Matthew Holt, Co-Chairman of Health 2.0 interviewed Amy Cueva, Chief Experience Officer of Mad*Pow to discuss some of exciting themes behind HxRefactored and what it means to change the experience of health care through design and technology. Amy will be speaking during the HxRefactored conference coming up on April 1-2.
Matthew Holt
HxRefactored: Exclusive Interview with Alan Joseph Williams, Code For America
Health 2.0 Co-Founder, Matthew Holt recently interviewed Alan Joseph Williams, Product Designer and User Researcher at Code for America’s Health Lab, which develops digital services for Californians eligible for or enrolled in social services like SNAP and Medicaid. Alan will be presenting at the HxRefactored Conference April 1-2 in Boston, MA.
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Validic meets Cerner–Drew Schiller speaks
Validic is one of the more interesting companies in what we define as the “data utility layer.” They’ve had a bit of a meteoric rise in the past 2 years, and now have over 45 employees, over 90 customers and are now one of the main names that come up when the conversation turns to “how do we get all that device data into the EHR?” Today they announced a new deal with Cerner (release here). This is the quick interview with CTO Drew Schiller.
[youtube width=”450″ height=”275″]https://youtu.be/yvlXdAQb9lY[/youtube]
Livongo–update on the “new diabetes meter experience”
I spent a day in Chicago last week and caught up with Stephanie Kowalski from Livongo. This is the company that has a very cool new blood glucose meter, with cloud communication, and a careteam and coaching function built in. The CEO is ex- Allscripts boss Glen Tullman (no stranger to building big companies) and the product launched at Health 2.0 last Fall. Take a look at the video to get a sense of the user experience and hear more about the company’s rapid evolution (and to hear me almost choke to death!)
[youtube width=”425″ height=”325″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUSNb0oxF4M[/youtube]
The FDA & Me (or How to Explain Your Test Isn’t a Game)
So you have a great idea for an app. Not so fast: it took two years and over half a million dollars to get ours cleared for marketing by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Our app, DANA uses a mobile phone to records peoples’ reaction time during game-like tests. It also provides questionnaires that help clinicians evaluate brain health. Commissioned from AnthroTronix by the Department of Defense, the app will help diagnose concussion, depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
For something so important, a serious investment of time and money for clearance may not sound extravagant, but few small companies can afford a two-year go-to-market delay, not to mention the significant investment and heartache that goes with it. And although the FDA has tried to facilitate regulation by providing guides like the Mobile Medical Applications Guidance Document and the Mobile Medical Applications website, the regulatory process remains confusing.
Here are five simple lessons from our own experience that will help other entrepreneurs to do the right thing and engage with the FDA:Continue reading…
What’s wrong with Cannon, Halbig & King in 5 tweets
When the latest post from Michael Cannon–he who seeks to sink the subsidies attached to the Federal exchange–hit my inbox, I wondered, “Why don’t his opponents stop arguing the specifics, and instead explain what the Supreme Court ought to do. I also don’t see why Mark Andreeseen (@pmarca) should have all the fun with long Twitter essays. So in only 5 tweets complete with misspellings and other contortions to get my thoughts into 140 characters, this is what I sent back
1/ I might be prepared to concede that @mfcannon is right on the facts of what the wording of the law says (King vs Burwell)
— Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) March 2, 2015
2/ might also concede that @mfcannon is right that the real @JonathanGruber & Senate HELP staffers meant to punish non-excange states
— Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) March 2, 2015
3/ But that doesn't mean that the language would have survived in committee. More likely we'd have House version = one national exchange
— Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) March 2, 2015
4/ And, sorry @mfcannon, the job of SCOTUS is to fix bad laws NOT perpatuate them (Brown vs Bd eductaion. Lawrence vs texas)
— Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) March 2, 2015
5/ Removing the subsidies in King vs Burwell would simply be punishing low inc. people on basis of geography. Is that what @mfcannon wants?
— Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) March 2, 2015
Health 2.0 Asia: Japan Conference Partnership
Tokyo, Japan – Health 2.0 announces the Health 2.0 Asia partnership with MedPeer, Inc. to showcase the Health 2.0 Asia conference Japan on November 4-5, 2015. The conference will be the first of a series of events expanding the global presence for Health 2.0 in Asia. This conference will feature ground-breaking insights and leadership within the global health care technology industry while showcasing cutting-edge technologies for user-generated health care. The conference will become a forum for attendees to build networks for exchanging innovative ideas and developing new business parternships, which will promote active inbound and outbound investment within the health-tech industry. MedPeer, Inc. will expand Health 2.0 activities across Japan in collaboration with local chapters by holding a series of health-tech hackathons.
About Health 2.0
Health 2.0 is the premiere showcase and catalyst for the advancement of new health technologies. Through a global series of conferences, thought leadership roundtables, developer competitions, pilot programs, and leading market intelligence, Health 2.0 drives the innovation and collaboration necessary to transform health and health care.
Media Contact
Sophie Park
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A Master Class In Health Policy with Kavita Patel
The HxRefactored Conference kicks off April 1st in Boston and we are excited to have Kavita Patel giving a Master Class in U.S. Health Policy.” Kavita is a Managing Director at The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC and has a long history working in health reform for both Ted Kennedy and at the Obama White House. I interviewed Kavita to talk health care reform impact, insight, technology and and timing.
Matthew Holt: What are the most important changes that you are currently seeing due to Health Care Reform as well as in the health care system as a whole?
Kavita Patel:I would say the most important change is everybody is now intensely focused on transforming every aspect of health care, not only the consumer experience or people who are not already inside the health care system, but also for patients and then for their family members–whether it’s an insurance company that had massive numbers of enrollees, as a result of the Affordable Care Act and the last wave of 11 million people who signed up, or if it’s the one person’s primary care physician who is now looking at whether or not he or she should be part of the patient centered medical home, because he or she is kind of thinking through what the future of medicine will look like, as well as patients and consumers.Continue reading…
Halamka Speaks: athenahealth & the Future of AMCs as Tech Innovators
It’s always interesting to talk with John Halamka, and last week–after athenahealth bought the IP but apparently not the actual code of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) web-based EHR he’s been shepherding for the past 18 years–I got him on the record for a few minutes. We started on the new deal but given that had already been covered pretty well elsewhere we didn’t really stay there. More fun that way–Matthew Holt
Matthew Holt: The guys across town (Partners) ripped out all the stuff they’ve been building and integrating for the last 30 years and they decided to pay Judy Faulkner over a billion dollars. And you took all the stuff that you’ve been building for the past 15 to 20 years and sold it to Jonathan Bush for money. Does that make you a better businessman than they are?
(Update Note 2/11/15: While I’ve heard from public & private sources that the cost of the Partners project will be between $700m and $1.4 billion, Carl Dvorak at Epic asked me to point out less than 10% of the cost goes to Epic for their fees/license. The rest I assume is external and internal salaries for implementation costs, and of course it’s possible that many of those costs would exist even if Partners kept its previous IT systems).
John Halamka: Well, that is hard to say, but I can tell you that smart people in Boston created all these very early systems back in the 1980s. On one hand, the John Glaser group created a client server front end. I joined Beth Israel Deaconess in 1996 and we created an entirely web-based front end. We have common roots but a different path.
It wasn’t so much that I did this because of a business deal. As I wrote in my blog, there is no benefit to me or to my staff. There are no royalty streams or anything like that. But sure, Beth Israel Deaconess receives a cash payment from Athena. But important to me is that the idea of a cloud-hosted service which is what we’ve been running at Beth Israel Deaconess since the late ’90s hopefully will now spread to more organizations across the country. And what better honor for a Harvard faculty member than to see the work of the team go to more people across the country?
MH: There’s been a lot of debate about the concept of developing for the new world of healthcare using client server technology that has been changed to “sort of” fit the integrated delivery systems over the last 10 years, primarily by Epic but also Cerner and others. In particular how open those systems are and how able they are to migrate to new technology. You’ve obviously seen both sides, you’re obviously been building a different version than that. And a lot of this is obviously about plugging in other tools, other technologies to do things that were never really envisaged back in 1998. You’ve come down pretty strongly on the web-based side of this, but what’s your sense for how likely it is that what has happened over the last five or ten years in most other systems including the one across the street we just mentioned is going to change to something more that looks more like what you had at Beth Israel Deaconess?Continue reading…
Health is Life
We’ve all experienced the crushing agony of a heartbreak, or the deep foundational stress of worrying about how you’ll pay all your bills, or the isolating and bleak reality of a mum or dad or loved one whose health is failing in a way you can’t figure out how to stop – or fix. Life is hard. Now – how hard is all relative … but for most of us, our days are consumed on some level with a pretty significant level of worry. Did you overextend when you bought that house? Is so-and-so gunning for your job? Is it wrong that you secretly and deeply resent your partner because you’re sick of them “never doing anything”?
And how about the real worries – will you have food, electricity, heat, clothing, safety…the worries that consume more people than any of us would care to imagine (The Shriver Report has 1 out of 3 women living ‘on the brink’ – in other words, right smack dab in this reality). For fun – let’s try an exercise marriage counselors use for marriages that are in trouble…they have each of you sit down and write on a piece of paper what matters to you, and what you think matters to your partner. Then they compare the two. And what do you think stands out in stark testament to the current state of the relationship? Pretty much zero overlap. You don’t understand what matters to me, and I don’t understand what matters to you.
Let’s extend that analogy to the healthcare space…picture a typical day for many of us in the health communication space, for example. How are we spending our days? Dreaming up new and more imaginative ways to lecture about the importance of getting a colon cancer screening, or eating well, or taking your blood pressure medication, or getting in for your annual Medicare wellness visit, or or or…
And a question for those of us working on this stuff. If you turned all that passion and intensity you bring with you to work, and to the task of telling others how to live in a way that complies with HEDIS this or STAR that or [insert any other traditional health quality metric here]…if you turned that lens on yourself – how are you doing? Do you eat the way you should? How’s your weight? Do you sleep the recommended 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night? How are you on your preventive screenings – are you up to date? Did you exercise at all in the last week?
I’d bet the answer to all those questions is “no”. Continue reading…
