Author Archives

Matthew Holt

Matthew Holt Interviews PlushCare Founder Ryan McQuaid

Jan 31, 2014• 2

By KIM KUEGER

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFqF0T1mYPQ#action=share[/youtube]

Ryan McQuaid, former Head of Product for AT&T mHealth and friend of Health 2.0, joined Matthew Holt to discuss the launch of his brand new startup PlushCare. And when we say brand new, we mean as of writing this post, their Indiegogo campaign is a mere 23 hours old. PlushCare combines elements of telehealth and concierge medicine to provide basic health care via phone, email, and video chat for $10 per month. Busy working professionals can use the service to connect with Stanford MDs for same-day diagnosis and treatment of illnesses or injuries. The physicians provide advice, prescribe medicine, and will refer directly to primary care providers and specialists if necessary.

PlushCare removes the hassle of scheduling an in-person doctor visit, and provides the same care at lower costs. In addition, for each individual that purchases PlushCare, the company provides one child a lifetime of immunity to measles. PlushCare is currently accepting a limited number of members via their Indiegogo campaign to validate demand and user test. Several other companies are using a similar model of tech-enabled services, including American Well and Teladoc, but the space is sure to see more activity at the prospect of pushing basic care out of the doctor’s office in a way that is convenient for consumers and increases provider efficiency.

Providers, Trackers, & Money: What You Need to Know About Health 2.0

Jan 14, 2014• 3

By Kim Krueger

The cloud, web, and mobile-based technologies developing in health that we call Health 2.0 had a big year in 2013 and look to be continuing full steam ahead in 2014.

Three things to know as the year takes off:

1. Professionals Facing Growth

Health 2.0 tools have been primarily consumer facing, but we’re beginning to see the gradual integration of Health 2.0 tools for professionals at the edges of the enterprise world in realms like patient care communication (WelVu), practice management (Simple Admit), and clinician workflow (Zipnosis).

Population health management in particular is an area where Health 2.0 companies (Phytel, Evolent) are experiencing relative success answering new demands from provider organizations needing to manage patient populations in different ways. Traditional enterprise software has not been designed for this type of challenge.

While Health 2.0 infiltrates the edges of the enterprise world, professional facing Health 2.0 tools are making significant inroads into the core workflow of small practice organizations. Practice Fusion, CareCloud, and Kareo are a few examples of companies making progress in this market.

2. Wearables and Trackers Explode, Divide

The tracking space continues to grow explosively with the addition, by our estimates, of around 100 new tools for self-management or tracking in 2013, and a whole slew of new tools that debuted at CES 2014. However, the tracking and wearables world is experiencing a division between consumer-oriented products and those with more clinical applications.

The consumer side of the equation is rife with interesting technology, including watches, clips, cuffs, and sleep tracking devices. Google’s latest purchase of Nest is vaguely related to this space as innovators continue to move towards smart tracking of the body and human activity generally. Of course, we are at the top of the hype cycle regarding wearables, but in general, tracking is growing rapidly and is increasingly becoming more passive and automatic in nature.

BetterFit Technologies Joins Forces with Ginger.io

Dec 9, 2013

By Indu Subaiya

In this exclusive interview Indu Subaiya, CEO of Health 2.0 talks with Ginger.io’s CEO Anmol Madan and Julia Winn, previous CEO of BetterFit Technologies, to discuss how their respective companies came together to make sense of the duality of active and passive patient data collection. They also dive into the challenges facing clinicians to make timely interventions across a large-scale patient population and how Ginger.io is creating the solution.

Join Health 2.0 at the 2013 mHealthSummit on Monday December 9th in Washington DC to see Julia Winn demo how BetterFit Technologies has integrated with Ginger.io on the panel Future of Self-Tracking and Personalized Medicine. Register here.

Indu Subaiya: Let me start by welcoming you, Anmol and Julia, to the conversation. We’re looking forward to having you at Health 2.0. Why don’t we begin by starting with you, Anmol. Give us a bit of a background and history of Ginger.io. We had you present at Health 2.0 in 2011. Tell us a bit about your roles in the company and how you’ve developed in the last couple of years.

Anmol Madan: We’ve been around for about 2 ½ years and presented at Health 2.0 in our very early days. At Ginger.io we work with passive mobile phone data and behavior analytics for chronic patient populations. For providers and other players in the health care ecosystem, we help them manage their patient populations better so we help identify which of their patients are likely asymptomatic at that point of time. The idea is to enable doctors, nurses, and also family members and friends to reach out to their patients and support them when they need help the most.

Indu Subaiya: The term that you use often in describing what you do is ‘passive data’. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that means specifically and how you distinguish passive data from other types of data that consumers are collecting about themselves?

Anmol Madan: Absolutely. Every one of us is carrying a mobile phone and it’s an incredibly powerful diary of your life because it has all sorts of sensors built in. There is a tremendous amount of data generated, and the complexity around interpreting this data, delivering insights, and making them actionable is a really interesting problem for us at Ginger.io.

A Global Movement Prepping For Lift Off

Dec 6, 2013

By MATTHEW HOLT

I’ve been a busy world traveler lately. The focus of the health care tech and policy crowd in the US has been on the fix to one high visibility website. Before I talk about the rest of the world it’s worth noting that the Administration painted itself into a corner here.

When healthcare.gov failed on take-off they didn’t make the obvious choice of letting other brokers and plans enroll people directly–and worry about correcting subsidies on the back end. I spoke with one big online broker this week who told me that his company still couldn’t get reliable access to the subsidy calculator API, and so can’t enroll people. I suggested the solution to that back in October but apparently no one is listening at HHS–although Sen Mary Landrieu was. The White House was however listening to the Fox news crowd ranting about cancelled insurance policies and made the bad policy (if necessary political) call to allow current individual market policies to continue–even if they are rightly now illegal under the ACA.

But elsewhere the impetus that the US has been seeing on the health technology side–with over $2 billion in venture funding this year–is spreading. The UK just confirmed that it’s releasing the equivalent of $800 million for new health technology, and we just returned from a very successful Health 2.0 Europe conference. All kinds of activity is going on over there–did you know there were over 100 digital health start-ups in Finland & the Baltics alone? Well, you do now.

Today the Health 2.0 international roadshow is in Sao Paulo, Brazil–a city that has the size and energy of New York–albeit before Guliani cleaned up the graffiti. And yes, even in Latin America, there’s lots of activity in using technology to change health care. I’ll tell you more next time, but it’s clear that there’s way more than one website in healthcare.

Hope to see you in Brazil or at at our Health 2.0 at the mhealth Summit Session in DC on Monday.

–

-Matthew Holt

Innovation In Care Transitions: Who’s Buying?

Dec 5, 2013• 1

MEETINGS

A few weeks ago Lisa Suennen, founding partner of Psilos Group and fledging best-seller author, wrote “Times of massive system transformation, such as we are in today, pave the way for new market entrants and disruptive technologies a la Clayton Christensen’s stories about other industries that have endured dramatic change. ” She was talking about health insurance exchanges, but could just as well have been talking about care transitions.

Health 2.0 Advisors is the Innovation Analytics and Acceleration business unit of Health 2.0, helping companies make sense of the – often ‘noisy’ – innovation landscape. Recently, innovation in care transition improvement became an important area of demand among hospitals and many startups have been developing new technologies, tools, and solutions to improve care transitions. Next week, Health 2.0 Advisors will be publishing a report that synthesizes barriers to adoption of such innovation in hospitals, lessons learned from those who succeeded, and share information about untapped areas of opportunity.

This report is based on a project done for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which included interviews with (100+) CIOs, CMIOs of hospitals, as well as startups of varying sizes and degrees of success in working with hospitals.

Check out the special presentation of highlights from this report during the mHealth Summit in Washington D.C. on the 8th. The report will be available for download after that and I will write a follow up post with some additional highlights and perspectives. If you want to receive a copy of this report but cannot make it to the mHealth Summit, send an email to ma***@********on.com and we will email you the download link after the mHealth Summit presentation.

Not Your Grandpa’s Health IT: Highlights from Health 2.0’s 7th Annual Fall Conference

Dec 3, 2013

Nancy Fabozzi, Principal Analyst at Connected Health shares her thoughts.

We recently attend the Health 2.0 7^th Annual Fall Conference held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in early October. This meeting is held every fall in the San Francisco area and is considered to be one of the premier events to gage the latest trends in disruptive health IT, particularly related to consumer health and patient engagement.

The conference was put on by Health 2.0, a San Francisco-based organization that provides events and media services designed to showcase innovative companies, technologies, and thought leaders focused on shaking up the status quo in healthcare. They also run the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, a platform for connecting healthcare organizations to health technology developers, operate a media channel, and provide market intelligence services among other things. Health 2.0’s various conferences, developer challenges, and live code-a-thons have a global reach, extending across major U.S. cities as well as Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and India. Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya, M.D. founded the organization in 2007. Holt serves as Co-Chairman of Health 2.0.

His background includes over 20 years in healthcare and healthcare IT market research and strategy consulting, and he is also the founder and publisher of The Health Care Blog, a highly influential and popular blog that features contributions from leading figures across the healthcare industry. The blog launched in 2003 and currently attracts around 150,000 visitors a month. Indu Subaiya, Health 2.0’s Co-Chairman and CEO, is a physician who also has a background in strategy consulting and business. The Health 2.0 enterprise has become a powerhouse in the world of health IT start ups. According to their website, the organization has introduced over 500 technology companies to the world stage, hosted more than 11,000 attendees at their conferences and code-a-thons, and awarded over $5,277,000 in prizes through their developer challenge program. In addition, they have inspired the formation of 70 new chapters in cities around the world.

We Love to Talk About Our Lives. What About Our Deaths?

Nov 27, 2013• 5

By Alexandra Drane, Leigh Calabrese-Eck & Matthew Holt

Most of us find ourselves pretty fascinating… flipping through photos and slowing down for the ones where we’re included, tweeting our favorite tidbits of information, facebook-ing progress on this or that…

We find other people captivating as well. In fact, there’s a meme going around on facebook where people share a handful of things that most people don’t know about them – and there’s a great joy in learning these tidbits about the friends and family we think we know so well.

This Thanksgiving, we’re asking our friends and family to try this exercise, but with a twist – we want to know how they’d answer just five questions on their end-of-life preferences.

What? Are you CRAZY? Talk about how you’d want to die over Thanksgiving? Yup – that’s exactly what we’re suggesting. You know why? Because this is a conversation you absolutely want to have exactly when you DON’T need to have it… and it’s a conversation you need to have with your loved ones. Our hope for you this Thanksgiving is that you’ll have the luxury of checking both those boxes.

Come to the Health 2.0 session at the 2013 mHealth Summit

Nov 27, 2013

Join Health 2.0 for an afternoon at the mHealthSummit – Dec 9th near Washington DC, at the Gaylord Convention Center!

First, we reveal the first ever Health 2.0 Annual Report – an insider’s guide to the 7th Annual Fall Conference, our biggest event yet. With company profiles that detail products, services, and why each presenter was selected for our stage, the Report captures all the trends and analysis you may have missed. Pre-order your copy of the report by emailing Kim Krueger. Available December 10th.

While the government is scrambling to get their exchange up and running smoothly, other tools are popping up everywhere for consumers to make smarter decisions about their insurance coverage. Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and Matthew Holt take the stage in The New Marketplace to review companies making waves in health care insurance.

Don’t miss Future of Self-Tracking and Personalized Medicine and Clinical and Population Data for Transforming Care which will cover the latest consumer quantifying tools, and how health care professionals are aggregating millions of these patient data points to streamline and provide better care.

Unmentionables is back! Leigh Calabrese-Eck of Eliza moderates this session about life’s buffers and magnifiers.

We’ll wrap the afternoon by revealing the new Health 2.0 Database, a go-to aggregated source for all players in the industry today.

LIVE demos from: GetInsured – WebMD – ConnectedHealth – Intuit – Ok Copay – Pokitdok – Azumio – BetterFit Technology – Withings – Aetna CarePass – Humetrix – Alere – Elation EMR – athenahealth – ManTherapy – MeQuillibrium – UT MD Anderson – Sexual Health Innovations – and more!

You can register for this session as a stand-alone or in addition to the whole event.

Worldone+Sermo’s next steps

Nov 18, 2013• 3

By Matthew Holt

Worldone+Sermo is the combination created last year of physician research company Worldone Interactive and the physician community Sermo. Sermo was an early Health 2.0 favorite that somewhat lost its way with both its early business model and a dive into politics, but behind it was an interesting experiment in clinical crowdsourcing.

Peter Kirk is the CEO of the combined business and I spoke to him in advance of his appearance at Health 2.0 Europe today in London. What’s clear is that Sermo is both poised to expand internationally and going to grow as a serious platform for clinical exchanges among professionals Watch the interview above to learn much more.

And one charity Sermo is supporting, called Floating Doctors, is showing really innovative use of the platform to help patients in very remote regions get expert diagnoses. The second video is well worth watching and gives a great example of the iConsult product. And if you are in London today, Peter will tell you more!

New York’s Digital Health Revolution

Nov 11, 2013• 15

By David Whitlinger

There’s a quiet revolution going on in New York State. While the national debate continues about Obamacare and how to reduce healthcare expenditures, New York has already taken action. Thanks to a significant investment in technology and operational capacity, New York State is building a digital network of electronic medical records that will literally transform how patient care is provided and deliver major cost savings. It’s called the Statewide Health Information Network of New York or SHIN-NY. And, it puts New York State far out ahead of all other states when it comes to Health IT.

In a tech-savvy world, consumers want healthcare to be as easy to manage as banking, shopping and all their other utilities. They want to be involved and proactive about their own health. In fact, a recent survey indicated that 41% of consumers said they would switch doctors if theirs did not use electronic medical records. Now, the SHIN-NY will give patients safe and secure access to all of their records, eliminating the hassle of faxing medical records between providers, remembering their health histories and keeping track of prescriptions.

Physicians and healthcare providers will be able to make better, more informed medical decisions for their patients. They will be able to reduce medical errors, avoid potentially harmful drug interactions and avoid duplicative or unnecessary lab and radiology tests that can add excessive cost to patients and insurance providers. Importantly, it will allow doctors to collaborate so they can coordinate care for patients that have more than one condition and see multiple physicians.

Nowhere will this be more important than in the Medicare and Medicaid population.