Category: Uncategorized

The World In 2016: Health Care Edition

Sep 10, 2015• 1

By MATTHEW HOLT

We’re taking your predictions for what 2016 will hold in store for health care. A President named Trump? The much-rumored Uber for Healthcare? The end of Meaningful Use? The beginning of the ACO era? New incentive payments? New penalties? Something else nobody has thought of yet?

You’re invited to a special online event hosted by athenahealth’s COO Ed Park (no he’s not his bro Todd whatever HIStalk may think), on Tuesday September 15, 2015 at noon. With a program created with doctors in mind, this is one event you won’t want to miss. Ed will talk about what 2016 is likely to bring for doctors, what probably won’t happen (despite what the skeptics say) and how health information technology is rapidly evolving to meet a new generation of pressing challenges. You’ll also get a rare insider’s look at athenahealth’s plans for 2016, including rumored new products and the company’s plans for expansion in the competitive electronic medical records space. If you track this much-talked about health IT company and its CEO Jonathan Bush and the broader health IT industry, you’ll want to be sure to mark your calendar.

The Wisdom of the Blog

Meanwhile, we want to know what THCB readers think is ahead in 2016. What do you expect to see? What’s next for Obamacare? What new technologies are poised to change everything? More importantly: What won’t we see? If you have a prediction for 2016, e-mail the editors at ed****@***************og.com or use the contact form at the top of the page. Write us a brief blog post. Submissions should be between 300 and 500 words in length. Tell us what you think will happen and why it’s important. Strong submissions will be published on THCB.

Is Obamacare working? Where’s the data?

Sep 8, 2015• 1

By FRED and ALMA TROTTER

As President Obama’s healthcare reform unfolds in the last years of his administration, critics and supporters alike are looking for objective data. Meaningful Use is a funding program designed to create health IT systems that, when used in combination, are capable of reporting objective data about the healthcare system as a whole. But the program is floundering. The digital systems created by Meaningful Use are mostly incompatible, and it is unclear whether they will be able to provide the needed insights to evaluate Obamacare.

Recent data releases from HHS, however, have made it possible to objectively evaluate the overall performance of Meaningful Use itself. In turn we can better evaluate whether the Meaningful Use program is providing the needed structure to Obamacare. This article seeks to make the current state of the Meaningful Use program clear. Subsequent articles will consider what the newly released data implies about Meaningful Use specifically, and about Obamacare generally.

ACA Database: How Do I Report a HIPAA Violation?

Sep 8, 2015• 2

By THCBist

I know my HIPAA rights were violated and would like to know the best recourse to settle the matter. By myself or via an attorney?Can you suggest a referral agency for attorneys?

Pilot Health Tech NYC 2015 Launches Today!

Sep 8, 2015• 1

By GRAEME OSSEY & JL NEPTUNE

The New York City Economic Development Corporation, in partnership with Health 2.0 and Blueprint Health, is proud to announce today’s kickoff of Pilot Health Tech NYC 2015. Pilot Health Tech NYC is a pioneering innovation initiative: a unique marketplace for digital health technologies, connecting buyers and sellers through curated matchmaking, technical assistance, and competitive commercialization awards.

Since launching in 2013 the Pilot Health Tech NYC program has been a resounding success, stimulating the growth of the digital health ecosystem in New York City and beyond. The program has provided $2,000,000 in funding grants to early-stage health care technology companies working in partnership with key NYC health care service organizations and stakeholders. Pilot Health Tech NYC grant awardees have gone on to raise $170M in venture funding, create more than 100 high-tech jobs, and impact the lives of countless patients in the city of New York.
Continue reading…

The Story of the Dying Doctor Who Saved a Patient’s Life

Sep 8, 2015

By TERRY BENNETT, MD

I have mentioned that in the past, often at times of great duress in my life, often in the midst of cacophony, some window in time and space opens, if only for a moment, but the moment becomes a moment of grace, and, in that moment, an extraordinary medical feat has been granted to me. I have no explanation for any of this, I admit freely that I “hear voices”, voices that others do not hear. I cannot complain about a gift, this gift, weird as it may sound to others

This year, while sick as a dog from the cancer chemotherapy I was receiving for the metastatic cancer that I had discovered in December, my wife having already bought advanced reservation tickets to the “Capital Steps” political spoof performance at the Portsmouth Music Hall, I went to the Music Hall.

I sat all the way back, next to the door, at the very back of the Hall, out of fear that my chemotherapy induced nausea and sudden overwhelming tendency to vomit, on little or no notice, might present, and that I would be able to bolt out the door ,make it to the nearest trash can, and barf there, rather than make a mess in the theater.Continue reading…

The Measure of a Physician: Albert Schweitzer

Sep 3, 2015• 1

By RICHARD GUNDERMAN, MD

There are different ways to take the measure of a life. John Rockefeller, the richest person in the history of mankind, once asked a neighbor, “Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It’s to see my dividends come in.” Television magnate Ted Turner once said, “I don’t want my tombstone to read, ‘He never owned a network.’” And musical artist Lady Gaga has described her quest as “mastering the art of fame.” But wealth, power, and fame are not life’s only metrics, and September 4 marks the 50^th anniversary of the death of one of the 20^th century’s brightest counterexamples.

His name was Albert Schweitzer. Winston Churchill once referred to him as a “genius of humanity,” and a 1947 issue of Time magazine dubbed him “the greatest man in the world.” Though Schweitzer held four doctorates and achieved worldwide fame as a musician, theologian, medical missionary, and promoter of a philosophy of “reverence for life,” for which he received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, his most enduring contribution lies in his lifelong commitment — both theoretical and practical – to the suffering.

Schweitzer was born 1865 in the Alsace region of what is now eastern France, the son of a Lutheran pastor whose grandfathers were both accomplished organists. Though already a world-renowned musician and writer, at age 30 Schweitzer decided to answer a call to missionary work, spending the next seven years of his life studying medicine. Once he finished his medical studies, he and his new wife, Helene, traveled 4,000 miles to set up a missionary hospital in what is now Gabon in west central Africa. There he spent most of the rest of his life, eventually dying there in 1965.

Are Studies Overestimating the Cost of EHRs?

Sep 3, 2015• 1

By TOM GIANNULLI, MD

On August 6, this article was posted, Are Electronic Medical Records Worth the Costs of Implementation?, in the American Action Forum. The article stated that there is value in the use of EHRs but the cost is significant. They estimated nearly $164,000 for a single physician and over $233,000 for a five provider practice.

I was surprised in 2015 to see this piece. Why? Because they used data from 2009 to 2011 on practices largely using server-based EHRs. The landscape of the EHR market has radically changed in the last 5 years. There are a wide range of more affordable, cloud-based EHRs today, including some that are free.

A free EHR doesn’t mean no cost, but it does make a big dent in the vendor related costs around hardware, software and implementation. This is often true for cloud-based EHRs that do charge a monthly per provider feeas well.

The Phonemic Path: A Way to Measure Health That Can Lead to Health Improvement

Sep 3, 2015• 3

By ANDY ORAM

We know what improves health–but we’re simply years away from having the tools to achieve it. We know that we can reduce the chronic conditions plaguing the world’s populations by a subtle combination of:

Closely monitoring the behavior of individuals
Linking health goals to treatments and behavior changes
Upgrading the problems in communities that contribute to disease

Such activities call for supple and sophisticated ways to link together disparate types and sources of information–the subject of this article. Doing such linking requires a new way of approaching data that is lacking today in our health care system.

The process of developing the new data approach will have to be incremental (no “Health Data Manhattan Project” for us), will involve thousands of contributors in crowd sourced fashion, and will take unanticipated directions based on the insights of the contributors. I am not laying out a framework in this article, but just touching on the themes that the project will likely explore. I’ll also mention a few of the people working in this area, notably the Yosemite Project. I call this idea Phonemic Path, in reference to the extensive research biologists are carrying on to find genomic paths that explain disease.

Clinical Research Rebooted

Sep 3, 2015

By SCANADU RESEARCH

The traditionally conducted clinical trial model requires increasing amounts of time, cost, and resources for both sponsors and sites. In fact, fewer than 10% of clinical trials are completed on time due to poor patient recruitment, retention and protracted budget negotiations. And since 2008 per-patient, clinical trial costs in the US have risen an average of 70% across all development phases.

In March 2015, however, BLOOMBERG BUSINESS
reported “Stanford University researchers were stunned when they awoke Tuesday 10 March to find that 11,000 people had signed up for a cardiovascular study using Apple Inc.’s ResearchKit, less than 24 hours after the iPhone tool was introduced. ‘To get 10,000 people enrolled in a medical study normally, it would take a year and 50 medical centers around the country’ said Alan Yeung, medical director of Stanford Cardiovascular Health. ‘That’s the power of the phone.”‘

Rebuilt

At Scanadu, data collection and clinical studies are key to the development and deployment of our medical devices, and we’re fully aware of the kind of scale and speed and power we’re talking about here. And as a startup developing the next generation of medical devices for consumers, we had to innovate the clinical study process, while bucking the traditional assumptions of how a clinical study should operate.

Value-based Telemedicine

Sep 2, 2015• 5

By BLAKE McKINNEY, MD

When a family member was a new mom she called me concerned about her 7-day old baby’s breathing.I almost sent them to the ER. Then she asked me if we could FaceTime. What I saw was a warm, pink, dry baby looking around, looking quite well to me. I was able to tell that she had no labored breathing, no retractions or nasal flaring. She just had a little stuffy nose. I had been answering questions, treating minor ailments and triaging the acutely ill for several years via text, but it was in that moment that I knew the iPhone and other smartphone devices would fundamentally and forever change the way physicians can deliver our services.

Fast forward to next year. An estimated 2 billion people will have smartphones across the world in 2016. Industries are being transformed radically by the widespread uptake of these devices. Healthcare will be no different and will continue to move toward more virtual care enabled by smartphones. As the example above demonstrates, it makes sense for both care and economics.Virtual care and telemedicine worldwide is expected to be a $34 B market by 2020 according to Mordor’s Market Intelligence, with the US accounting for 40% of that, nearing $15 Billion in the next five years. Several early stage tele-medicine companies have raised many millions of dollars in the last several months.

Payment reforms are driving the market toward value-based care and will only accelerate the use of telemedicine via smartphone. Many new forms of payment for medical services are emerging that are not tied to the legacy fee-for-service reimbursement model. Patients are paying more out of pocket and therefore have increasingly aligned interests with payers to reduce costs while achieving better overall health. These changes are, in turn, driving the empowered healthcare consumers’ demand for a better experience and convenience.