We are going to start some new content on THCB in the next few weeks including a lot more video hosted by Jessica DaMassa. And one weekly show will be her asking me as many questions as I can answer in two minutes. Here’s the first crack at it. Hope you enjoy it!–Matthew Holt
Matthew Holt
The Conference Created by Innovators for Innovators
Get set for a new exciting conference experience coming this spring from Health 2.0 and HIMSS, focused on the collaboration between developers and healthcare providers on building emerging digital health technologies: Dev4Health.
Join hundreds of developers, innovative leaders, designers, chief technology officers, chief innovation officers, start-ups, and health tech enthusiasts for two days of strategic networking, idea generation, and innovative workshops – plus live demos some of the newest health tech start-ups.
Top Reasons to Attend Dev4Health:
- Innovation Leaders: Hear cutting edge ideas to infuse your technology strategy with the latest insights and methodologies.
- Developers: Benefit from immersive content and hands-on learning by sharing open-source code, applications, interfaces and other resources with like-minded developers.
- Health Systems: Discover the latest health tech products to hit the market with live demos by some of the most innovative start-ups in healthcare.
- All Attendees: Join in-depth panel sessions focusing on health tech trends, including open tools in the U.S. healthcare server; healthcare focused developer programs; artificial intelligence and machine learning; blockchain; and more!
What are you waiting for? If you’re looking to collaborate with developers on building new applications
or discover new tools to enhance the healthcare experience, then Dev4Health is the place to be this spring.
Take advantage of the early bird savings. Save up $100 when you register by March 16, 2018.
Looking for sponsorship opportunities? Please contact Patrick Ryan at 781-424-2755.
RWJF Opioid Challenge: You Can Help
By CHELSEA POLANIECKI AND CHANLY PHILOGENE
Opioid overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under 50 years old. In fact, the majority of drug overdose related deaths involve an opioid. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, deaths from prescription opioids—drugs like oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone—have more than quadrupled since 1999. The U.S. is currently experiencing an opioid epidemic, as more than 2 million Americans have become dependent on, or abused prescription pain pills and street drugs. Substance misuse is not only affecting the users but also their families, friends, and the healthcare system as a whole.
Although improvements have been made to the way opioids are prescribed through clinical practice guidelines, the epidemic has continued to grow. The CDC has made several efforts to combat substance misuse and overdose but there is much more to be done, and you can help. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is committed to supporting those affected by this issue and launched the RWJF Opioid Challenge live, at Health 2.0’s Wintertech conference in January 2018. This innovation challenge calls for tech-enabled solutions that help identify resources, facilities, and educational content for support, as well as platforms for connecting patients, caregivers and peers for peer community.
RWJF has teamed up with Catalyst @ Health 2.0 to identify and incentivize the development of tech-enabled solutions that should aim to support affected individuals (e.g. opioid users, caregivers, peers, family, etc.) and connect them to relevant resources. Every individual faces a different set of challenges, meaning that needs for recovery can be unique and varied.* The challenge is calling on innovators, developers, entrepreneurs and other bright minds to create tools to support those affected by opioid misuse.
Diversifying Digital Health
Earlier this week Health 2.0 held a TECHquality meetup focused on diversity in the digital health industry. We hoped that this event would foster an honest and frank discussion about how we can create diverse workplaces and develop inclusive technology for the people we serve. After speakers, Jean-Luc Neptune, Co-Founder at Athletik Health and Nyala Khan, VP of People at Baby+Co, shared their thoughts, meetup attendees were encouraged to share their own experiences and comments in relation to the topic at hand. Following an engaging and insightful discussion, where people of different backgrounds and walks of life shared their individual viewpoints, the hard questions remained, what more can we do to ensure that our workplaces are not only diverse, but inclusive? How do we ensure that the companies we build with people, embed the diverse perspectives of those people from the very start?
NEJM Blasts “Crusade,” Omits that Its Former Editor Launched It
A blistering attack by the national editor of the New England Journal of Medicine against the “less is more” movement in medicine omitted that the publication’s former editor-in-chief played a foundational role in popularizing the idea of widespread medical waste.
The commentary in late December by Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum, “The Less-Is-More Crusade – Are We Overmedicalizing or Oversimplifying?” has attracted intense attention. Rosenbaum berates a “missionary zeal” to reduce putative overtreatment that she says is putting dangerous pressure on physicians to abstain from recommending some helpful treatments. She also asserts that the research by Dartmouth investigators and others who claim 30 percent waste in U.S. health care, in which she once fervently believed, is actually based on suspect methodology.
What Rosenbaum fails to mention is that the policy consensus she seeks to puncture – that the sheer magnitude of wasted dollars in U.S. health care offers “the promise of a solution without trade-offs” – originated in the speeches, articles and editorials of the late Dr. Arnold Relman, the New England Journal’s editor from 1977 to 1991.Continue reading…
A Patient Experience-Based View of the TEFCA
Let’s give the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) credit for trying. In what’s arguably the first significant piece of policymaking, the newly Republican HHS issued a draft Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) that aims to implement the massively bipartisan 21st Century Cures act mandate to end information blocking. Are they succeeding?
Why should you care? After almost a decade and many tens of $billions spent on health information technology, neither physicians nor patients have access to a longitudinal health record, transparency of quality or cost, access to independent decision support, or even the ability to know what their out-of-pocket cost is going to be. After eight years of regulation, precious little benefit has trickled-down to patients and physicians. This post looks at the TEFCA proposal from the patient experience perspective.
The patient perspective matters because, under HIPAA, patients do not have choice about how our data is accessed or used. This has led to information blocking as hospitals and EHR vendors slow-walk the ability of patients to direct data to information services we choose. Patients lost the “right of consent” in 2002. This puts a regulation-shy administration in a quandary: How do they regulate to implement Cures, when current HIPAA and HITECH-era regulations give all of the power to provider institutions bent on locking-in patients as key to value-based compensation?
Mark Ganz — What’s Your Purpose in Health Care?
Last week at Health 2.0’s Wintertech, held during “health care’s money week” JP Morgan in San Francisco, Cambia CEO Mark Ganz gave a remarkable talk–one you wouldn’t expect from the leader of a big health insurer. He called out pharma for price gouging, he asked what consumers would think about the conversations we are having, but mostly he asked people to think about why they were working in health care. And he did it with a deeply personal set of stories. Everyone there found it very moving and very important, so I wanted to share it with the THCB audience. It’s well worth your time to watch. — Matthew Holt
Are you in SF? What are you doing on Wednesday?
If you’re in San Francisco for JP Morgan Week, you can’t miss the hottest event focusing on new investment trends in health tech and the revolution in choice within the consumer landscape.
Check out the full agenda of our 4th annual WinterTech conference!
Here is what’s happening during our WinterTech conference that makes it unique from every other event happening during JP Morgan Week:
- Mark Ganz, CEO of Cambia Health giving a keynote presentation on how to create seamless health care experiences to meet the needs of consumers.
- Bakul Patel, Associate Director for Digital Health at the FDA in a panel discussion on the opportunities, roadblocks, and regulations within the field of digital therapeutics.
- Investment Strategies Past and Present: a look into 2017 trends, surprises, and flops. Plus predictions for 2018 by VC firms GE Ventures, Canaan, Fifty Years, NEA, and B Capital Group.
- Four chats between 4 VCs and their CEOs on their relationships, how they work together, and where their companies are going next.
- Live demos from some of the most innovative companies in the digital healthcare space includingParsley Health, Neurotrack, Habit, and much more!
- Access to the Investor Breakfast where start-ups and investors discuss business models and explore portfolios.
- Launch winners from previous years – hear what Healthvana, a patient engagement platform that delivers interpreted lab results; and Cardinal Analytx Solutions, which identifies next year’s new high cost members before a high cost event occurs, are up too since they appeared at Health 2.0.
Register today to get the latest on new heath tech investments, see live tech demos, and network with hundreds of health tech VCs, CEOs, and thought leaders.
Your Ticket to an Intimate Chat With Health Tech VCs
There’s so much news from media outlets and bloggers about the next Health Tech investment treads that its difficult to pin point where to focus or what will materialize.
Its much easier when you can actually hear the treads from the investors who are shaping the industry – well Health 2.0 got you covered! At next week’s WinterTech conference, we’re featuring the 4 CEOs and Their VCs panel session.
A spin-off of the popular 3 CEOs session from the Fall Conference, the 4 CEOs and Their VCs session is made up of four, back-to-back interviews between digital health CEOs and the VCs who believe in them. Hear exclusive insight into what’s happening in health tech investments with conversations between:
- Venrock and Robin: Robin is a brand new digital assistant for doctors. Hear Venrock Partner Bryan Roberts and Robin CEO Punit Son discuss the opportunities Venrock sees in Robin.
- 415 and Lemonaid: Patient experience has gotten easier with Lemonaid’s accessible online platform. Lemonaid CEO Paul Johnson sits with investment firm 415 to talk about their business strategy.
- Thrive Capital and Honor: An online service that connects in-home caregivers, seniors and their families, Honor sits down with its investor Thrive Capital to discuss the purpose of their investment.
- Grandrounds and Venrock: Owen Tripp of Grandrounds and Bob Kocher of Venrock discuss their working partnership, and give insight into what those closed-door meetings look like.
From Seed to Series C, don’t miss the opportunity to join the session that is representing each unique stage of the investment cycle. Tickets are selling fast so register today!
Matthew Holt’s EOY 2017 letter (charities/issues/gossip)
Right at the end of every year I write a letter summarizing my issues and charities. And as I own the joint here, I post it on THCB! Please take a look–Matthew Holt
Well 2017 has been quite a year, and last year 2016 I failed to get my end-of-year letter out at all. This I would like to think was due to extreme business but it probably came down to me being totally lazy. On the other hand like many of you I may have just been depressed about the election–2016 was summed up by our cat vomiting on our bed at 11.55 on New Years Eve.
Having said that even though most of you will never comment on this letter and I mostly write it to myself, I have had a few people ask me whether it is coming out this year–so here it goes.
2017 was a big year especially for my business Health 2.0. After 10 years my partner Indu Subaiya and I sold it to HIMSS–the biggest Health IT trade association and conference. And although I used to make fun of HIMSS for being a little bit staid and mainstream, when it came to finding the right partner to take over Health 2.0’s mantel for driving innovation in health technology, they were the ones who stepped up most seriously. From now on the Health 2.0 conferences are part of the HIMSS organization, and Indu is now an Executive Vice President at HIMSS. I’ll still be very involved as chair of the conferences and going to all of them but will (hooray!) be doing a lot less back office & operational work. (Those of you in the weeds might want to know that we are keeping the Health 2.0 Catalyst division for now at least)
That does mean that next year I will have a bit more time to do some new things. I haven’t quite figured out what they are yet but they will include a reboot of (my role at least) on The Health Care Blog and possibly finally getting that book out of the archives into print. But if you have any ideas for me (and I do mean constructive ideas, not just the usual insults!) then please get in touch. You can of course follow me on Twitter (@boltyboy) to see what I’m thinking with only modest filtering!Continue reading…
