Author Archives

Matthew Holt

Where is there mHealth, really?

May 4, 2011• 4

Health 2.0 aficionados will know that I’ve been railing against the term “mobile health” or “mHealth” for about three years. Health 2.0 is simply the next thing in health technology, and will remain so (whatever that might be). Sure we have a definition, but it’s about what’s happening not how it happens. Calling something mHealth traps it to a device, in particular a cell phone, and ignores the rest of the ecosystem of the technology and culture that the cell phone is but one part of–that’s the concept we call “unplatforms.” mHealth is like talking about cooking in the kitchen and only talking about the fridge. It’s damn important but you need a stove, a sink and more to make it all work.So if you have a mHealth strategy, as Susannah Fox might quote LOLcats, “URDoin it Rong”.

However, the place where it makes sense to talk abut mHealth is where there are only cell phones, and that place is large tranches of the rural developing world. This came up for me twice yesterday. once in a long chat with DataDyne‘s Joel Selanikio who has a really cool product called EpiSurveyor that works not via SMS but via an app on simple phones and enables very cheap and easy data collection. The other was in a high profile announcement by Johnson & Johnson (a major funder of text4baby btw), which via its Babycenter subsidiary is introducing–with USAID, State Department & the mHealth Alliance– $10m program supporting the use of cell phones for maternal health in developing countries.

So for the health worker in the rural Bangladeshi village, lets have an mHealth strategy. For those of us in the developed world, we need an overall strategy to deal with data and applications–whatever devices they are using.

Interview:CareLogistics and Mercy St. Vincent

May 3, 2011

Matthew Holt interviews Ben Sawyer, Executive Vice President of CareLogistics, and Imran Andrabi, President and CEO of Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center, at the World Health Care Congress.

Big community hospital CEO pay-out. Normal, criminal, both?

May 1, 2011• 1

Salinas is a poor-ish rural California town down Highway 101 from Silicon Valley, and the financial contrast between the two is similar to that between Beverly Hills and Bell, a California city where officials’ salaries sparked national outrage and then arrests. Now it turns out that the CEO of the local Salinas community hospital got a $4m retirement pay-out and a $150,000 a year pension and managed to stay on in his job for another two years at $668,000 a year and when he retired last week he got another payment of nearly $900,000. Can we expect the same in the Salinas case as in Bell? I doubt it because that would expose to the world that there are thousands of community hospitals all over America paying their CEOs the same kind of money–ignoring the $1 million + salaries most AMCs dole out. Can running a 300 bed hospital really be that difficult?

Fixing The Failure At Physician Compare

Apr 28, 2011• 23

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

The launch of Medicare’s Physician Compare website at year-end should have been a watershed event in the long campaign for health care transparency and patient empowerment. Instead – and it pains me to write this – Physician Compare is a case study in how the interests of the average citizen can be shunted aside by indifferent government, lazy journalists and solipsistic special interests. That remains true despite all of those involved being Good People Trying To Do The Right Thing.

In reality, the site is confusing and unfriendly to consumers, painfully slow and, worst of all, factually unreliable. Put bluntly, the agency, whose leader famously called himself a “patient-centered … extremist” in a 2009 Health Affairs article, has produced a consumer tool that practically shouts, “We couldn’t care less whether any consumer ever uses this.”

Fortunately for CMS, most of the journalists writing about the site apparently did little more than cut and paste the government press release description of it into their own stories. If I were a federal flack, I’d drink a toast to that famous Marx Brothers movie line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”

$3 Million Heritage Health Prize: Interview with Dr. Richard Merkin

Apr 26, 2011

I recently had a chance to interview Dr. Richard Merkin, President and CEO of Heritage Provider Network. Richard has spent the last 30 years implementing a successful business model to address the needs and challenges of affordable managed health care. In this interview, we discussed the role of prizes throughout history and the lessons Heritage has taken from it’s beginnings in rural areas to a system that now covers 700,000 lives. The conversation also dishes the details behind the $3M Heritage Health Prize and the impact Richard hopes it will have on the affordability of care across the system.

Here’s the interview

Interview with Andy Cohen, CEO, Caring.com

Apr 25, 2011• 2

A couple of weeks back Andy Cohen, CEO and Founder of Caring.com stopped by Health 2.0’s offices to give us an update on the site. Having established itself as a go-to site for caregivers needing to figure out what to do when a loved one needs help, Caring has now branched out to develop assessment tools and communities. In this video interview you’ll get to hear and see a bit about that, and get more information about the company’s plans to be the “Babycenter” for the other end of life.

Feds on the Web: Medicare relaunches caregiver site

Apr 25, 2011

I’ve been impressed by the efforts of CMS and others in the Federal government to develop helpful websites. Medicare has just relaunched its Caregivers website. It’s got a nice variety of stories, links and resources–including links to multiple partners offering support communities and other help. While the Physician Compare site had problems (and is a much more complex effort), I thought that Healthcare.gov was a good start to the complex world of finding health insurance, and the Health Indicators Warehouse is another good start at releasing masses of data in a usable format (FD Health 2.0’s Technology Guide is linked to as part of the site). Everything here can and will be improved, and much of this will be built on by the private sector–and that’s the way it should be. But given the scorn poured upon government, lets recognize the strides made.

THCB Live: Health Dialog

Apr 22, 2011

Matthew Holt interviews David Wennberg, Chief Scientist for Health Dialog, at the World Health Care Congress.

And the Worst Health Care System in the World Is…

Apr 21, 2011• 53

By EVAN FALCHUK

The United States, of course.

Oh, no, wait, it’s Canada.

Actually, I think it could be Germany.

Geez, now I think it might be the UK.

You could go on and on like this. But you know what?

No matter how good or bad your system is, there are certain universal truths.

Here are four of them that might make you look at global health care a little differently.

First, health care is getting more expensive, all over the world. A new study by the global consultant, Towers Watson (disclosure: Towers Watson is a Best Doctors client) found that the average medical cost trend around the world will be 10.5% in 2011. In the advanced economies costs will rise by an average of 9.3%. While Americans tend to think of rising medical costs as a uniquely American problem (they’ll rise by 9.9% here), it’s just not true. Canadian costs will rise by 13.3%. In the UK and Switzerland, they will increase by 9.5%, and in France by 8.4%.

Great job at CHCF Innovation Fund

Apr 21, 2011

Want to be part of a health innovation fund with a social conscience? This best of all world’s job could be yours with the wonderful people at the California Health Care Foundation. Here’s what CHCF’s Veenu Aulakh wrote to me: “The Health Innovations Fund Program Officer would help lead analysis in investment opportunities, analyze business plans, work with outside consultants and companies, and support team activities. Our ideal candidate has a strong interest in the broader work of CHCF and the Innovations program as well as knowledge of the health care system and experience in investing or market analysis. We’re looking for a health care type person who has a business background but cares about the mission of what we’re trying to do.” Here’s the full posting.