The Medical-Industrial Complex is swarming with grifters. This is to be expected when you build a purposefully complex system designed to advance profitability for small and large players alike. The $4T operation payrolling 1 in 5 American workers is, in large part, a hidden economy, one built by professional tricksters, designed by Fortune 100 firms with mountains of lobbyists, but reinforced as well by friendly doctors and hospitals engaged in petty and small scale swindling who justify their predatory actions as entrepreneurial, innovative, and purposeful means of necessary financial survival.
I find myself thinking about the future a lot, in part because I’ve somehow accumulated so much past, and in part because thinking about the present usually depresses me. I’m not so sure the future is going to be better, but I still have hopes that it can be better.
Two articles recently provided some good insights into how to think about the future: Kevin Kelly’s How to Future and an except from Jane McGonigal’s new book Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today that was published in Fast Company.
I’ll briefly summarize each and then try to apply them to healthcare.
It’s the scandal inside the scandal, and we’ve got the scoop! Check out this episode of Health Tech Deals to learn more about Facebook, health data, and American Hospitals. Is someone stealing someone else’s activity and not getting rewarded for it? What about HIPPAA violations? All these questions and more are answered, along with some new deals: Sana Health raises $60 million; Seasme raises $27 million; Bardavon Health Innovations buys Peerwell; AIdoc raises $110 million.
A study eight years ago, published in Nature, was titled “Study revives bird origin for 1918 flu pandemic.” The study, which analyzed more than 80,000 gene sequences from flu viruses from humans., birds, horses, pigs, and bats, concluded the 1918 pandemic disaster “probably sprang from North American domestic and wild birds, not from the mixing of human and swine viruses.”
The search for origin in pandemics is not simply an esoteric academic exercise. It is practical, pragmatic, and hopefully preventive. The origin of our very own pandemic, now in its third year and claiming more than 1 million American lives, remains up in the air. Whether occurring “naturally” from an animal reservoir, or the progeny of an experimental lab engaged in U.S. funded “gain-of-function” research, we may never know. What we do know is that viruses move at the speed of light, or more accurately, at the speed of birds.
Here’s how I’ll know when we’re serious about reforming the U.S. healthcare system: we’ll no longer have both M.D.s and D.O.s.
Now, I’m not saying that this change alone will bring about a new and better healthcare system; I’m just saying that until such change, our healthcare system will remain too rooted in the past, not focused enough on the science, and – most importantly – not really about patients’ best interests.
Let me make it clear from the outset that I have no dog in this hunt. I’ve had physicians who have been M.D.s and others who have been D.O.s, and I have no indication that there have been any differences in the care due to those training differences. That’s sort of the point: if there are no meaningful differences, why have both?
“As I’ve said before, I believe Dr. Ladapo is an anti-science quack who doesn’t belong anywhere near our state’s Surgeon General office, let alone running it. But now that he’s been confirmed, it’s my sincere hope that he and Governor DeSantis choose to focus on saving lives and preventing unnecessary illness instead of continuing their absurd promotion of conspiracy theories and opposition to proven public health measures — but I’m not going to hold my breath.”
If you identified these as the words of the former governor, and now Congressman Charlie Crisp, currently running to retake the office he once held, you’d be wrong. These are the words of another state Democrat who is running a distant 2nd in the Democratic primary battle set for this summer.
Healthcare needs to move into 2022 and get away from the one-size-fits-all approach that healthcare takes almost everywhere and, instead, treat people like who they are matters.” That’s the challenge coming from SameSky Health’s founder & CEO Abner Mason whose business is helping some of healthcare’s most notorious “one-size-fits-all-ers” (health plans) improve the way they engage with diverse populations.
SameSky has built a proprietary tech platform that creates an ‘n of 1’ approach to member engagement that is focused on using data to understand who each individual member is at a “cultural” level which, as Abner defines it, is not just about ethnicity or race, but about ALL the factors that go into how a person makes a decision about whether or not to seek care, where to get that care, and who they ultimately trust to deliver it.
You can call it “micro-targeting-at-scale” and Abner compares it to the way Netflix customizes movie recommendations based on what it learns about its users. SameSky is hoping to achieve the same level of consumer-focused customization among Medicaid populations, and is working with some of the biggest names in the biz (UnitedHealthcare, Anthem, Humana and others) to tailor an annual “journey” to each member that helps members build trust with their plan, helps the plan get to know their members, and, in the end, helps both the plan AND the member satisfy mutual needs when it comes to getting things like annual health screenings done.
Will we eventually get to a more equitable and personally-tailored healthcare system? Stick around until the last few minutes to hear what Abner finds exciting about some of the new federal regulations that impact health data collection and what he sees as their big-picture impact on the future of health equity. PLUS, a bonus for all those who may have been wondering: What prompted the name change to SameSky Health from ConsejoSano?? Is this REALLY because Matthew Holt could never pronounce it? The shocking backstory is revealed!
OK, how many of you had on your women-in-power bingo cards that, in 2022, Sheryl Sandberg would be out at Facebook but Queen Elizabeth II would still be Queen? It’s the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, marking seventy years on the throne. She’s getting a lot of love for that tenure, but it makes me think, geez, some people just don’t know when to step away.
Perhaps what sparked my cynicism about the Queen was an op-ed by Yuval Levin, Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old? Dr. Levin is, of course, referring to the U.S., and he’s spot-on about our governance problem. But I think the problem goes further: we have too many old people running our companies and major institutions as well.
Whether it is, say, healthcare, education, or the military, we’re so busy protecting the past that we’re not really getting ready for the future.
The question of the day: does 25 people leaving a several 100-person company REALLY count as a “mass exodus”? In this episode, Jess and I find out! Hey – it’s the startup world, things explode all the time. Some new deals: Aledade raises $123 million; Tripp raises $11 million; Socially Determined raises $22.7 million; Digital Diagnostics raises $46.3 million.
Shots have been fired. Hear the crickets? Maybe it’s the chirping from health technology twitter, particularly on the lack of deals? NO! That sound you hear is the stunning silence from our epic burns this episode. Shoutout to our new sponsor AHIP – check out the AHIP Conference 2022 taking place in Las Vegas! Common (the rapper) will be there. Tickets are $100 off with code THCB. Some deals: Hint Health raises $45 million; Moxe Health raises $30 million; uMotif raises $25 million; Fairtility raises $15 million; Circles raises $16 million.
