Today on Health in 2 Point 00, we have another takeover! Dr. Jennifer Schneider, president of Livongo, is here to give us her take on health tech news. On Episode 81, Jess asks Jenny about Daye, a startup developing cramp-fighting CBD tampons, which just raised $5.5 million, and LetsGetChecked, which raised $30 million for at-home health testing. Jess also asks about Jenny’s new book, Decoding Health Signals, which offers a blueprint for building a consumer-focused healthcare company.
Christina Liu
New GuideWell Innovation Scale Up Accelerator Program
SPONSORED POST
By CATALYST @ HEALTH 2.0
GuideWell Innovation, in collaboration with Springboard Enterprises, is hosting an exciting new 10-week Scale Up Accelerator program for women-founded health tech companies (or those with at least one female key executive) located in the Southeastern US (FL, GA, AL, MS, LA, NC, SC, KY, TN). Because both women-led startups and the South East are lagging in access and closure of venture capital, this unique cohort is dedicated to accelerating the growth and financing of companies within these demographics.
The program will run from Jun 26th – Aug 30th and includes a kickoff boot camp (June 26th – 28th) at the GuideWell Innovation Center in Orlando, FL. Most of the program will be conducted virtually other than the 3-day kickoff boot camp and a innovator/investor matchmaking showcase at the end of August. During weeks 2-9, the cohort companies will be matched with various advisors and are expected to connect with advisors every week. In addition, each week will incorporate a virtual 2-hour workshop/collaboration session led by subject matter experts on key challenge topics faced by most early-stage health tech companies.
Required criteria for the cohort:
- Company must be a health, wellness or medical device technology company that addresses critical gaps in providing affordable, accessible health care or holistic health/wellness solutions for diverse populations and communities in the United States
- Life sciences companies are NOT eligible for this cohort
- Women founders or key executives must own a minimum of 25% of the company’s equity
- The company must be headquartered and have a minimum of 50% of its staff located in the Southeastern US (FL, GA, AL, MS, LA, NC, SC, TN, KY)
- Can show proof of “Scale Up” traction through revenues, capital raised, customer acquisition, and product development (see below)
- Addressing a huge market opportunity in the U.S. healthcare, holistic health or wellness industry
THCB Spotlights | Lygeia Ricciardi, CTO of Carium Health
By ZOYA KHAN
Today, THCB is spotlighting Lygeia Ricciardi. As the former Director of Consumer e-Health at the ONC, Lygeia tells us about patient access to health data and the ONC and CMS’s new rules on interoperability. But now, she’s the CTO of Carium Health, going from a “consumer activist consultant-type” to actually working with a startup. Carium provides a platform for consumer empowerment and engagement, helping to guide individuals through their health care and wellness journeys.
Coaching and Leadership Training Can Help Med Students Avoid Burnout
By MARGARET CARY, JACK PENNER, and JP MIKHAIE
Burnout is one of the biggest problems physicians face today. We believe that addressing it early — in medical school — through coaching gives physicians the tools they need to maintain balance and meaning in their personal and professional lives.
We say that after reading comments from participants in our coaching program, “A Whole New Doctor,” developed at Georgetown University School of Medicine. This program, born almost by chance, provides executive coaching and leadership training to medical students, who are exactly the right audience for it.
Medical students tend to begin their education as optimistic 20-somethings, eager to learn and eager to see patients. After spending one or two years on the academic study of medicine, they move to the wards where they observe the hidden curriculum — a set of norms, values, and behaviors conveyed in implicit and explicit ways in the clinical learning environment.
In the hospital, convenience and expediency, deference to specialists, and factual knowledge tend to replace the holistic and patient-centered care that is lauded during the preclinical years. This new culture nudges some students to the brink of burnout and depression. Some consider suicide.
The Folly of Self Referral
By HANS DUVEFELT, MD
A lot of Americans think they should be able to make an appointment with a specialist on their own, and view the referral from a primary care provider as an unnecessary roadblock.
This “system” often doesn’t work, because of the way medical specialties are divided up.
If belly pain is due to gallbladder problems you need a general surgeon. If it’s due to pancreas cancer, you need an oncologic surgeon. If the cause is Crohn’s disease, any gastroenterologist will do, but with Sphincter of Oddi problems, you’ll need a gastroenterologist who does ERCPs, and not all of them do. Now, of course, if you’re a woman, that abdominal pain may actually be referred pain from an ovarian cancer, best treated by a GYN-oncology surgeon, which anywhere in Maine means a drive down to Portland.
The other day I saw an older man for a second opinion. He had been through one hand surgery for a small tumor many years ago in Boston, and another unrelated operation for a fracture in Bangor a few years ago. Then, after a non surgical injury, he developed stabbing pains in the same hand. Someone referred him to a neurologist for EMG testing, which was normal, and the man told me that was all the neurologist did, not a full consultation.
Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 80 | Takeover Edition!
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, where am I?! In Episode 80, Bayer’s Eugene Borukhovich is here to answer Jess’s questions—but don’t worry, he’s channeling his inner “Matthew”. Get Eugene’s take on Jawbone’s $65 million raise after its relaunch and find out if he disagrees with me about Noom’s recent $60 million raise. Jess also picks Eugene’s brain about what G4A is looking for in their challenge applications, so don’t miss out — Matthew Holt
Health Care is Coming Home
SPONSORED POST
By DIANA CHEN
In an AARP survey of 2000 adults, 6 out of 10 respondents indicated they prefer to stay in their home and community for as long as possible. This desire increases with age; more than 75% of adults over 50 would rather remain in a familiar environment where they have strong connections to friends, neighbors, and businesses. However, for the elderly and people with chronic illness or disabilities, remaining at home can be difficult. These populations require services that are often provided at long term care facilities (e.g. nursing homes) and/or formal medical settings– which can be costly, inconvenient, and inefficient.
Individuals of all ages across the health spectrum have also expressed interest in receiving health services in the home or community as a means to access higher quality and convenient care. With consumer demand for patient-centered care, the U.S. healthcare system has steadily steered away from institutional services in favor of home and community-based services (HCBS). Since 2013, Medicaid expenditures for HCBS has continued to exceed spending for institutional services. HCBS now accounts for 55% of Medicaid Long Term Care spending.
As the largest payor for healthcare in the United States, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is often the first to experiment and adopt new care delivery models. With Medicaid’s perceived benefits with HCBS, the CMS has also changed what is covered under Medicare Advantage (MA) to accommodate for the transition towards home and community based care. In 2018, CMS added “non-medical in-home care” as a supplemental benefit for 2019 MA plans. This year, CMS continued to broaden the range of supplemental benefits for MA 2020 to cover any benefits “that have a reasonable expectation of improving or maintaining the health or overall function” of beneficiaries with chronic conditions or illnesses.
Reducing Churn to Increase Value in Health Care: Solutions for Payers, Providers, and Policymakers
By NIKO LEHMAN-WHITE and SAEED AMINZADEH
Introduction
Every day and in every corner of the country, innovative health care leaders are conceiving of strategies and programs to manage their patients’ health, as an alternative to treating their sickness (see Figure 1).
The value-based contracts that have proliferated in this country over the past decade and which now account for about half of the money spent on healthcare allow these wellness investments to make good financial sense in addition to benefiting patient health.
However, a phenomenon in health coverage in the US is increasing costs, destabilizing care continuity and holding back the potential of value-based care. It prevents us from making the long-term investments we desperately need.
Understanding Churn
Churn refers to gaining, losing, or moving between sources of coverage. Every year, approximately a quarter of the US population switches out of their health plan. Reasons can be voluntary or involuntary from the perspective of the beneficiary (see Table 1) and vary from changes in job status, eligibility, insurance offerings, and preference, to non-payment of premiums, to unawareness of pending coverage termination.
We Are Not A Dashboard: Contesting The Tyranny Of Metrics, Measurement, And Managerialism
By DAVID SHAYWITZ
The dashboard is the potent symbol of our age. It offers the elegant visualization of data, and is intended to capture and represent the performance of a system, revealing at a glance current status, and pointing out potential emerging concerns. Dashboards are a prominent feature of most every “big data” project I can think of, offered by every vendor, and constructed to provide a powerful sense of control to the viewer. It seemed fitting that Novartis CEO Dr. Vas Narasimhan, a former McKinsey consultant, would build (then tweet enthusiastically about) “our new ‘control tower’” – essentially a multi-screen super dashboard – “to track, analyse and predict the status of all our clinical studies. 500+ active trials, 70+ countries, 80 000+ patients – transformative for how we develop medicines.” Dashboards are the physical manifestation of the ideology of big data, the idea that if you can measure it you can manage it.
I am increasingly concerned, however, that the ideology of big data has taken on a life of it’s own, assuming a sense of both inevitability and self-justification. From measurement in service of people, we increasingly seem to be measuring in service of data, setting up systems and organizations where constant measurement often appears to be an end in itself.
My worries, it turns out, are hardly original. I’ve been delighted to discover over the past year what feels like an underground movement of dissidents who question the direction we seem to be heading, and who’ve thoughtfully discussed many of the issues that I stumbled upon. (Special hat-tip to “The Accad & Koka Report” podcast, an independent and original voice in the healthcare podcast universe, for introducing me to several of these thinkers, including Jerry Muller and Gary Klein.)
Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 79 | Noom, DispatchHealth and Kaiser Permanente
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess is in Italy…and has me up far too early in the morning for this episode. On Episode 79, Jess asks me for an update on uBiome after their raid by the FBI. We also talk about nutrition startup Noom’s $58 million raise and clinician house-call platform DispatchHealth’s $33 million raise. In other news, Kaiser Permanente is launching a network to integrate the social determinants of health with their EHR. –Matthew Holt
