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Matthew Holt Interviews Regina Holliday at HIMSS

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By PRIYA KUMAR

Another in a series of interviews that should have been posted months ago, but Matthew Holt is just getting to now.

If you don’t Regina Holliday, well you should. Regina is a patient rights activist and artist, and she founded The Walking Gallery of Healthcare in 2009 after attending her first medical conference. We are also pretty sure that Health 2.0, in 2010, was the first conference she was invited to speak at! She is on a mission to amplify patients’ voice by painting jackets for patients and providers.

Several companies and individuals are now asking Regina Holliday to paint their story. Today, The Walking Gallery has a total of 43 artists and 400+ painted jackets. Individuals who believe in the movement are asked to join Regina at Salt and Pepper Studios in Maryland, and are able to paint their patient narrative. Matthew Holt caught up with Regina at HIMSS back in February, where her painting was sponsored by Xerox Health for the first time at the conference. A very interesting woman with a different approach to supporting patient rights.

Priya Kumar is an Operations & Marketing Intern at Health 2.0, and a student at the George Washington University 

 

Navinet: Health 2.0 Poster Child

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By KIM KRUEGER & MATTHEW HOLT

What was once an enterprise software company designing bespoke systems for each client has over the course of the past three years transitioned to a national network-as-a-service with configuration tools and a soon-to-come open API. Could there be a better example of Health 2.0 in action? Say hello to the ‘new’ Navinet, a 15 year-old network that connects over 400,000 providers to more than 40 health plans, covering more than 47 million lives.

Matthew Holt spoke with Navinet CEO Frank Ingari about both Navinet’s stealthy evolution, as well as the company’s new goals moving forward. Navinet still performs the core handful of transactions health care providers have always used the system for — eligibility checks, payment status, referral approval, and treatment authorization among others – but now with a connected network, the emphasis is on collaborative workflow and combining clinical information with reimbursement transactions to improve care.

Ingari said it best: the health care communication infrastructure sucks. Consumers know it, and it isn’t any better for payers and providers. To hear more about how Navinet plans to be that communication infrastructure health care is so sorely missing, watch the interview below.

Kim Krueger is a Research Analyst at Health 2.0 where Matthew Holt is the Co-Chairman.  

Looking to Get Funded? Thoughts From An Entrepreneur Who Just Did

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By PASCAL LARDIER

GET_imagePascal Lardier, Health 2.0 International Director, recently interviewed Omri Shor, CEO of Medisafe, for the EU funded GET Project. Shor has showcased Medisafe on stage at Health 2.0 several times and recently closed a $6 million Series A funding round. His advice? Shor says “Investors care about two things: the product market fit and the business model fit.” Read on for more.     

Pascal Lardier: Omri, to start can you say a few words to describe your solution and what it does?

Omri Shor: For sure. MediSafe is an intelligent medication management platform helping people manage their medications correctly. When we go into details, we’re a cloud and apps company. We have apps, iPhone and Android, that are synced together for a cloud service that we have developed.

In general, we remind people to take their medications. We keep a log of what they took and what they didn’t take. And we’re able to share that data back with physicians. The new layer that we’ve just added is a personalized feed that is dealing with more than just a reminder, it’s now dealing with persuasive technology to make sure that patients understand the need to take their medications as well as the ability to track some measurements and vital signs inside MediSafe and correlate this with the medication that the patient has actually taken.

PL: Can you say a few words about your niche in digital health? How many competitors and what makes MediSafe different and better than other solutions?

OS: MediSafe is dealing with a big problem called medication non-adherence. The niche is actually patient engagement, specifically in the medication management space. There are hundreds of companies from cloudware companies to software companies to app companies. We’ve chosen to be mobile-first because we thought that this is the best place to help patients manage their medications mostly because we all engage with our smartphones so much and we think it’s only going to grow. We have iPhone, Android, and we have smart watches now as well. Some of that have already come, some of that are coming just around the corner.

In the medication management space in terms of apps, there are hundreds of competitors. MediSafe’s first differentiator is the user experience. We’re quite fanatic about user experience. We made sure that we are well-designed. MediSafe looks like a virtual pill Box. We have the design patent on the way that we integrate with the users.

The second piece that differentiated us from the beginning is our ability to sync via the cloud. We have the ability to sync family members. That means that if my father who is diabetic accidentally didn’t take his meds, I get notified and I can help him get reminded and make sure that he takes his meds or at least that he thinks of taking his meds.

These were the first things that differentiated MediSafe. Currently, the most important thing that is differentiating us is that we’ve taken a personalized approach. That means that we’ve created a feed that is dealing with patient’s condition, medication, et cetera. This feed is communicating to the patient how important it is to take his meds safely, correctly, that it would actually help him; and the ability to connect back to the healthcare system and back to the physician to make the physician more knowledgeable of the immediate outcomes of the medications that the patient is taking.

One other thing that is now differentiating MediSafe is that we currently have well over a million downloads of our solution with hundreds of thousands of active users. This is putting us in a position, I would say, in the class that just a handful of the medication management solutions were actually able to achieve. And this is accelerating, so we will see more of those users coming to choose MediSafe to manage their medications correctly.

PL: You have jumped ahead to my next question. The user experience, the personalized approach, this is what makes you different in the eyes of the users. This is why they’re going to choose MediSafe rather than another solution. My next question is, specifically in your niche that you described with hundreds of solutions, what did you think exactly make a difference in your discussions with investors?

OS: Investors care about two things. Investors care about the fact that there is a product market fit. That means that patients are using our solution. The second thing that investors care about is that there is a business model fit. That means that our customers, pharmaceutical companies, are willing to pay us money for the use of MediSafe and for different things that we do with them. These two together, the growth that we’ve seen organically without investing money and marketing and the ability to monetize users, brought them to the conclusion that the company has the ability to be a leading company or a leading solution for a multi-billion dollar problem.

Continue reading…

WTF Health | Self-Reported Patient Monitoring Startup from Finland, Kaiku Health

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By JESSICA DAMASSA

WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of the health industry and how we love to hate WTF is wrong with it right now. Can’t get enough? Check out more interviews at www.wtf.health. 

Central to the ‘WTF Health’ ethos is the idea that around the world, there is a shared passion for creating a new future for healthcare — and that the less-positive ‘WTF moment’ is a shared experience, regardless of which country’s health system one is standing in.

So, I’m going around the world this year — to 17 different health innovation conferences in 11 different countries — to find out what innovators abroad are doing to tackle the problems in their health systems and what we can learn from one another.

Driving down the cost of care, managing chronic conditions, helping people achieve better health, improving care delivery and patient experience — these goals know no borders. What’s different is the framework around them. So, what if the payment model were different? What if there was a single electronic patient record? What if certain laws and regulations didn’t exist?

Different constraints breed different solutions. What a hopeful and inspiring idea. And, with any luck, food for your thoughts and innovative thinking.

So here is the first interview I’d like to share from abroad! Everyone meet Finnish startup Kaiku Health, fresh off closing a €4.4M Euro series A. Their patient monitoring monitoring platform lets cancer patients (and others with chronic diseases) self-report on how they’re doing, using their hospital’s existing patient portal. Stick around until the end: Bonus insight on the strengths of the health tech startup scene in the Nordics for those who want to go explore.

Filmed at Upgraded Life Festival in Helsinki, early June.  

WTF Health | Oscar’s Schlosser on Consumerizing Health Plans, post-ACA & pre-Amazon/JPM/BH

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By JESSICA DAMASSA

WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of the health industry and how we love to hate WTF is wrong with it right now. Can’t get enough? Check out more interviews at www.wtf.health. 

Having formerly worked for a health plan, I geek out over health plan innovation as IMO it’s the underpinning of the true disruption of health care. When the incentives change, everything else will change too…

So when I met Mario Schlosser, co-founder & CEO of Oscar Health at Health Datapalooza, I may or may not have asked him to sign my Oscar insurance card. (Yep, I’m a member.)

Our chat focused his push to continue driving health plan innovation amid the deterioration of the ACA and his plans for Oscar’s latest $165M round. His goal: make the payer “an interface and enabler of new kinds of technologies.” Is that even possible?!

Around 4:15 minute mark we find out if he’s been tapped for advice from the Berkshire Hathaway/Amazon/JP Morgan health alliance as they take on their own challenges disrupting health insurance.

WTF Health | Teladoc’s Gorevic: “We’re feeling A-quisitive”

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By JESSICA DAMASSA

WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of the health industry and how we love to hate WTF is wrong with it right now. Can’t get enough? Check out more interviews at www.wtf.health. 

I guess he warned us that Teladoc was feeling ‘A-quisitive’ — the question now is are they done? A few weeks ago I spoke with Jason Gorevic, Teladoc’s CEO at the new HLTH Conference about consolidation in the telehealth space and what’s next for the virtual care giant.

Although he was mum on the company’s $352M mega-buy of Advance Medical, there was a shopping list of other solutions that seem to have caught Teladoc’s eye — everything from tech that turns Alexa into a telemed access point to NLP plug-ins and any number of shiny devices that make remote monitoring easier, less expensive, and more effective.

Perhaps an indicator of where they’ll look next as they continue to sweep up market share? Listen in on some of the details about their CVS partnership (VIRTUAL Minute Clinic, anyone?) and the VERY interesting talks he’s having with the country’s largest payers on redefining benefit designs to push virtual care first.

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 28

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Another late night Health 2.0 Europe related episode of #Healthin2point00. Filmed (yet again by Jennifer Lannon) in front of a live studio audience (well, a bunch of people at the restaurant in Spain), with more reflections on the conference, Indu Subaiya’s talk and where we go next (Hint, way up North!) — Jessica DaMassa & Matthew Holt

Health in 2 point 00, Episode 27

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With .health‘s Jennifer Lannon again running the camera and with guest appearances from Bayer’s Aline Noizet and Health 2.0’s Emily Hagermen, Jessica DaMassa asked me about Health 2.0 Europe, DCtoVC, the other goings on in Stiges, Spain. And yes, filmed in a nice Spanish restaurant over a Rioja or 2–Matthew Holt

Health in 2 point 00 — Episode 26

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This week we’re on location in Europe! Sitges near Barcelona to be exact, the site of the 2018 HIMSS Europe & Health 2.0 Conference. There, with our friend Jennifer Lannon from .health acting as emergency camera crew, Jessica DaMassa pins me down about HHS CTO Bruce Greenstein, Bayer & cannabis, Entraprenurses and where HIMSS/Health 2.0 is going next in Europe. It’s all in a day’s work (well 2 minutes) in Health in 2 point 00! — Matthew Holt

Bad Blood & Mad Love at Theranos—Psychopaths at Work

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By MATTHEW HOLT

I’ve been kidding John Carreyrou on Twitter that I was going to give Bad Blood, his tale about the Theranos fraud, a one star review because he never sent me a preview copy. But it’s a barn burner, and I can’t recommend it enough, even though I spent my own $13.95 on the Kindle version!

By now the story is well known. The young blonde Stanford drop out with the baritone voice says she’s going to change lab testing forever, then hides in stealth in Silicon Valley. I caught a few whispers over the years that this company was doing something but as lab testing was a little away from the mainstream of health tech, I didn’t ever bother to look for more. And then in 2014 Holmes gets into Fortune and from a distance we are all cheering her on because she’s figured out a new way to disrupt a stodgy industry. The first Carreyrou piece is published in the WSJ in late 2015—even though Murdoch was a huge investor–and over the next 2 years massive fraud is exposed.

About when Holmes was starting to talk about stuff, and after the Walgreens deal eventually went live (mid 2014) there was the very odd series of events when Holmes appeared to agree to come talk at Health 2.0 but shortly afterwards she and her PR team went totally radio silent on us. I was told by one PR flack that he’d heard that another conference had told her to choose between us and them (TedMed? I’m guessing) but who knows. She appeared at TechCrunch in September 2014 and had the interviewer Jon Shieber’s blood drawn with his results coming back while she was on stage—clearly faked we now know. I saw her interviewed by a fawning Toby Cosgrove at Cleveland Clinic, where she said that Carreyrou was lying. I stood at the end of a receiving line full of people asking her to sign things for their daughters as she was such an inspiration. When I got to the front I asked her why she didn’t come to Health 2.0 and invited her to come the next time. With me in line was Medcity News Editor Chris Seper who asked for an interview. After about 15 seconds of her not saying anything, a PR flack jumped in, pulled us away from her, got our cards and said she’d get back to us. I’m still waiting

But what is just remarkable about this whole thing is how little due diligence was done by investors who plunked down hundreds of millions.Continue reading…