Author Archives

Matthew Holt

Health 2.0: TweetChat and SF Agenda!

Sep 1, 2011

By Matthew Holt

The agenda for the Fall Health 2.0 Conference is up–and it is mega, as in by far the biggest thing we’ve ever done. Just getting the agenda right online took three of us all day!

Four Pre-Conferences. An overnight Code-a-thon and Health 2.0 101, educational session for developers and people new to health care. Two full days of main stage programming including more CEOs and tech whizes than you can imagine. Over 140 live product demos. More than 25 parallel sessions or Deep Dives. Live CEO interviews. And some “Unmentionable” topics never discussed at a health care tech conference before. Not to mention at least 20 brand new product introductions.

The conference is Sept 25-7 in San Francisco. The Exhibit Hall is sold out, the room block is going fast, registration is running well ahead of last year’s record crowd of 1,000, and ticket prices go up on Wednesday. Buy yours now, while they’re still available. Deals will be done, imaginations will be blown, history will be made. You won’t regret coming!

And just in case you need a little taster. From 9.30 PST/12.30 EST I’ll be running a 30 minute tweetchat tweeting from @boltyboy and @health2con. Just follow the #health2con hashtag —this Tweetchat link is a painless way to do that— and have fun with my questions and answers! See you there!

Aiming developers at the insurance market?

Aug 30, 2011• 1

It’s hard to think of a more opaque market than that for individual health insurance. But perhaps there’s enough data that can be reworked so that ordinary people can get a better understanding of it. Todd Park, HHS’ CTO, for sure thinks so, and just last week arranged (as in he said in this blog post) to allow developers to download files with data from all the markets in all 50 states & DC. My hope is that this will inspire people like eHealthInsurance.com to put the most important part of any plan comparison (out of pocket maximums) front and center on their plan comparison tools. Otherwise, I may just have to build my own….

Google – Say it Ain’t So

Aug 29, 2011• 5

By Dan Munro

Webster’s has a new entry for mea culpa: A voluntary payment of $500,000,000.00 to avoid prosecution.

That’s almost a rounding error for a company with a Market Cap well north of $130 billion – but the healthcare system can definitely use the money. I remember when some of the first estimates for widespread EHR adoption were announced in 2008. One that was hotly contested (way too high) was $150 million over 8 years. Safe to say – we’ve got that fully funded – with change.

Google stock actually inched up (+$3.25) so it’s safe to say investors collectively yawned. Buried in their long forgotten Corporate Information pages is this one called:

Ten Things We Know To Be True

“We first wrote these ‘10 things’ several years ago. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does – and you can hold us to that. (September 2009).”Continue reading…

DC to VC Start-up Showcase

Aug 25, 2011

By Matthew Holt

This time of year is all about selection. Which demos should we have for the Health 2.0 Conference coming up next month? Who to have speak in the Health 2.0 Europe Conference in Berlin in October? How to fit in a vacation around the Health 2.0 India Conference in December? But believe it or not, Health 2.0 isn’t all there is!

Rebecca Lynn, Ching Wu, & their colleagues at Morgenthaler Ventures started DC to VC last year, and this year they’re hosting the DC to VC Start-Up Showcase during Health Innovation Week in San Francisco. It’ll be on September 22nd at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, CA. I’m delighted to be MCing this event, and was even more fascinated to be a (minor) part of the selection process. Rebecca really showed that it is hard to be a VC (I’m not kidding), but with great skill and lots of patience she helped us cut to the chase of the more than 125 applications and elevator pitches. There were lots of great submissions and some companies everyone loved didn’t even make the final group.

Today the finalists were announced including a class ready for seed stage (very early) and one slightly further along (ready for Series A). So drum roll please and get ready.Continue reading…

Health 2.0 Show on Big Data–12 noon PST Monday

Aug 21, 2011

Join us for the next episode of the Health 2.0 Show, airing Monday, August 22nd at 12:00 PM PST (3pm EST)–Yes that’s tomorrow or even today (depending on when you read this!!) We’ll give a preview of the 2011 Health 2.0 fall conference session, Data Drives Decisions: The New World of Analytics, Data Mining and How Big Data Will Transform Health Care.

In recent years, the world of data has evolved and researchers are able to spend less time gathering data in the traditional sense, and more time analyzing and tailoring data that fits their needs. As data is mined and dissected in new and innovative ways, it not only affects research, but health care decisions and outcomes, and ultimately, helps our current system become smarter. In addition to diving into the content, we’ll feature a few special guests and talk about some of the exciting demos we have planned. Our guests will be:

Tod Fetherling–Health Data Source
Sarah Mihalik–Explorys
David Hadden–Therasim

So to register, just hit the button below–and yes it’s FREE

If you’d like to see past episodes of The Health 2.0 Show, check out our archives.

Dave Chase, brilliant but wrong!

Aug 19, 2011

I’d like to welcome Dave Chase, new THCB contributor who’s writing about the Carnage in Health IT.Go read his provocative article then sneak back to hear from me why he’s wrong! Love ‘em to death but the RockHealth crowd is the kids on the outside–the only slightly more seasoned Health 2.0 companies (of whom Aavdo is one) know that they have to work with the system to get going. Even the ones focused on consumer end users (patients or doctors) like Sermo & American Well have been making alliances and getting customers in the old HC world since before day 1. And in fact the carnage in Health 2.0 has been very limited compared to (say) the consumer Web world of the early 2000s. Why? because they all started much smaller and most didnt rise so much money but went looking for customers–in the old HC world. Which is why change is slower.

Finally I love ZocDoc, but equating raising money with market success is a stretch. Unlike OpenTable which only had to drop a booking system into restaurants, there’s lots of different systems that an appt booking system has to integrate with in a doc’s office. And those systems have their own vendors who are competing directly with ZocDoc’s features.

And of course while I might want to go to lots of different and new restaurants all the time, I’m likely to want to stick to only a few doctors–once I find the ones I want. So I’m not sure a consumer wants a one stop place for every possible doctor, and it’s possible that a doctor doesn’t want just a one point solution for appointments. At any rate it’s damn early in the game and I guarantee you that despite the very encouraging progress and the boatload of roubles they just got, Cyrus and his team at ZocDoc know that they’re in for a long ground war and have not declared victory and gone home yet.

Lessons from the Carnage in HealthTech

Aug 19, 2011• 10

By DAVE CHASE

Recently ZocDoc had a huge funding round demonstrating the success that they are having. There’s a number of lessons learned from ZocDoc’s experience. Unfortunately, many haven’t demonstrated Zocdoc’s wisdom leading to a large number of healthtech failures. A recent study highlights this phenomena. After interviewing 110 digital health entrepreneurs, RockHealth recently released its study Rock Report: State of Digital Health demonstrating the disconnect between the startups getting funding and what many startups are pursuing. This disconnect is the last and most important reason healthtech companies have failed that are detailed below. The following are the top reasons why healthtech companies have failed or had to do major pivots in order to survive:

Lack of Specific Focus or Adoption point

It’s well documented that a lack of focus kills startups whether they are in healthcare or not but it is particularly prevalent in healthcare. The diversity of opportunities in healthcare is so great that it’s tempting to try to solve it all. These startups are ignoring the old saying about how to eat an elephant — one bite at a time. Too many startups are trying to swallow the elephant whole.

Expected consumers to pay

With the exception of weight loss programs, there aren’t many examples of consumers paying directly for health services. Over time, this is likely to change as more of the burden of healthcare costs gets shifted to consumers as was highlighted in a Healthcare Disruption series (see links below). However, I’d be very cautious about any business expecting to have consumers pay in the near-term.

The True Measures of a “Good Doctor”

Aug 12, 2011• 23

By CHRISTOPHER J. WHITE, MD, FSCAI

Measuring patient outcomes is one way to determine how “good” a doctor is – but it is far from the only way. In our obsession with measuring performance, we seem to have forgotten that.

In medicine we measure a lot of things. We measure procedure times, length of stay in the hospital, complication rates. As a chief of cardiology, I’m involved in measuring a wide range of metrics, from how quickly the patient receives treatment (door-to-balloon time) to major adverse cardiac event (MACE) rates, and numerous other measurements. The medical field has spent the last decade developing metrics to assess quality of health care, and certainly these measures have value.

But by themselves, these metrics are inadequate to answer the patient’s most essential question, “Do I have a good doctor?”

We seldom measure whether a doctor is available after hours when their patient has a concern. We seldom measure doctors’ ethics or whether they are able to meet the emotional needs of a patient. We seldom measure a doctor’s willingness to refer a patient to another physician if that person can better meet the patient’s needs. Yet to a patient, these things can be every bit as important as outcomes.

Most health care professionals know a “good doctor” when they encounter one. Being a good doctor is not the same as a career achievement award such as being named a “master clinician.” Often we recognize “good doctors” among younger physicians-in-training, or junior faculty members, as well as some, but not all, senior faculty members. Patients can identify “good doctors” without ever knowing what they scored on their Board exams.

Rich hospital buys poor Medicaid Health plan. Hmm

Aug 10, 2011• 4

Partners, the Boston behemoth that rivals California’s Sutter Health for its ability to impose its pricing will on the local Blues plans, has bought a struggling Medicaid plan, Neighborhood Health Plan (NHP). Actually “bought” is a strong word, as it’s like one of those deals when you “buy” someone’s car by taking over the payments they can’t meet. The fascinating part is that Partners has agreed to fund 50 community clinics that provide most of the care for the Medicaid crowd that NHP insures. So is Partners’ goal to ramp those clinics up to its standard level of pricing and charge Medicaid–i.e. the state & Feds-more for the privilege? Or is the goal (as Jeff Goldsmith suggested more generally yesterday) to import the knowledge those clinics have and get the rest of the system to run at their low cost? You be the judge…

AHIP Video Series: Brainshark

Aug 10, 2011

By DEB LINTON

Health 2.0 and THCB had the chance to catch up with Thomas Raleigh, VP of Brainshark‘s Healthcare Business Unit. In addition to having one of the coolest names in the industry, Brainshark is helping healthcare professionals improve their communications, reach mobile employees and save millions of dollars. Through Brainshark’s technology, users can rapidly create video presentations with simple tools they’re already familiar with like PowerPoint and their own phone. In this AHIP video, Raleigh shares Brainshark success stories with groups like BCBSF, Nova Biomedical, AHIP, CIGNA, Gorman Health Group etc. and discusses the platform’s role in capturing healthcare trends. You’ll also hear how Brainshark is improving the visibility of wellness programs, why it’s going “unplatformed” and much more.