Back in the US of A to celebrate the nation’s birthday, Jessica DaMassa asks about Amazon buying Pill Pack, GE spinning off its health division, and what Rock Health and Startup Health’s numbers say about health tech investment–Matthew Holt
matthew holt
The Past, Present and Future of Health Care
OK, so it’s a tad of an ambitious title… but it was a talk that I gave in Finland last month. I had fun looking at the development of health and technology and suggesting a structure for the future. Plus I got to tell my Neil Armstrong joke. The talk was part of the Upgraded Life Festival in Helsinki and you can see some of the other speakers videos on their channel—Matthew Holt
Why I Tattooed My Health Data Over My Heart | WTF Health with Casey Quinlan
WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of the health industry and how we love to hate WTF is wrong with it right now. Can’t get enough? Check out more interviews at www.wtf.health.
How can patients help usher in a better future for healthcare? Start speaking up. LOUDLY.
In this WTF Health interview, meet one of health’s most outspoken patient advocates, Twitter voices (@mightycasey) and podcasters, Casey Quinlan of Mighty Casey Media, who talks about her patient journey as a cancer survivor — and why the awful experience led her to tattoo a QR code linking to her electronic medical record to her chest.
Casey’s ‘physical political protest’ is tied to her passionate views about the lack of data liquidity in healthcare and how patients suffer as a result. She’s launching a new “If-You’re-Selling-My-Health-Data-Cut-Me-In” Movement and weighs in on why more patients aren’t clamoring after their health data to push real change in the healthcare system.
Filmed at Health Datapalooza in Washington DC, April 2018.
Stay Out of my Wellness
By VA WEST HAVEN COE CLINIC
On a sunny New England morning at a secluded guest house with a perfectly manicured lawn, medical residents, each with their own brightly colored yoga mat, were getting ready to assume the downward dog position. They were on an annual retreat organized by their residency program to promote wellness. One embraced the opportunity with delight, smiling through every pose. Another grimaced as his back spasmed. And yet another wandered off towards a lake to find his own kind of respite.
Physician wellness has become something of a buzzword in recent years, and rightfully so considering that the rates of burnout and suicide within medicine are rising. Individual residency programs have found burnout rates between 55% and 76%. Such burnout erodes well-being over time and may be contributing to suicide, which is now the second leading cause of death among residents nationwide. In 2014, the suicides of two medical interns in New York prompted the American College of Graduate Medical Education to take action. A series of initiatives to combat burnout were rolled out, including the consideration of wellness in its review of residency programs during site visits. In 2017, emergency medicine physicians convened the first Residency Wellness Consensus Summit to devise a module-based curriculum on wellness. Hospital systems have attempted to respond as well, through the hiring of chief wellness officers.
It is unsurprising that the medical community has taken such an analytical approach towards diagnosing burnout, much as we do with other diseases, in search for a cure. But perhaps such a prescriptive approach fails to capture the highly individualized and somewhat abstract concept of wellness. The reasons for resident burnout are personal and vast. Decreased wellness has been attributed to the lack of time for self-care, inadequate sleep, social isolation, negative work environments, excessive paperwork, long work hours, poor relationships with colleagues, and insufficient mentorship, among others in a lengthy list. Any attempt to standardize the definition of wellness should be met with caution.
So how do we as a society go forward in ensuring our resident physicians are well?Continue reading…
Self-Driving Cars are Like Most EMRs
by HANS DUVEFELT, MD
Drivers are distracted klutzes and computers could obviously do better. Self driving cars will make all of us safer on he road.
Doctors have spotty knowledge and keep illegible records. EMRs with decision support will improve the quality of healthcare.
The parallels are obvious. And so far the outcomes are disappointing on both fronts of our new war against human error.
I remember vividly flunking my first driving test in Sweden. It was early fall in 1972. I was in a baby blue Volvo with a long, wiggly stick shift on the floor. My examiner had a set of pedals on the passenger side of the car. At first I did well, starting the car on a hill and easing up the clutch with my left foot while depressing and then slowly releasing the brake pedal with my right forefoot and at the same time giving the car gas with my right heel.
I stopped appropriately for some pedestrians at a crosswalk and kept a safe distance from the other cars on the road.
A few minutes later, the instructor said “turn left here”. I did. That was the end of the test. He used his pedals. It was a one way street.
Three times this spring, driving in the dark between my two clinics, I have successfully swerved, at 75 miles (121 km) per hour, to avoid hitting a moose standing in the middle of the highway. Would a self driving car have done as well or better? Maybe, maybe not.
Every day I get red pop up warnings that the diabetic medication I am about to prescribe can cause low blood sugars. I would hope it might.
Almost daily I read 7 page emergency room reports that fail to mention the diagnosis or the treatment. Or maybe it’s there and I just don’t have enough time in my 15 minute visit to find it.
For a couple of years one of my clinics kept failing some basic quality measures because our hasty orientation to our EMR (there was a deadline for the incentive monies to purchase EMRs) resulted in us putting critical information in the wrong “results” box. When our scores improved, it had nothing to do with doing better for our patients, only clicking the right box to get credit for what we had been doing for decades before.
Our country has a naive and childish fascination with novelties. We worship disrupting technologies and undervalue continuous quality improvement, which was the mantra of the industrial era. It seems so old fashioned today, when everything seems to evolve at warp speed.
But the disasters of these new technologies should make us slow down and examine our motives. Change for the sake of change is not a virtue.
I know from my everyday painful experiences that EMRs often lack the most basic functionalities doctors want and need. Seeing a lab result without also seeing if the patient is scheduled to come back soon, or their phone number in case they need a call about their results, is plainly speaking a stupid interface design.
I know most EMRs weren’t created by doctors working in 15 minute appointments. I wonder who designed the software for self driving cars…
Hans Duvefelt is a family doctor in Maine. This piece was first published at his blog A Country Doctor Writes
Health in 2 point 00 -Episode 35, Shafi Ahmed takeover edition
Jessica DaMassa’s European tour continues. This week she’s at the #WebIT conference in Sofia, Bulgaria (no, I couldn’t find it on a map either!) and the #HealthIn2Point00 takeovers continue! This time the guest is pioneering British surgeon Shafi Ahmed, who has lots to say about medical education, the future of digital hospitals, what he’s up to in Bolivia and how cool #WebITHealth will be–Matthew Holt
Information Blocking–Gropper & Peel Weigh in
Today is the last day for public comments on the proposed CMS regulations regarding Medicare hospital inpatient prospective payment systems (IPPS). While there are several changes proposed, the one that’s raised lots of attention has been the idea that access to Medicare may be denied to those providers guilty of information blocking. Here are the comments submitted by Gropper & Peel from Patients Privacy Rights— Matthew Holt
Executive Summary of PPR Comments on Information Blocking
Information blocking is a multi-faceted problem that has proved resistant to over a decade of regulatory and market-based intervention. As Dr. Rucker said on June 19, “Health care providers and technology developers may have powerful economic incentives not to share electronic health information and to slow progress towards greater data liquidity.” Because it involves technology standards controlled by industry incumbents, solving this problem cannot be done by regulation alone. It will require the coordinated application of the “power of the purse” held by CMS, VA, and NIH.
PPR believes that the 21st Century Cures Act and HIPAA provide sufficient authority to solve interoperability on a meaningful scale as long as we avoid framing the problem in ways that have already been shown to fail such as “patient matching” and “trust federations”. These wicked problems are an institutional framing of the interoperability issue. The new, patient-centered framing is now being championed by CMS Administrator Verma and ONC Coordinator Rucker is a welcome path forward and a foundation to build upon.
To help understand the detailed comments below, consider the Application Programming Interface (API) policy and technology options according to two dimensions:
| API Content and Security | Institution is Accountable | Patient is Accountable |
| API Security and Privacy |
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| API Content / Data Model |
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This table highlights the features and benefits of interoperability based on institutional or individual accountability. This is not an either-or choice. The main point of our comments is that a patient-centered vision by HHS must put patient accountability on an equal footing with institutional accountability and ensure that Open APIs are accessible to patient-directed interoperability “without special effort” first, even as we continue to struggle with wicked problems of national-scale patient matching and national-scale trust federations.
Here are our detailed comments inline with the CMS questions in bold:Continue reading…
Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 34
I’m back. After the takeover editions, I’m answering Jessica DaMassa about Atul Gawande as the CEO of the ABC new venture, the demise of Caresync, Ooda Health and its demand for a female VC, and whole bunch more blather! — Matthew Holt
Adjusting for Risk Adjustment
Risk adjustment in health insurance is at first glance, and second, among the driest and most arcane of subjects. And yet, like the fine print on a variable-rate mortgage, it can matter enormously. It may make the difference between a healthy market and a sick one.
The market for individual health insurance has had major challenges both before and after the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) risk adjustment program came along. Given recent changes from Washington, like the removal of the individual mandate, the market now needs all the help it can get. Unfortunately, risk adjustment under the ACA has been an example of a well-meaning regulation that has had destructive impacts directly contrary to its intent. It has caused insurer collapses and market exits that reduced competition. It has also led to upstarts, small plans and unprofitable ones paying billions of dollars to larger, more established and profitable insurers.
Many of these transfers since the ACA rules took effect in 2014 have gone from locally-based non-profit health plans to multi-state for-profit organizations. The payments have hampered competition not just in the individual market, which has never worked very well in the U.S., but in the small group market, which arguably didn’t need “help” from risk adjustment in many states.
The sense of urgency to fix these problems may be dissipating now that the initial rush for market share under the ACA is over and plans have enough actuarial data to predict costs better. There has been an overall shift to profitability. But it would be a serious mistake to think that just because fewer plans are under water, the current approach to risk adjustment isn’t distorting markets and harming competition.
Defining Engagement in an Age of Patient Monitoring and Data Collection
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What is healthcare without patients? For decades physicians have been a one-stop shop for diagnosis and treatment, a trusted source. And yet it’s only been in recent years that the entire healthcare industry has woken up to the notion that patients can and should have an active role in their healthcare and the decision making process. Patients may not have a medical education or clinical experience, but they do have a strong asset going for them: intimate knowledge of their bodies and access to information only they can provide. The rise of wearable technologies over the past decade has only increased patients ability to quantify their experiences, health and otherwise. Diet, exercise, daily habits, stress levels, family life, physical environment all contribute to an overall picture of health. Yet too often, clinicians only see a slice of their patients health picture – the picture that is presented during office visits. The increased importance of tracking lifestyle data has clinicians and technologists asking themselves, How do we unlock more information in order to make better decisions and deliver better care?
The field is called Patient Engagement. And while the industry has mutually agreed upon it’s critical importance, the question remains as to what it looks like.Continue reading…
