European health startups and health tech investors are turning their attention to a new market: Europe. Where the US healthcare system once seemed the only path to mass adoption, now the European healthcare market, with its proliferation of Big Pharma and med device companies, has opened itself up to the digital health community — offering EU startups the chance to grow and mature closer to home. Watching the space closely is on of Europe’s first, loudest, and most ardent supporters of digital health, Roberto Ascione, CEO of Healthware International. How does he see the market taking shape? What’s next for European healthcare companies in terms of scaling and integrating new revenue streams based on the digital transformation of healthcare? Listen in to find out.
Filmed at the Frontiers Health Conference in Berlin, Germany, November 2018.
Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt. Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health.
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, I’m back (despite Jess’s attempt to replace me). In Episode 82, Jess asks me about Talkspace’s $50 million raise, Heal getting flack for adding telehealth to their house call service, and Apple acquiring Tueo Health last year—and we’re just now hearing about it. Jess also gets riled up by Pokemon Sleep and Pillo’s $11 million raise. —Matthew Holt
What does it take to create a decision rule? In this episode of Radiology Firing Line podcast Saurabh Jha (@RogueRad) has a discussion with Robert W. Yeh MD MBA about the deep thought and complex statistics involved in creating a decision rule to guide therapy which have narrow risk-benefit calculus, specifically a rule for how long patients should continue dual anti-platelet therapy after percutaneous coronary intervention. They also discuss the motivation behind the legendary, and satirical, parachute RCT published in the recent Christmas edition of the BMJ, which delighted satirists all over the world.
Our Experience on Facebook Offers Important Insight Into Mark Zuckerberg’s Future Vision For Meaningful Groups
By ANDREA DOWNING
Seven years ago, I was utterly alone and seeking support as I navigated a scary health experience. I had a secret: I was struggling with the prospect of making life-changing decisions after testing positive for a BRCA mutation. I am a Previvor. This was an isolating and difficult experience, but it turned out that I wasn’t alone. I searched online for others like me, and was incredibly thankful that I found a caring community of women who could help me through the painful decisions that I faced.
As I found these women through a Closed Facebook Group, I began to understand that we had a shared identity. I began to find a voice, and understand how my own story fit into a bigger picture in health care and research. Over time, this incredible support group became an important part of my own healing process.
This group was founded by my friends Karen and Teri, and has a truly incredible story. With support from my friends in this group of other cancer previvors and survivors I have found ways to face the decisions and fear that I needed to work through.
Facebook recently had a summit to share that groups are at the heart of their future. We had a summit of our own with some of the amazing leaders within the broader cancer community on social media.
With the application deadline for Bayer’s G4A Partnerships program coming up on Friday, I thought I’d throw out a little inspiration to would-be applicants by featuring an interview I did with one of last year’s program participants at the grand-finale Launch Event.
Not only was this a great party, but a microcosm of the G4A program experience itself: a way to meet Bayer execs en-masse, an opportunity to sell directly to key decision-makers across Bayer’s various global business units, and a chance to feed off the energy of like-minded innovators eager to see ‘big health care’ change for the better.
While the G4A program itself has changed a bit this year to be more streamlined and to allow for bespoke deal-making that may or may not involve giving up equity (my favorite new feature), startups questioning whether or not they have what it takes should take a look at some alums.
There’s a playlist with nearly two dozen interviews waiting for you here if you’re REALLY up for some procrastinating, or you can click through and just check out my chat with Joe Curcio, CEO of KinAptic. A healthtech startup taking wearables to the bleeding edge, Joe shows us a mock-up of the KinAptic ‘smart shirt’ which features their real innovation: printed ink electronics that look and feel like screenprinting ink, but work bi-directionally to both collect data from the body AND apply signals back to it. Is it AI-enabled? Did you have to ask? Listen in for a mindblowing chat about how this tech can change diagnostic analysis and treatment and completely redefine our current limitations when it comes to healthcare wearables.Once you’re inspired, don’t forget to head over to www.g4a.health and fill out your own application for this year’s partnership program.
Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt
Nearly a decade has passed since Healthy People 2020positioned social determinants of health (SDoH) at the forefront of healthcare reform. As defined by the report, SDoH are the “conditions in the environment in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age, that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality of life outcomes.” Examples of social determinants include:
Resources to meet daily needs (e.g., safe housing and local food markets)
Educational, economic, and job opportunities
Community-based resources in support of community living and opportunities for recreational and leisure-time activities
Transportation
The ability to influence
social determinants largely falls outside of the health care system’s reach.
Therefore, a key to address opportunities for health involves collaboration between
health care and different industries such as education, housing, and
transportation. Both the public and private sectors have made significant
efforts to bridge the gap between physical, mental, and social care by
experimenting with non-traditional partnerships.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has spearheaded multiple programs with government agencies and community partners to achieve the goals outlined in Healthy People 2020. One of the most notable successes is the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, an initiative by the CDC with the Department of Housing & Urban Development and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Through housing rehabilitation, enforcement of housing and health codes, and partnerships with healthcare experts, the program helped Healthy People 2020 exceed their target of reducing blood lead level in children.
Other programs such as the “National Program to Eliminate Diabetes Related Disparities in Vulnerable Populations,” leveraged community partners and resources to increase food security, health literacy, and physical spaces for active living. In one of their projects, the program partnered with community health workers (promotoras) who spoke Spanish to engage with Hispanic/Latino communities where participation to Diabetes Self-Management Education (DSME) was low. The community health workers provided linguistically and culturally-sensitive materials that effectively increased participation in DSME among the targeted population. The outcomes from such initiatives have inspired more health and community organizations to work together to reduce health disparities.
How long does it take to diagnose guttate psoriasis versus pityriasis rosea? Swimmers ear versus a ruptured eardrum? A kidney stone? A urinary tract infection? An ankle sprain?
So why is the typical “cycle time”, the time it takes for a patient to get through a clinic such as mine for these kinds of problems, close to an hour?
Answer: Mandated screening activities that could actually be done in different ways and not even necessarily in person or in real time!
Guess how many emergency room or urgent care center visits could be avoided and handled in the primary care office if we were able to provide only the services patients thought they needed? Well over 50% and probably more like 75%.
Primary Care clinics like mine are penalized if a patient with an ankle sprain comes in late in the year and has a high blood pressure because they are in pain and that becomes the final blood pressure recording for the year. (One more uncontrolled hypertensive patient.)
Today the notion that health is a preferred state of being, rather than a set of disconnected functions or services, is increasingly being embraced. A recent JAMA article promoted a health measurement system called the “flourishing index” focused on 6 key domains: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material security.
Dr.
Gro Brundtland, former director-general of the World Health Organization, wrote
in the World Health Report 2000 that
“The objective of good health is twofold – goodness and fairness;
goodness being the best attainable average level; and fairness, the smallest
feasible differences among individuals and groups.”
In
the age of Trump, with forced separation of immigrant mothers and children,
criminalization of abortion, and purposeful obstruction of enhanced access to
health care for vulnerable populations, it becomes impossible to ignore a
significant modern-day truism. Health is profoundly political.
Health is a collection of resources unequally distributed in society. Health’s “social determinants” such as housing, income, and employment, are critical to the accomplishment of individual, family, and community well being and are themselves politically determined.
In this two-part series, we examine several common misconceptions
made by health tech start-up companies in working with Health Systems and
offers advice on how to recognize and address each. From approaching systems
with a solution-first mentality to not understanding the context in which
health systems work, we look to provide constructive criticisms meant to
support more effective partnerships between health systems and digital tech
solutions.
Perspectives
and Reactions from the Industry
Understand the Current System Environment We Are Working In: In some cases,
technology solutions are barricading healthcare systems inside. In other
cases, they are allowing us to seamlessly interact with other systems. Typically, large healthcare systems have a
combination of both. For outside solutions to be effective,
start-ups need to be intimately familiar with the existing (and on-the-horizon)
systems that healthcare organizations are using or contemplating. Rarely
will a solution not have to interact with existing software solutions – and
this goes well beyond just the EMR.
Advice
Have an Integration Plan: A
stand-alone solution, which doesn’t tie to one or more of the healthcare
institutions key systems of record (SoR) or systems of engagement (SoE) is a
useless solution. Your solution should be able to stand alone in the first few
weeks, as users begin to use it and get familiar with its capabilities.
However, as soon as value is realized
(not necessarily achieved), it’s crucial that your solution support either SMART on FHIR, FHIR,
HL7v2.x, or all of the above. If you don’t have a believable integration story
fully worked out, you’re not ready to launch into the health system market. Go
back and do your homework.
Having a Clinician Is Nice, But Not Enough: The physician, nurse, or other clinician on your team helps credibility but we also understand the incentives associated with selling solutions, and this takes away from the altruism you think we will blindly swallow. And they are rarely businessmen or women who understand both the complexities of solving a problem that isn’t theirs and starting, let alone, running a company. Pair an MD with an MBA? Now we’re talking.
Start-ups are an increasingly important “node” within the
healthcare ecosystem. They are challenging status quo concepts that have
long been ingrained in the healthcare system, like questioning the value of
traditional EMR systems, or shifting the power of information to patients, or
breaking down cost and quality transparency barriers. They may be the future of
the industry, but startups have a long way to go to truly transform the
system. The reasons are many, from an incredibly convoluted and bureaucratic
review process and rigid risk-controlling regulations and policies, to the
large-scale organizational inertia most of our healthcare systems have.
And while all of these hurdles can and will be overcome if we work
together, there are still several lessons each “node” in the ecosystem can learn to more effectively work with each other.
This article is directed at the emerging digital solutions trying
resiliently to help transform this stubborn industry. It provides some critical
lessons in dealing with healthcare systems and is accompanied by reactions from
a digital solutions expert with serial digital health entrepreneurship
experience. We hope to provide perspective from two people living and
breathing, and surviving, from both sides of the
equation every day.
Perspectives
and Reactions from the Industry
Healthcare Startups Must Understand how Provider
Systems Operate: Most
health systems are increasingly becoming rightfully skeptical about new
solutions because they feel the solutions don’t understand the environment of
their system. To help overcome the challenges of introducing your innovation into a complex business and
clinical environment, startups must understand how health systems operate to
include how they make decisions, contract and evaluate solutions.
Advice
(1)
Recognize that Decisions are Consensus-driven and Permissions-based: Unlike
other industries, where “shadow IT” is rampant and there can be one or two “key
decision makers,” in health systems you’re not likely to get very far without
figuring out how to build consensus among an array of influencers and then
figuring out how to get permissions from a group of key decision makers. You
should seek a “Sherpa” that understands enough about your solution to champion
the idea of change – which is really what you’re seeking when you’re
selling a new solution (the solution is just the means to accomplish the change,
it’s the change that’s hard). The first thing to focus on is to identify the
group of decision makers and how you convince them that the status quo should
be abandoned in favor of any change –
then, once you know how to convince them of some
change you’ll work with the group to get the right permissions to work on the
change management process – which will then influence a purchase of your
solution.
