cybersecurity – one that’s adaptive to evolving risks and threats plus aligns with overall business objectives, such as increased revenue.

The one unifying thing we see with most health IT clients is the cloud. They need to design, build, assess, test and validate architectures and products on the cloud to confidently go to market with secure solutions. They’re finding that as they address cybersecurity in the design and development of products and services, they experience new ways to innovate and move faster. These cloud-integrated solutions can also enhance data privacy and boost customer trust and brand reputation. These are crucial safeguards as consumers are more concerned than ever about how their data is collected and shared.

Organizations aren’t waiting to hear that security program elements to demonstrate customer data protection are a requirement to closing a deal, they’re getting proactive by using cybersecurity as a sales strategy.Continue reading…

How Wellness Become the Wrong Word

Sep 26, 2017• 5

JIM PURCELL

What do employers want more than anything? Healthy, engaged, productive, energized, and thriving employees who provide great customer service and high quality products. What they have is all too often the antithesis of that.

This article is about why and how to move away from “wellness” to “wellbeing.” Wellness is one dimensional—the absence of illness. But for employees to thrive, they need so much more. The essence? They need to be happy with what they are doing and where they are doing it. Without that, good physical health, engagement, and productivity are almost impossible. It’s as simple as that, and with happiness comes success on multiple levels for the employee and the employer. And yet the all too many of today’s American employees are dreadfully unhappy with their jobs and bosses. It’s time for that to change.

The companies that successfully address the deteriorating health (both physical and mental/emotional) of their employees have a huge competitive advantage, and not just from reduced healthcare coverage, but in cultivating more enthusiastic, productive, and engaged employees which drive competitive and financial success through better products and better service.

Dee Edington confirmed this in his book Zero Trends when he wrote: “Our mission is to create shareholder value. We create shareholder value because we have innovative, creative, and quality products and services. We have innovative, creative, and quality products and services because we have healthy and productive people.”

This is, as we say in Massachusetts, “wicked important.” Yet most American CEOs do not yet see it as even rising to their level of attention. That is nothing short of astonishing given how much they pay for healthcare coverage and the truly poor value they receive in return. Starbucks pays more for employee coverage than for coffee. GM pays more for coverage than for steel. Businesses don’t realize it, but they are truly in the healthcare coverage business whether they like it or not. And that doesn’t even begin to total up the costs of disengagement, absenteeism, and turnover.Continue reading…

Bringing Behaviorial Health Into Primary Care Settings

Sep 26, 2017• 2

BY MARTHA WHITECOTTON SPONSORED POST

The integration of behavioral health into the primary care setting has resulted in a number of benefits. Traditionally, behavioral health and medical health operated separately, but in recent years, the integration of these two systems has improved access to care, ensured continuity of care, reduced stigma associated with seeking care and allowed for earlier detection and treatment of mental health and substance abuse issues. By bringing behavioral health specialists into primary care facilities, healthcare systems have streamlined care and brought down costs, working collaboratively and reducing the number of appointments and hospital visits.

At Carolinas HealthCare System, we use technology to take behavioral health integration one step further. A robust behavioral health integration project was developed through myStrength, using virtual and telehealth technology to ensure that every primary care practice has the capabilities for early detection of mental illness and substance abuse and upstream intervention, easing the connection between behavior health specialists and patients who might otherwise be averse to seeking professional help.

Postgaming Sunday’s Graham-Cassidy Action

Sep 25, 2017• 1

By CRAIG KONNOTH

Another day, another draft of Graham-Cassidy. And yet another slew of special deals for Alaska, which I have criticized as unconstitutional elsewhere. Congressional Republicans must pass their recent version of Obamacare repeal by September 30 to avoid the filibuster rules that are usually applicable, and which would require a 60 vote threshold. Until then, they need only 50 of the Senate’s 52 GOP Senators to eke out a victory. John McCain has said he won’t vote for the bill; Susan Collins has said she is leaning against it. Rand Paul, after signalling early disapproval of the bill because it did not go far enough, is now negotiating with the bill’s authors to roll back even more patient protective regulations.

If Paul shifts, eyes once more will turn to Lisa Murkowski. In anticipation of this, news outlets are once more reporting sweeteners to Alaska that characterized earlier versions of the bill. The reporting is somewhat vague and sometimes inaccurate, so I thought a deper dive would be helpful.

I must caveat all of this by noting that this analysis is based on a quick read of a bill that was released just today—I welcome any corrections or additions.

An Op-Ed Ghostwriter Speaks

Sep 25, 2017• 4

By WILLIAM S KLEIN

Is it “a breach of trust” for a publication to publish an opinion piece that was written with the participation of public relations professionals? That was the conclusion of a recent article in Health News Review, a publication that bills itself as “Your Health News Watchdog.”(“Another ‘breach of trust’ at STAT: patient who praised TV drug ads says pharma PR company asked her to write op-ed”).

The article traces the origins of an op-ed that appeared in STAT, the respected medical blog published by the Boston Globe, headlined “You can complain about TV drug ads. They may have saved my life.” Health News Review managing editor Kevin Lomangino found that a public relations firm working for Gilead, a pharmaceutical company that makes the hepatitis C drug Harvoni, had reached out to a patient named Deborah Clark Duschane and asked her to write about her experience with drug ads.

Lomangino quotes Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at New York University, who called the situation a “breach of trust.”

“The whole point of ghostwriting is to hide the hand of an actor — to make an industry position seem like it’s coming from an unaffiliated individual,” Seife said. “That’s deception. It’s meant to disarm the natural skepticism that we have when an industry makes self-serving statements. And when someone tries to disarm our skepticism, well, it ain’t good.”

As a professional ghostwriter, who has been hired by public relations professionals to work with authors on op-eds that have run in respected publications, I disagree.

Microsoft Set To Demo VR/Mixed reality Physician Education Platform

Sep 25, 2017• 1

Dr. Simon Kos had big shoes to fill when he took over the role of Microsoft Chief Medical Officer from Dr. Bill Crounse last year. Dr. Kos said himself that they were some “big scrubs to fill”. However, at the time he had already been with Microsoft for six years and in Health IT for more than a decade before that, so he was no doubt up to the challenge.

As Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kos is responsible for providing clinical guidance, worldwide thought leadership, vision and strategy for Microsoft technologies and solutions in the healthcare industries. He made the move to Health IT after working a few years as a Medical Officer in Sydney, Australia. It was then that Kos decided to go back to school to study software engineering, and later his MBA. He then worked with InterSystems and Cerner and helped them to implement e-Health initiatives in Australia. In 2010 he joined Microsoft as a Health Industry Manager “with the appreciation that improving health and healthcare was about more than just putting in EMRs.” Even back then Dr. Kos had the vision to know that the future of healthcare would be in the data analytics and the AI applications that Microsoft would eventually release.

In a recent conversation, with the team here at Health 2.0, Dr. Kos talked about Microsoft’s current framework of digital transformation and highlighted their four pillars; Patient Engagement, Clinician Empowerment, Advanced Analytics, and New Models of Care. As a once practicing doc, he knows that technology needs to help not hinder the healthcare workforce and that AI will be able to improve diagnosis speed and accuracy without replacing or interfering with the clinician. He is a fervent believer that it is important to be constantly evaluating the tech models that may not be viable today but will be in the future. He is excited about Microsoft’s work on patient chatbots and VR/Mixed reality physician education platforms and will be demoing that technology on the Health 2.0 Stage on Monday, October 2nd.

Interview with Paul Black, CEO, Allscripts

Sep 25, 2017

Paul Black is CEO of Allscripts and he’ll be with me at Health 2.0 on October 1-4. Paul has been CEO of Allscripts for about five years, taking over from Glen Tullman who grew the company aggressively by acquisition over the previous decade. Paul has been steering Allscripts through a pretty big transformation for the past few years, and they’ve been the major EMR vendor that has most aggressively reached out to the startup tech community. This is an edited transcript of an interview we had in late August. — Matthew Holt

Matthew Holt: Paul thanks for talking with me today, but also we’re going to have you on for a quick chat when you’ll be on the main stage at Health 2.0, of which Allscripts has been a great supporter. Your colleagues Tina Joros and Erik Kins have been there for many years but not you, so I ‘m thrilled to have you coming in early October. Paul, welcome!

Paul Black: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be on the call with you today.

Matthew: Let’s dive in to the current state of play. There’s been some changes over the last five to seven years since the HITECH dollars came in, as more and more physicians, and more and more hospitals put in electronic medical records.

Obviously, Allscripts, was, I think, it’s right to say, built by Glen and Lee Shapiro via lot of acquisitions, especially with the Eclipsys purchase, with the goal of becoming a big player in that meaningful use world. And obviously, you have your old company, Cerner, and your friends from Wisconsin, Epic, who have been very dominant becoming a single platform for many large integrated delivery systems. Can you give me your sense of where the mainstream enterprise EMR market is at the moment?

Paul: I think that the mainstream EMR market in United States is becoming a mature market. And by that I mean it’s a marketplace in which almost every institution, almost every hospital, almost every post-acute facility, almost every ambulatory facility, has some semblance of an electronic medical record system. And certainly, they have an electronic billing set of capabilities. So, from that standpoint, almost everybody has something with regard to the ordering the management of and the documentation surrounding a clinical series of events.

Matthew: Give me a sense of how you think that’s changing in terms of the split between the integrated systems which are covering in-patients and out-patients, with physicians using the same system on both sides of the fences were, and the continued, I would say growth, but probably more accurately the continued existence of a large ambulatory-only segment of the market? After all that’s different for not only the way that the health systems and medical groups organize, but also the way that they’re served by organizations like you and Epic and many others. Is that system integration continuing or do you think that trend is kind of stopping?

Paul: I’ll take it from a couple of different angles. One is from an integration at the industry level, what has been vertical integration of large integrated delivery networks, or large multispecialty groups, especially practices, or in some cases, payers who are acquiring assets. I tend to see that while there was a lot going on over the course of the last four, five years, I’m starting to see people be more focused on what they’ve already acquired, and looking at operational efficiency and looking internally to ensure that they’re gleaning the expected returns, both clinically and financially, of the original goals of how they built those enterprises. That means from a culture standpoint, from an operation standpoint, and from a financial standpoint.

So, I don’t sense that there is as much of a, if you will, a go-go attitude to the continuation of acquisitions. I don’t think it’s necessarily been a conscious pause, but in some cases there’s been a lot of affiliations and acquisitions that have caused people to really have to make sure that they’ve done the things they need to do to really operationalize and to optimize the assets and the people that they are now a part of a new overall enterprise. I think from an industry standpoint of the people that serve that marketplace, us and some of the companies that you mentioned today, I see it’s just a natural progression of the other point that you’ve started with about where do we find ourselves in the state of the industry.Continue reading…

As Ohio Goes, So May Go the Nation: The Patient Access Expansion Act

Sep 24, 2017• 11

By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

According to recent Ohio statistics, 1.3 million people have limited or no access to primary care physicians. Based on the 2015 Ohio Primary Care Assessment, 60 of 88 Ohio counties have medically-underserved populations. The Patient Access Expansion Act (HB 273), co-sponsored by Representative Theresa Gavarone (3rd District) and Representative Terry Johnson (90th District), specifically addresses healthcare access by prohibiting physicians from being required to comply with maintenance of certification (MOC) as a condition to obtain licensure, reimbursement for work, employment, or admitting privileges at a hospital or other facility.

Recently, I spoke with Representative Gavarone on the critical importance of this legislation for Ohio. Physician family members have grumbled about the expense of MOC compliance however, a practicing cardiologist better clarified the connection between MOC regulations and the growing physician shortage. “He shared his frustrations at the time and money involved participating in a program that has absolutely no scientifically-proven benefit for patient outcomes,” said Representative Gavarone. The cardiologist discussed numerous hours wasted preparing for an exam with little to no bearing on his day-to-day work serving his patients.