Another data breach–this time impacting 4 million Sutter patients. My daughter is among the patients in this breach (most likely), But even if this data isn’t immediately wiped by the thief, I’m struggling to see what’s worse about this than a standard credit card theft–which happens everyday. To me the worse impact from “data” being known about anyone is the completely OPEN data that is forcibly shared about people in the individual market (you are forced to share it to apply for coverage). And the only slightly less forced sharing of health information to get a job with a self-insured employer (yes they know who you are and they can tell what you’re likely to cost before hiring you). And do we hear shit about that? No, but that has real not imagined consequences. I sincerely hope that by the time my daughter gets to school in 3 years, there is no legal discrimination on health data whether that data is forcibly extracted or stolen. Oh and BTW premiums for California small group are going up 20% again this year … and that may be Sutter’s fault.
Matthew Holt
Apps Against Abuse–the Winners
The Federal government has been getting behind the Challenges craze in a big way but this one from the Vice President’s Office and HHS is a doozy. Called Apps Against Abuse it asked developers to create an application that would help young people deal with abuse and violence, primarily in the world of dating and relationships. (FD my company Health 2.0 has a contract with HHS to run challenges, and Apps Against Abuse was featured in the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge and we worked on publicizing the project).
Today two winners were announced on the White House Blog by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and in a conference call hosted by Aneesh Chopra (Federal CTO) and Todd Park (CTO, HHS) and some fellow called Joe Biden was there too!
OnWatch is a phone based app that has a series of alarms and prompts built in. For example, it can be set with a message sent to friends saying “I went to a party at XYZ dorm, if I don’t come back by midnight come find me” or it has a panic button that calls 911 or the campus police.
The other winner is called Circle of 6 and it comes from the team at ISIS. 
(FD I’m on the board of ISIS but I didn’t even know they’d entered the contest!). Circle of 6 puts you in touch with 6 of your closest friends and asks them to come help you if you’re in trouble. It even plugs in the coordinates for them. The ISIS team intends to build out Circle of 6 which is currently an iPhone only prototype.
There were more than 33 entries for Apps Against Abuse, even though there was no prize money at stake. It’s good to see that such commonsense use of these new technologies is finding so many spirited innovators willing to help.
Health 2.0 Europe–the view from hip Berlin
It’s morning on Day 2 of Health 2.0 Europe. We’re at the on the campus of Charité Hospital and University of Medecine (in the old East Berlin) in the Langenbeck-Virchow Building which is now a conference center for medical societies but apparently was used as a part of the old GDR parliament before 1989.
Yesterday, we had a series of intense panel discussions, not least between the German members of the panel who were discussing (and disagreeing) on whether Health 2.0 tools could come “bottom up” or would have to fit in the rather slow creation of national electronic infrastructure for clinical care.Continue reading…
Gmail offline–not as easy as using toothpaste
Tonight I’m getting on an 18 hour flight with no WiFi, so this morning I spent 20 minutes trying and failing to first download, then to open, then re-find the Offline Gmail app from Google. Which has changed since it was part of Gears a while back and now only works on Chrome–too much consternation from those who’d been using it the old way (as I did on an older computer). Except it doesn’t work. Or at least I can’t find it to make it work–I cant even find the place to find the apps I’ve downloaded from the Chrome store (yes, it’s the only one I’ve downloaded). This wouldn’t merit a mention on THCB until I read in a NY Times article about educating children without computers. In it is this priceless quote about computer technology from Alan Eagle, a senior Google employee who sends his kids to a school with no computers in it: “It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.” And that arrogance is the reason why Google will eventually fade. Clearly Mr Eagle has never used the Chrome App for offline Gmail. But perhaps he’ll come round to my house and help me find it!
Join Us For Tomorrow’s Health 2.0 Show
Join us, tomorrow, October 19th at 10:00 AM PST as Matthew and Indu recap highlights from the 5th annual Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. They’ll be joined by two special guests: first, Alexandra Drane of Eliza will discuss and take another look at the popular Unmentionables panel. Then, Marco Smit, President of Health 2.0 Advisors will take a deeper dive into the special VC Advisory Session as well as the newest addition to Health 2.0, Matchpoint.
Also, our very own Jean-Luc Neptune will announce three upcoming Code-a-thons as part of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, and review the newest online challenges.
If you’d like to see past episodes of The Health 2.0 Show, check out our archives.
Putting the IT in Care TransITions–Webcast
Heath 2.0’s JL Neptune will be on a panel in Washington DC tomorrow (Friday 14 October) to discuss the role of IT in Health Transitions–which is of course the topic of a major challenge with $40,000 in prize money in the i2 ONC Challenge program which Health 2.0 is running. The panel is part of a major meeting put on by several foundations and HHS. Details about the meeting are below–Matthew Holt:
The John A. Hartford Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Kaiser Permanente are convening key stakeholders in the innovation, healthcare provider, and IT vendor communities for an event Friday, October 14, 2011. Media partners for the event are Health Affairs and Health 2.0. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the HHS Partnership for Patients Initiative are also key participants. The agenda for this event is here. You can register for the webcast here. The webcast will pause during the breakout sessions from 8:45 am – 10:45 am ET.
These sessions will be in four topic areas:
1. Discharge process
2. Medication reconciliation
3. Information flow and feedback
4. Patient and care-giver activation
There’ll be facilitated discussion on Google Plus and Twitter during that portion of the meeting to discuss these topics. The three questions being posed are:
1. What are the most important problem statements from the patient’s and caregiver’s perspective that require our attention?
2. Where is IT effectively addressing these challenges now?
3. Where is innovation most needed now?
The webcast will then resume at 10:45 am until 12:00 noon ET when there will be a half hour break for lunch. The final portion of the event will then go from 12:30 pm until 3:00 pm ET, with a short break at 1:45 pm ET.
Steve Jobs, Health Care Apps & Me
When I heard the news about Steve Jobs on Wednesday, I was surprised at how profoundly sad I felt. Although I had never met him, my company had the thrill of sharing the stage with Steve when Apple announced they would open their platform to third party developers. At the time, I was head of marketing and subscriptions for Epocrates, then best know for our Palm Pilot application for physicians.
At the time, we thought we had done a pretty good job of disproving the old notion that physicians are slow to adopt new technologies. Steve was about to show us our full potential.
It was a surprise for us to be up on that stage, to say the least. Our fellow presenters were industry giants: EA, AOL, SalesForce, Sega and…us. The Sesame Street song ran through my head – “one of these things is not like the other.” Naturally, we were thrilled, but we had no idea how profoundly our company and industry were about to change.
Before the iPhone, Epocrates had built a great business creating drug, disease and formulary content for mobile devices. We launched our first product in 1999 with the premise that physicians were mobile and wanted to access information anywhere, anytime. Health care professionals loved their Palm Pilots – and I still have a bag of Palm IIIs, VX, Tungsten, Handspring, and Treo devices to prove it! Business was going well and we had grown to 25% of U.S. physicians. But we faced a challenge – we had already saturated the market of physicians with a device – and growth of the mobile device market had stagnated.
To this day, I don’t really know how we ended up that stage. But I like to believe the story we were told. Apparently, Steve asked one of his personal physicians why she wouldn’t switch to an iPhone and she replied “because I can’t use Epocrates on it.” True or not, we got an invitation from Apple to be one of their very first third party developers.Continue reading…
Don’t dump on the Brits’ Health IT program — they’re way ahead
Last week the Brits canceled their troubled NPfIT program, which lead to lots of crowing over here about our Meaningful Use program and how it’s better. But that crowing reveals two major ignorances. First, most of the money that was spent in the UK was spent on hospital IT systems, especially PACS. It wasn’t necessarily wasted, and it was not comparable to the ONC program — none of which goes to PACS. Second and more importantly, before NPfIT, EMR use among British primary care docs was ALREADY at more or less 100% and had been for the better part of a decade. (Part of) the NPfIT program was about connecting primary care practices together and with hospitals. (One reason it ran into trouble was because it wanted to replace those existing primary care systems with different ones). Over here about 10% of physicians are using EMRs, and if we’re very lucky we’ll get to about 2/3rds of where the Brits were BEFORE the NPfIT. For sure the Brits have problems, but ours are way worse and we’re starting from much further back.
Educating the Health 2.0 Workforce
As any new field of human activity evolves into something important, its original participants are drawn to it from a range of other fields and bring to it a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. For example, the original computer scientists were not schooled in computer science. The field didn’t exist when they were in school. The first generation of computer scientists were mathematicians, engineers, philosophers, among other things, who came together around shared interests in a set of challenging and important problems.
As computer science matured and proved its worth, however, something inevitable happened. Programs specifically to educate the next generation of computer scientists began to develop, and a range of questions arose about how best prepare them—how to combine math, engineering, philosophy into a new interdisciplinary program of studies.
Exploration of how to train its next generation gives shape to a new field, stimulates further growth and innovation, and ensures that that the next generation will be large enough to support a thriving enterprise. So it is with Health 2.0—a new field that has attracted an eclectic group of energetic pioneers and is beginning to mature. It’s time to think about the next generation.Continue reading…
Fun with Heritage on Health Affairs blog
Here’s my comment on a recent Health Affairs blog post from Heritage’s Nina Owcharenko whining about the ACA as a g’vermint takeover.I wrote “I’m really pissing myself about this one. Only in the bizzarro world of American politics can the nutjobs on the right, and not just any nutjobs but on the right but Nina’s actual colleagues at Heritage design the basics of a health care policy and then declare it something that’s antithetical to their very being. Furthermore, it’s only in bizzarro world of American politics that a massive expansion of PRIVATE health insurance legislated in the ACA is called a government takeover, or in Nina’s words puts the “trend toward government-based coverage on the fast track”. If Nina had bothered to check she’d realize that the vast majority of Medicaid enrollees — 66% according to KFF– are in private plans and the rest are being moved there. Yet this is another expansion of government!” Of course if you look at the Health Affairs version where they moderate comments, you’ll note that some of the words I wrote and the words they publish are slightly different
