Author Archives

Matthew Holt

Announcing the Winners and Finalists of the RWJF Hospital Price Transparency Challenge!

Oct 1, 2013

RWJF

With the Health 2.0 Fall Conference underway, we’re excited to to announce the winners of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Hospital Price Transparency Challenge! The Foundation launched the RWJF Hospital Price Transparency Challenge on June 3, 2013 at the Health Datapalooza tasking innovators to build tools and visualizations that can enable consumers to make more informed decisions based on recently release CMS hospital inpatient and outpatient pricing data.

This challenge was broken into two categories: the Visualization Category and the Apps & Tools Category. The Visualization Category tasked innovators to build interactive or static visualizations that can better display aspects of the pricing data like regional patterns or differences by procedure while the Apps & Tools Category challenged teams to create a tool or app that allows users to analyze and potentially leverage the data for purchasing decisions or to negotiate hospital bills.

The foundation received a tremendous response from the technology and design community, with over 130 total submissions received for both categories. Health 2.0 is thrilled to announce the results!

Interactive Visualization Category Winners:

1st place ($9,000): Optimal Hospital by Adam McCann
2nd place ($7,000): Clinic Optimizer by Drake Pruitt, Mauro Brunato, and Roberto Battiti
3rd place ($3,000): Crystal Care by Sagar Sawant

Static Visualization Category Winners:

1st place ($6,000): Imaginary Office by Esther Chak, Mary-Jo Valentino
2nd place ($3,500): wHealth by Edward Kim
3rd place ($1,500): Hospital Prices and Consumer Assessment Survey by Melvin Hill

For the applications/tools category, five finalist were chosen out of 85 submissions! It was a close race, no doubt. These teams won $5,000 each, and are now tasked with building out their conceptual designs into real applications! The five finalists were:

Consumer Reports by Chris Bailey
Haberham Health by Jacob Byrne
Nerdwallet Health by Christina LaMontagne
ProcedureTap by Tony Webster
ReferMe by Arjun Ohri

Learn more about the challenge HERE and stay tuned for results from Phase II of the Apps & Tools Category of the challenge that will be announced at the mHealth Summit in December!

Five Must-See New Technologies for Hospitals at Health 2.0

Sep 26, 2013• 3

By Lori Houston

More than ever, hospitals are squeezed by demands to reduce costs, operate more efficiently, improve patient safety and outcomes, reduce readmissions, and earn high patient satisfaction ratings. We’ve entered an era where accountable care and pay for performance increasingly dictate hospital revenues.

While technology alone can’t enable hospitals to meet their challenges, there’s a burst of innovation around health tech tools that offer hospitals new pathways to harnessing data, managing performance, and providing better care all around.

What better opportunity for hospital CIOs and CTOs to get a close look at emerging possibilities than the upcoming Health 2.0 2013 Fall Conference?

Here’s a sampling of five budding technologies with game-changing potential for hospitals.

Health Recovery Solutions’ has developed a care management system that scores discharged hospital patients on their re-admission risk daily and intervenes when necessary. The tools are built around a software platform on tablets that patients take home, enabling interaction with trained health coaches and nurses who can intervene when needed.

Catch a demo as part of Health 2.0’s Improving the Inpatient Experience: Tools for Hospitals, a breakout session demonstrating new and dynamic ways to break the structural cycles underlying readmissions.

Exponential Health Technology Bringing Personal “Check Engine Lights”

Sep 25, 2013• 8

By Daniel Kraft

Daniel Kraft is the Exec. Director of FutureMed and on the scientific Advisory Board for the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE which will be judged and have its award ceremony at the Health 2.0 Annual Fall Conference next Wednesday, October 2nd.

It sometimes seems that the world is speeding up, and it’s often hard to remember how quickly things are changing in our everyday lives. The relatively slow, expensive technologies of the 1970s and 80s are now essentially ‘free’ features that have dissolved into our exponentially more powerful devices. GPS with navigation directions, video and still cameras, online encyclopedias and the like would have separately cost over $500K 20-30 years ago. As inventor, futurist and Singularity University co-founder Ray Kurzweil likes to point out, a kid in Africa with a smartphone today has more access to information than the U.S. president did 15 years ago.

I recently found (via Twitter) this delightful and insightful story about a couple, both born in 1986, who have two young children. The couple, inspired by their son’s propensity to play on an iPad instead of outside on a nice day, have chosen to revert their life to 1986 levels of technology. No cell phones, no Google, no email, no tweets, no SMS…. So now they read books, develop rolls of film, and look things up in Encyclopedia Britannica. Watching this family, we might wonder how we got through the day and communicated and coordinated with our friends and family.

Moving Beyond the Quantified Self

Sep 25, 2013• 2

By Kim Krueger & Sophie Park

In a world where big data plays an important role of monitoring individual health care and wellness, Health 2.0’s CEO and Co-Founder Indu Subaiya had an exclusive interview with Christine Robbins, CEO of BodyMedia on the future of health care in the marketplace as well as the role of big data. As we all know, BodyMedia was recently acquired by Jawbone – and we’re excited to have Christine joining us on the famous “3 CEOs” panel at the Health 2.0 Annual Fall Conference next week to tell us more about it.

Here’s a preview of what you should be looking forward to.

Indu Subaiya: We’re really excited for the Health 2.0 7^th Annual Fall Conference and of course, I’ve been following news about you and BodyMedia over the last two months, which is really exciting. Congratulations on the acquisition.

Christine Robbins: Thank you. We’re on to the next chapter.

IS: That’s just amazing to me because BodyMedia in and of itself has had so many chapters and we’ve followed you almost from the very beginning. But what would be great is [if you could give] us an overview of the last year. When we saw you at Health 2.0 last — what you were beginning to present at the earliest stages, I believe, were data that BodyMedia had collected that could then be used in partnership with health plans and larger healthcare organizations.

Moving Beyond the Sick Care Model

Sep 24, 2013

By Lori Houston

How does a corporate behemoth heavily invested in the transaction-based health care system of today make the shift to engaging with its 20 million+ customers about their health in new and deeper ways? Humana’s new CEO Bruce Broussard sees technology as key to successfully meeting this challenge.

The company does a good part of its $39 million annual business in one of the health system’s status quo areas: providing medical benefit plans to employer groups.

In his October 1st keynote at the Seventh Annual Health 2.0 2013 Fall Conference, Broussard will share some thoughts from the executive suite about the role Humana envisions for itself as part of health care’s future. Health 2.0 co-founder Matthew Holt recently chatted with Broussard about Humana’s plans.

Matthew Holt: Humana has been looking to get involved in the new changes in health care as a whole. I know you’ve been surveying the role of new information technologies and tools in recent months.

What kinds of things are you seeing? What has most surprised you about the possibilities?

Bruce Broussard: The informational tools that are coming out are pretty powerful. I’d categorize them as allowing individuals and companies like Humana to educate and motivate individuals, and to gain easier access to providers and to more timely treatments.

When we look at the new tools coming out, I think these are going to greatly improve health care in multiple ways.

Top Twelve Reasons to be at Health 2.0 Next Week

Sep 24, 2013

By Matthew Holt

And now, for your crassly commercial consideration, I am emerging from my bunker/email queue and relentless rehearsing of 150+ demos to tell you the Top Twelve reasons why you need to join over 1,600 others at the 7th Annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference which starts with pre-conferences on Sunday 29th and kicks off officially on Monday 30th September:

Twelve Teams creating new on-body laboratory grade sensors competing for $2.25 million in prizes in the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE

Eleven Pre-conference sessions including International Health 2.0, a design workshop from Mad*Pow on behavior change, Patients 2.0, Doctors 2.0, Employers 2.0 and more!

Ten New Companies introducing their brand new products to the market in Launch!

Nine Developer Challenge Competitions with winners & new challenge announcements on stage!

Eight Start-Ups Competing in the DC to VC start-up showcase from Morgenthaler Ventures with 8 VCs as team captains

Seven Sponsored Deep Dive Sessions from leaders Janssen, United Healthcare, Cigna, Airstrip, Health Dialog, NaviNet & The Iron Yard (featuring 10 startups from the South)!

Six Demos showing the latest tools for and about health consumers on our panel called Big Data: Tools & Applications for Individuals

Five Networking Parties for attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors!

Four Cutting-Edge Revolutionary Demos on the Frontier of Health 2.0 panel including Syapse, BrainControl and from the labs of Adam Gazzaley at UCSF and Louis-Philippe Morency at USC.

Three Female Health 2.0 Rising Stars: Akhila Satish, CyberDoctor; Hind Hobeika, InstaBeat; Julia Winn, BetterFit Technologies.

Two Engaging Keynotes by movers and shakers –Bruce Broussard, CEO of Humana, and Gavin Newsom, Lt. Governor of California.

One Revolutionary Health Technology Conference you don’t want to miss!

And honestly we could have done a top 100! You can find out more and sign up here! And, to quote a recently late Silicon Valley legend, it will be insanely great.

Inside the NHS Health IT Program

Sep 18, 2013• 5

By Harriet Messenger

I had an opportunity to speak with NHS National Director for Patients and Information Tim Kelsey, who will be speaking at the at the Health 2.0 7th Annual Fall Conference on Monday, September 30th.

HM: Can you tell us a little bit about your vision for open data, transparency and participation. How do you believe this will actually transform the NHS?

TK: I believe that if we can create an environment in the health service in which data and information can freely flow, it will improve the quality of patient care because it will give doctors, clinicians and patients the tools they need to measure the quality of care in their environment. It also gives patients the opportunity to make more decisions themselves, of benefit to people with long-term conditions who may want to take more control of their own care, but also of benefit to people who want to look after their health and well being, and avoid interaction with the health services altogether.

HM: You often make reference to the ‘internet banking revolution’; how can this be applied to healthcare and how will actually benefit patients?

TK: In pretty much every area of our lives, digital technology has transformed the way we do things. A combination of transparency of data and our ability to participate with it to do things, has resulted in a revolution in the quality of customer experience, and so too has the cost of providing this service been reduced. It is not a perfect example – banking is not the same as healthcare – but at least it gives us an insight into what is possible. The story of online financial services in the UK started back in 1997 when online banking was launched. Those old enough to remember it will know just how skeptical the public were of doing their banking online. The issues of trust back then I think are to some degree comparable to healthcare today. Anyway, today in 2013, more than 22 million adults in this country only do online banking. It has been a phenomenal social shift. If you ask me what are the most important social transformations of our time, it was through a combination of been given access to our own data transparency and the ability to transact with it (pay our bills, and so on), participation, that that revolution was effected.

HM: To what extent do you see the patient influencing these kind of changes in the NHS? How do we encourage patients to embrace this?

TK: We in the NHS in England have a massive financial problem – and we are not alone, it is a problem that afflicts most healthcare systems. In the UK it has been estimated that over the next five to ten years we’re going to have a deficit of around 30 billion pounds in the cost of providing health care. We need to do something different to find new ways of creating better value for patients in healthcare. A model that stands out and suggests a new way forward is to get the patient – the customer – to do a lot more for themselves. We need to unleash the power of patients, get them managing their own health and healthcare, making the health service more effective by telling it how they want services to be delivered, and how they can be delivered more efficiently.

Health 2.0 and Enspektos Market Intelligence Webinar TODAY

Aug 15, 2013• 1

Enspektos and Health 2.0 have come together to implement a unique market intelligence partnership. It will combine:

Groundbreaking insights on how digital content can be used to change health behavior – based on a novel consumer research tehchnology
Deep intelligence about the shape and future of digital health from a technology and company perspective.

Health 2.0 and Enspektos are holding a Webinar TODAY August 15 at 2pm ET where we’ll not only talk about these offerings, but also provide a sampling of the kind of big picture intelligence and analysis we’ll be delivering. You’ll also learn how you can access our unique insights and much more 24/7. Click here to spend an hour with us learning about the new breed of health technology market intelligence Health 2.0 and Enspektos will deliver — Fard Johnmar, Enspektos & Matthew Holt, Health 2.0

Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE Finalists at Health 2.0

Aug 6, 2013

By Matthew Holt

Today XPRIZE announced the 12 finalists for the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE. This is a $2.25m prize competition to advance the ability to use sensors to measure and manage health, and it’s something that we’re fascinated by at Health 2.0.

We’re even more thrilled to tell you that on October 2nd the winners will be unveiled live on stage at Health 2.0’s Fall Conference by our friends at XPRIZE and Nokia, the XChALLENGE’s sponsor. The 12 finalists come from the US, Israel, Japan and the UK and run the gamut in new diagnostic tools. Details below the fold, but this is going to change how we measure health–not to mention it’ll also be lots of fun!

Health 2.0 2013 Fall Conference

Jul 30, 2013• 1

Health 2.0’s 7th Annual Fall Conference is Sept. 29-Oct 2. That’s only eight weeks until the LARGEST showcase in new health care tech with over 150 demos and 200 speakers! More demos, more tightly curated panels, and more networking.