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Matthew Holt

“Putting Care In Context” Design Challenge Winners Announced

Aug 14, 2014

Innovations Help Patients Share Their Lives with Health Care Providers

The California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), Mad*Pow and Health 2.0 today announced the winners of the “Putting Care In Context” design challenge which sought innovative ways to help patients take an active role in sharing information about hurdles in their lives that impact health.

The three winning solutions each empower patients to share information about issues like hunger, poor housing conditions, stress, and isolation with their health care providers. The winners are:

First place: Healthify is a web-based platform used to assess patients’ social and behavioral health needs, refer patients to appropriate resources to meet those needs, and engage patients around their social determinants via interactive texting. The platform also provides dashboards for managed care plans and case managers to use, allowing them to better manage the social needs in their population and to efficiently search for social services.

Second place: Share4Care is a design prototype of an iPad app that would allow patients to document stress levels and issues in their life while in a clinical waiting room. The Share4Care app would then calculate a “Life Change Score” and assign a color (green, yellow, or red) that would be immediately available to the patient’s physician, prompting them to ask about factors that could impact the patient’s health.

Third place: MyDay Media Messaging Journal is a web-based platform that patients use to document their barriers to health through photos and text messages. The MyDay website and mobile app allow providers to view patients’ journal entries and follow-up to build patient-provider rapport, clarify journal entry content, and connect patients with resources.

The creators of these ideas will share $10,000 in prize money for their thoughtful, original work.

“We believe that healthcare providers must understand the hurdles in a patient’s life that can be a barrier to good health,” says Amy Cueva, Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Mad*Pow. “These winning concepts can help engage patients to share this important personal information, leading to more effective care.”

The challenge was first announced at the HxRefactored conference on May 14, 2014 in Brooklyn, NY. A healthcare experience, design and technology conference, HxRefactored fused the technical and creative elements of Mad*Pow’s Healthcare Experience Design Conference and Health 2.0’s Health: Refactored.

“The winning solutions – all at varying stages of development – demonstrate different ways that patients can be engaged to share information about their lives outside the clinic walls” said Giovanna Giuliani, senior program officer with the California HealthCare Foundation. “From a one-time assessment in the waiting room, to a daily social media-inspired approach, to a more developed web-based screening tool, these solutions will spark new ways to think about promoting conversations and care that addresses the whole person.”

For more information on the design challenge and the winning entries, visit http://bit.ly/CareInContext.

About the California HealthCare Foundation

The California HealthCare Foundation works as a catalyst to fulfill the promise of better health care for all Californians, supporting ideas and innovations that improve quality, increase efficiency, and lower the costs of care. For more information, visit www.chcf.org.

About Mad*Pow

Mad*Pow is a design agency that improves the experiences people have with technology, organizations and each other. Using human-centered design, Mad*Pow creates strong multi-channel experience strategies, intuitive digital experiences and streamlined processes for its clients. The company has offices in Boston, Portsmouth, NH and Louisville. For more information, visit www.madpow.com.

About Health 2.0

Health 2.0 promotes, showcases, and catalyzes new technologies in health care through a worldwide series of conferences, code-a-thons, prize challenges, and leading market intelligence. Visit www.health2con.com for more info.

Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO to Keynote Health 2.0

Jul 29, 2014• 8

Announcing Wearables Health Tech Runway Show and New Companies, Panels, Sessions and Speakers!

Health 2.0 announces Bernard J. Tyson, Chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente, as a keynote alongside visionary physicians Eric Topol, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Samsung’s President Young Sohn at the Health 2.0 8th Annual Fall Conference this coming Sept. 21-24 in Santa Clara, CA. This year, Health 2.0 is set to host the very first Wearable Tech Fashion Runway as a part of the larger session on Consumer Tech & Wearables: Powering Healthy Lifestyles. The panel will also showcase data utility layer platforms from tech giants such as Intel, Qualcomm, WebMD, and Walgreens, which are working with these trackers to provide a complete consumer health solution. Once again,Health 2.0 leads the industry with never before seen technologies, panels, and discussions based on industry classifications of patient-provider communication, consumer facing products, professional facing products, and data analytics.

Health 2.0 8th Annual Fall Conference highlights include:

Consumer Tech & Wearables: The newest addition to the Health 2.0 agenda is The Wearable Tech Fashion Runway which features a multitude of wearable health tech in addition to data utility layer platforms from giants such as Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm, WebMD and Walgreens.

Big Names, Big Issues, Big Solutions: Notable Industry leaders and companies bring their solutions and knowledge to tackle some of the most pressing issues within health care. Newly added to the agenda are Ryan Howard (Practice Fusion), Mike & Albert Lee (myfitnesspal), Kent Bradley (Safeway), Jonathan Bush (athenahealth), Girish Navani (eClinicalWorks), Andy Krackov (California Healthcare Foundation), Jacob Reider (ONC), Rajni Aneja (Humana), andDena Bravata, (Castlight Health). A special bonus feature includes ademo of the latest Samsung Electronics platform and product–SAMI and the SIMBand–with President Young Sohn interviewed by Indu Subaiya (Health 2.0).

Health care Data Analytics: This topic covers the volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value of health care data and analytics. Highlights include genomics, non-invasive diagnosis tools, and integrated data collection to uncover new discoveries, personalize medicine, and develop new care protocols with speakers from IBM Watson, Merck, Predilytics, and many more.

Start-Ups, Entrepreneurship & Investors: This year, Health 2.0 is poised to offer new opportunities for start-ups and entrepreneurs during the fall conference. Traction: Health 2.0’s Start-Up Championship is the inaugural pitch contest enabling series A-ready start-ups to showcase their business plan in front of a judging panel of renowned venture capitalists. The Bootstrapped Basecamp will put the most innovative seed stage start-ups inside the Health 2.0 Exhibit Hall to be found by potential partners, investors and customers.

The 8th Annual Health 2.0 Conference showcases over 200 LIVE demos, 150+ speakers, and 50+ sessions across four full days with an extensive audience of 2,100+ health care professionals, health care and health tech executives, thought leaders, policy makers, and entrepreneurs. A multitude of never before seen technologies will be presented on stage,while the conference offers ground-breaking insights into the policy, tools, and solutions of new health care technology.

Registration information is available here. Prices for the conference are set to increase on Wed. 30th, July. The full agenda of speakers and companies can be found on the main conference website here.

Halbig corpus interruptus

Jul 23, 2014• 59

By MATTHEW HOLT

In more stunning proof that America’s 18th century style governing process just doesn’t work, a subset of a regional Federal court ruled against part of Obamacare. The Halbig ruling is certain to be overturned by the full DC court and then probably will stay that way after it makes it’s way through the Supremes–at least Jonathan Cohn thinks so.

But think about what the Halbig ruling is about. Its proponents say that when Congress (well, just the Senate actually as it was their version of the bill that passed) designed the ACA, they wanted states only to run exchanges and only people buying via states to get subsidies. But that they also wanted a Federal exchange for those states that couldn’t or (as it turned out) wouldn’t create their own. But apparently they meant that subsidies wouldn’t be available on the Federal exchange. That would just sail through Logic 101 at any high school. Well only if the teacher was asleep, as apparently most Senators were.

Now two judges interpret what was written down to imply that subsidies should only be available on state exchanges–even though logic, basic common sense and fairness would dictate that if we’re going to subsidize health insurance we should do it for everyone regardless of geography.

Don’t forget that in the House version of the bill there was only a Federal exchange. Continue reading…

Jessie Gruman: Tribute to a Tightrope Walker

Jul 17, 2014• 6

By Michael Millenson

When I heard that Jessie Gruman had died, that her powerful voice on behalf of patients had been stilled and gone silent years too soon, I thought of Phillipe Petite, the high-wire artist who famously tread a cable strung between the two World Trade Center buildings back in 1974.

Jessie’s balancing act did not take place on so visible a stage, but her death-defying dance equally amazed those who knew, worked with, respected and loved her.

On the one side, she was persistently pulled down by cancer. There was Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1973 when she was just 20, setting the stage for repercussions of treatment that would dog her ever after: cervical cancer eight years later; colon cancer in 2004; and a diagnosis of stomach cancer in 2011 that returned after a too-brief hiatus. There was also pericarditis, a dangerous heart condition.

Counterbalancing that burden was the uplift of a woman whose “bouts” with cancer shaped, but never defined her. She was a social psychologist who was an early part of work on the chronic care model; the founder of a policy and research center dedicated to empowering patients in health care and in health; a prolific writer and author of a landmark book on what to do with a diagnosis of serious disease; and for many, a personal inspiration.

On the morning of July 14, Jessie finally fell off the tightrope, as we all must eventually do, dying at home. She was 60 years old.

You can’t really understand the outpouring of affection, appreciation and aching loss Jessie inspired just by browsing her impressive bio. She was sharp and funny, with wry asides directed at any pretension exhibited by allies or adversaries alike.

However, Jessie did far more than dish and dis. She was a superlative builder; of an organization, yes, but more importantly, of a body of work that prompted government policymakers and uncounted health care organizations to pay greater attention to the unmet needs of patients. She also reached out directly to fellow patients to help. In all these activities, she married intellectual rigor and careful attention to evidence – techie trendiness, for example, did not impress her – with emotional honesty. Jessie spoke what often goes unspoken, candidly acknowledging how horribly scary and alone it feels to be seriously ill.

As she wrote in her book, AfterShock: What to Do When the Doctor Gives You – or Someone You Love –a Devastating Diagnosis:

Every time I have received bad health news, I have felt like a healthy person who has been accidentally drop-kicked into a foreign country: I don’t know the language, the culture is unfamiliar, I have no idea what is expected of me, I have no map and I desperately want to find my way home.

Jessie told one interviewer: “I want people to know how to take care of themselves and pay attention to the urgency of their situation even when their heart is broken.” Later, she repeated that theme in an article for Health Affairs that called for policies to support patients and their families in their time of distress.Continue reading…

Physicians Interactive Acquires MedHelp In Move to Bridge Consumer and Provider Worlds

Jun 25, 2014

By Kim Krueger

Earlier this week, Health 2.0 promised some big news showing how the provider and consumer facing worlds of Health 2.0 are coming together. Today, they officially shared that Physicians Interactive has acquired MedHelp. Both companies are stalwarts in the Health 2.0 world, and their merging serves as further evidence that consumer and professional facing tools are continuing to connect in new and meaningful ways.

Physicians Interactive has been onstage at Health 2.0 multiples times, but always in a professional facing role. Tools like Omnio, a provider-to-provider content sharing app, play to Physicians Interactive strengths, which center on accessing and communicating with an extensive provider network — some 300,000 doctors to be exact.

MedHelp, on the other hand, another Health 2.0 staple, is nothing if not a consumer-oriented tool. Their web-based online health community helps individuals actively manage their health with a host of tools, including patient forums, physician search engines, provider communication tools, and personalized trackers.

MedHelp has grown organically (CEO John deSouza always tells us “no bought traffic”!) and gone from communities to trackers to an active health data utility layer that takes in data from many devices and trackers. In one recent partnership, demoed at Health 2.0 last fall, MedHelp took a step towards connecting consumers and providers with an app that delivers both lab results and an expert opinion, if the consumer elects to receive one. However, connecting to providers was still on the edges of MedHelp’s capabilities.

Health Datapalooza Exclusive Interview: Dwayne Spradlin, CEO, Health Data Consortium

May 30, 2014

Interview by Matthew Holt, Co-Chairman, Health 2.0

In just two days, Health 2.0 will be attending Health Datapalooza in Washington, D.C. from June 1-3. In this exclusive interview, Dwayne Spradlin, CEO, Health Data Consortium will highlight the new sessions, panels, workshops, and speakers you can look forward to at Health Datapalooza! As an additional bonus, Spradlin gives insight on how data is driving health care innovation, and sheds light on new and on-going projects of the Health Data Consortium.

Samsung Throws Kitchen Sink onto the Wrist

May 29, 2014

BY MATTHEW HOLT

Yesterday phone and electronics giant Samsung rushed out its next step in health related hardware. Samsung was clearly trying to get this out the door and in the press before Apple’s forthcoming announcement of something health-related –or I assume that’s what their industrial espionage told them Apple was about to reveal (just kidding guys!). And some people (well, Techcrunch) were clearly unimpressed.

The most compelling moment which I captured (poorly) in the video above was the demo of the new SIMBAND–albeit a concept rather than an available product. (In fact a couple of their partners told me that no-one outside the company has one). In the SIMBAND are a stack of new sensors which attempt to use the wrist to monitor not only heart rate, but blood pressure, temperature, EKG and do it all continuously. You can see a rather better video of the demo from Gizmodo, which I cued up to start at the right place.

They also announced a fully open platform (what at Health 2.0 we dub the Data Utility Layer) called Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions (SAMI) to accept and spit out all types of health related data.

This is all potentially very impressive. Samsung’s first two attempts at Smart Watches have fizzled, but they tend to keep coming back, and now are pretty much the best at Smart Phones. (You fan bois can keep your teeny iPhone screens!) But can they make the health related smartwatch work? I’ve three quick assessments/questions.

Thinking Out Loud About A New Approach To Digital Health Innovation – PART 3

May 12, 2014

By Jean-Luc Neptune, MD

What Digital Health Innovation Initiatives Did We Pursue at Health 2.0?

In my last post I talked about the many provider- and innovator-facing issues limiting the adoption of digital health technologies in health delivery enterprise settings (e.g. hospitals, physician offices, etc.). As I alluded to in the piece there are some approaches that are working well and one in particular that I think gives us a chance to really accelerate the pace of innovation. In today’s piece I’ll talk about some of these initiatives.

At the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge program we focused on using prize competitions as the primary tool to help health care providers and other stakeholders innovate and effect change at their organizations. Health 2.0, with the support of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) and a broad range of for-profit and non-profit partners, pioneered a number of different prize competition formats including – hackathons, challenges, and pilot programs:

Hackathons

A hackathon (what we also called a “code-a-thon”) is an in-person competition event in which developers, designers, technologists, health providers, researchers and others work together closely over a very short period of time (generally 1 to 2 days) to build technology solutions to health care problems. Hackathons are generally focused on a specific theme and center around the utilization of a specific dataset, API (application programming interface), or other technology.

In terms of the potential to help patients and providers the most impactful hackathon project we managed was the “Code-A-Palooza”, a 2-day event that took place as part of the 4th Annual Health Datapalooza (formerly known as the Health Data Initiative Forum). The Code-A-Palooza challenged participants to utilize newly-released Medicare claims data and other data sources to help providers better understand their patient panels from both a clinical and financial perspective. The event generated a number of interesting ideas and prototype applications that had real applicability in the provider setting and could make their way into the clinic with further development. The Code-A-Palooza was successful for a number of reasons, including:

Focus – Our partners at HHS and ONC did a great job in defining a relatively narrow focus for the event and specifying a clear aim – i.e. helping providers develop actionable insights from a very important dataset.
High Value Resource – The Code-A-Palooza gave developers access to a very high value source of information, namely Medicare part A and B claims for 2011, a dataset that had been largely unavailable to the innovator community in the past.
Support – Finally, teams at HHS and ONC provided a high level of support to event participants, including an excellent “pre-game” orientation session, which allowed the attendees to hit the ground running. In addition, a number of participants in the hackathon were physicians, as was one of the event organizers (the ONC’s Rebecca Mitchell), which greatly helped the participants develop insight into real issues faced by providers.

Overall, hackathons are an interesting innovation tool with a great deal of potential, which is why a number of major technology companies, most notably Facebook, use hackathons on a regular basis to stimulate internal innovation and experiment with new ideas. Hackathons can help innovators access the health system and develop a better understanding of relevant health care issues through collaboration with providers sponsoring or participating in an event.

Doximity Raises Another $54M to Pursue LinkedIn’s Business Model Too

Apr 29, 2014• 3

By Kim Krueger & Matthew Holt

Doximity, known as the LinkedIn for doctors and a frequent Health 2.0 participant, raised $54 million in a Series C funding round led by T. Rowe Price and Draper Fisher Jurveston with participation from Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

Doximity claims more than 40% of US physicians as active users, and in January of this year announced that their physician network has grown to more than 250,000 members.

Doctors can use Doximity to collaborate on cases, further their careers, and stay up to date on specialty-specific news, but that’s not where they make their revenue.

“There are a lot of things we can do to make medical networking more efficient,” Doximity CEO Jeff Tangney told Health 2.0 when asked how the funds would be used.

“If you think about it, how would your life be different if you weren’t able to use email in your job? How out of touch would you be? That’s what it’s like to be a US physician. We see a lot of opportunity to improve the connectivity of physicians as a new business area.”

Like LinkedIn, Doximity is a recruiting tool for people looking to hire doctors. Tangney didn’t reveal all the numbers, but he did say that Doximity was cash flow positive in January for the first time. He also said that Doximity has 55 employees, somewhere around 200 hospital clients, and that a subscription to the recruiting product costs $12,000 per seat per year to send 50 messages per month.

With some back of the envelope math, and a guess of a burn of about $10-12 million a year, it figures out to about four subscribed seats per hospital. With about 5,000 hospitals in the US and some other revenue streams to pursue, it looks like Doximity has room to grow at a bare minimum.

Open Call: The NY Digital Health Accelerator

Apr 2, 2014

Interview with NYeC Exec. Director, Dave Whitlinger

Health 2.0 sat down with the NY Digital Health Accelerator’s Dave Whitlinger to learn about the work the organization is doing with digital health startups in New York. If you’re interested in applying for the program, please visit http://digitalhealthaccelerator.com/

1. Why have you decided to launch another Digital Health Accelerator class?

The first Accelerator program surpassed our expectations and was tremendously successful. Having seen the impact the program had we felt that continuing the Accelerator could have a positive impact on New York State’s Health IT ecosystem by helping to foster digital health innovation in the state. The eight members of the Inaugural Class, who graduated in May, 2013, launched 17 pilots with their provider mentors, created over 120 new high tech jobs in New York, and raised over $12 MM from sources outside of the program. In addition, two of the companies have been acquired. We are very proud of the accomplishments of the first Accelerator Class members and we are excited to the launch the 2014 program.

2. How did the alliance with the Partnership Fund for New York City come about?

The New York eHealth Collaborative was formed in 2006 to advance health care information technology) in New York State and to develop the Statewide Health Information Network of New York, or SHIN-NY, a technology platform will connect electronic health records across New York State. The Partnership Fund for New York City was formed as a private fund with a civic mission to create jobs in New York City. The collaboration between our two organizations is logical: the Partnership Fund is committed to company and job growth and the New York eHealth Collaborative wants to accelerate health It innovation using top talent. The timing of the Accelerator is perfect: New York has one of the most vibrant digital health markets and is increasingly becoming a center of entrepreneurial growth.