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Category: Health Policy

Healthcare Starts to Zoom Along

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By KIM BELLARD

A year ago, if you’d used or even heard about Zoom, you were probably in the tech industry.  Today, if you haven’t used Zoom, your friends or colleagues must not like you very much.  COVID-19 has made most of us homebound most of the time, and video services like Zoom are helping make that more bearable.

And, thankfully, healthcare is finally paying attention.

Zoom was founded in 2011, poking along under the radar for several years, overshadowed by competitors like Skype or WebEx.  For the entire month of May 2013 it only had a million meeting participants.  Even by December 2019 it could boast “only” 10 million daily users.

Then — boom — COVID-19 hits and people start staying at home.  Daily users skyrocketed to 200 million in March and as many as 300 million in April (well, not quite).  Daily downloads went from 56,000 in January 2020 to over 2 million in April.  Zoom is now used by businesses and families alike, drawn by its simplicity and ease of use.  

By all rights, we should be using WebEx for business video calls and Skype for personal ones.  Both had been around longer, offered credible services, and still exist.  But both were acquired along the way, WebEx by Cisco, and Skype ultimately by Microsoft.  As with its acquisition of Nokia, once acquired Microsoft didn’t quite seem to know what to do with it.  Each left openings that Zoom plunged through when the pandemic hit.

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The Problem With “Herd Immunity” as a COVID-19 Strategy

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By e-PATIENT DAVE DEBRONKART

Caution: This post is not a prediction. It’s just a tutorial about the concept of herd immunity, with an eye to why it’s probably not an approach the US wants to take in solving the complex problems we’ve gotten ourselves into with COVID-19.

Click this graphic to go see a six second animation of these images, created in 2017 by Reddit user TheOtherEdmund. You many need to watch a few times. Get a feel for the differences in what happens in the different blocks, and come back to discuss:

This weekend I’ve labored to understand this concept, which first came to my ears regarding coronavirus in March, when British prime minister Boris Johnson proposed it as a possible approach for Britain to take: let the virus take its course, and they’d end up with “herd immunity,” and that would be the end of that.

In my unsophisticated knowledge “herd immunity” meant “you let the weak cows die, and the rest of the herd will be fine.” And in fact in April a Tennessee protestor held up a sign saying “Sacrifice the Weak – Reopen TN.” (It’s not clear whether the sign was mocking or real (Snopes), but it illustrates the point.)

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Deep-Dive on GuideWell’s Covid19 Innovation Collaborative for Health Tech Startups | WTF Health

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By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

“I think that the baseline platform of telehealth adoption created a whole springboard opportunity for the plethora of digital health companies that are out there eager to get into the space and grow their businesses. I think the industry as a whole now is a whole lot more receptive to looking at things like that then they were eight weeks ago.”

Among those in the industry very open to digital health, digital therapeutics, precision medicine, and virtual care solutions in this time of covid19 is GuideWell, which counts Florida Blue and four other healthcare businesses among its subsidiaries.

The national healthcare company is looking to bring together health tech startups around five different kinds of healthcare challenges created by the coronavirus pandemic via its Covid-19 Innovation Collaborative. With the application deadline set for Friday, May 8, we caught up with GuideWell Innovation’s Executive Director, Kirstie McCool, about the details behind the unique model for the Collaborative, its non-dilutive funding awards, and what happens to the startups that are selected to participate. (Hello, other Blues plans!)

If the Collaborative’s areas of focus aren’t enough to clue you in on where the healthcare giant is interested in rounding out its own array of services as a payer, provider, and innovator, we asked Kirstie point-blank to tell us what she thinks is next in terms of supporting the traditional healthcare system with outside-in innovation. Tune in around the 15:20 mark for that part of the conversation, and a final word-to-the-wise for any startup looking to work with a large healthcare enterprise.

COVID-19 and Opening the Country: Lessons from 1918 Philadelphia

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By CHADI NABHAN, MD, MBA, FACP

Everyone has an opinion on whether and when we should open the country. Never in the history of America have we had so many “correct” theories and experts to pontificate on a new pandemic. But somehow, few seem to recall history or attempt to learn from it.

Over a century ago, almost 100 million people out of a world population of 1.8 billion lost their lives to the so-called “Spanish Flu”. At 8.5 million casualties, the death toll from World War I pales in comparison. In the US alone, we lost over 675,000 people in one year to this pandemic. In fact, we lost more people to the 1918 flu than to World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. It was estimated that 5-10% of young adults had died. Nothing has ever come close in devastating the world’s population.

In early 1918, Dr. Miner from Haskell County in Kansas encountered several patients with a severe form of the flu that faded away by March 1918. He was concerned enough to report his observations to the US public health services, who published his concerns but then ignored the issue; there were more pressing problems facing the world, namely World War I. But in Camp Funston, a military complex, soldiers were faced with such cold weather and inadequate clothing that 7,000 of them suffered from the flu and nearly 100 died. Still, these warning signs didn’t seem alarming enough to prevent 1.5 million soldiers from crossing the ocean and going to war in Europe.

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COVID-19: Physicians in Shackles

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By ANISH KOKA, MD

A number of politically tinged narratives have divided physicians during the pandemic. It would be unfortunate if politics obscured the major problem brought into stark relief by the pandemic: a system that marginalizes physicians and strips them of agency.

In practices big and small, hospital-employed or private practice, nursing homes or hospitals, there are serious issues raising their heads for doctors and their patients.

No masks for you

When I walked into my office Thursday, March 12th, I assembled the office staff for the first time to talk about COVID.  The prior weekend had been awash with scenes of mayhem in Italy, and I had come away with the dawning realization that my wishful thinking on the virus from Wuhan skipping us was dead wrong.  The US focus had been on travel from China and other Far East hotspots.  There was no such limitation on travel from Europe.  The virus had clearly seeded Italy and possibly other parts of Europe heavily, and now the US was faced with the very real possibility that there was significant community spread that had occurred from travelers from Europe and Italy over the last month. I had assumed that seeing no cases in our hospitals and ICUs by early March meant the virus had been contained in China.  That was clearly not the case.

Our testing apparatus had also largely been limited in the US to symptomatic patients who had been to high-risk countries.  If Europe was seeded, this meant we had not been screening nearly enough people.  When I heard the first few cases pop up in my county, it was clear the jig was up.  It was pandemic panic mode time.  There was a chance that there were thousands of cases in the community we didn’t know about and that we were weeks away from the die-off happening in hospitals in China and Italy.  So what I told the staff the morning of March 12th was that we needed to start acting now as if there was significant spread of COVID in the community.  This meant canceling clinic visits for all but urgent patients, wearing masks, trying to buy masks, attention to hand hygiene, cleaning rooms between patients, screening everyone for flu-like symptoms before coming to the office, and moving to a skeleton staff in the office.  I left the office that day wearing a mask as I headed to the ER.

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The False Choice Between Science And Economics

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By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD, PhD

As the nation wrestles with how best to return to normalcy, there’s a tension, largely but not entirely contrived, emerging between health experts—who are generally focused on maintaining social distancing and avoiding “preventable deaths”—and some economists, who point to the deep structural harm being caused by these policies.

Some, including many on the Trumpist-right, are consumed by the impact of the economic pain, and tend to cast themselves as sensible pragmatists trying to recapture the country from catastrophizing, pointy-headed academic scientists who never much liked the president anyway.

This concern isn’t intrinsically unreasonable. Most academics neither like nor trust the president. There is also a natural tendency for physicians to prioritize conditions they encounter frequently—or which hold particular saliency because of their devastating impact—and pay less attention to conditions or recommendations that may be more relevant to a population as a whole.

Even so, there are very, very few people on what we will call, for lack of a better term, “Team Health,” who do not appreciate, at least at some level, the ongoing economic devastation. There may be literally no one—I have yet to see or hear anyone who does not have a deep appreciation for how serious our economic problems are, and I know of a number of previously-successful medical practices which are suddenly struggling to stay afloat amidst this epidemic.

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Can The Tablighi Jamaat’s Conference be India’s Own Epidemiological Diamond Princess?

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By SOMALARAM VENKATESH, MD

“It has always been science versus fundamentalism, not science versus religion.” 

Abhijit Naskar, Biopsy of Religions: Neuroanalysis Towards Universal Tolerance

On February 3, 2020, the luxury cruise ship Diamond Princess docked on Japanese shores and was promptly quarantined with 3711 people on board, because a passenger who had disembarked at Hong Kong two days earlier had tested positive for SARS-Cov-2,  or also known as  COVID-19. Passengers & crew members were either repatriated or hospitalized in Japan over the next 4 weeks. In total,, more than 700 of them were found to be infected with the virus. This was a unique opportunity – a Petri dish in a ship, if you may – for epidemiologists and virologists to study the disease and the virus. 

At the beginning of this global pandemic, health care professionals and policymakers used data from the Diamond Princess experience and inferences thereof, such as infectivity & death rates, as a supplement to the observations from Wuhan. They used the data to derive models on how the pandemic will play out in the rest of the world. Later, after widespread devastation in Iran, Europe, & the United States, and after relative containment in Taiwan, South Korea & Singapore, experts have access to larger datasets & a variety of scenarios to help develop disease virulence predictions and control models. 

So far, authorities in the Indian subcontinent appear to copy strategies of other countries to combat the spread of the pandemic. The curves of exponential ascendency of COVID-19’s spread across countries appear identical in nature, except in a few where health care response is more regimented. Yet, there is speculation about the virus’s survival in India’s climatic conditions: Indians may have a better “innate resistance” and the impact of compulsory the BCG vaccination in most Indians may have some effect on the expression of the disease in the country. Therefore, it may be worthwhile for India to study the actual transmission, clinical expression, and outcomes of the disease in her own population and design responses to the pandemic based on those studies. 

That is to say, we must find our own Diamond Princess before we find our Wuhan. 

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Pandemic State of Mind: Data from Behavioral Telehealth Startup Reveals How We’re Feeling

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By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

“The mental health system was completely broken before COVID. The supply-demand imbalance was wildly upside down. Now, that’s just all exacerbated.”

On-demand mental health startup Ginger has watched usage of their app climb 130% over the last 4-week period. The conversations people are having with clinicians are growing more intense (there’s an internal metric for that) and amid all of this the late-stage startup has re-run its ‘Workforce Attitudes’ survey to find out what’s really going on with the mental health of the employee populations it serves.

CEO Russell Glass dives into some of the findings of that report, which are pretty revealing in terms of understanding how we as a population are dealing with our stress around COVID-19 when we’re seeking professional help with it. Nearly 70% of respondents confessed this was the most stressful period of their career — five times more stressful than the financial crash of 2008 — and there are some surprising differences with how this is all unfolding across gender lines, especially with working from home.

With inbound interest from employers up 4X over the past month, we get Russ’s input on whether or not the demand for telehealth will sustain once the crisis is over and if the temporary regulatory and reimbursement changes will become permanent. Says Russ: “This is like a great experiment of the efficacy of telehealth versus non-telehealth.”

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 121 | Takeover Edition ft. Eugene Borukhovich and Jim Joyce

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Today on Health in 2 Point 00, we have a digital audience! Eugene Borukhovich and Jim Joyce join us as guests on Episode 121. Well actually we were invited on their show A Shot Of Digital Health, and we decided to launch a takeover! Jess asks me about a lot of movement in the telehealth space with Medici raising $24 million in a Series B, Tomorrow Health launching with a $7.5M seed round for in-home care, Decoded Health launching an AI telehealth app and IDC Telemed buying Ilum. Also HIMSS launches a new Digital Health Indicator to help hospitals judge their digital health readiness — and don’t get Jess started on their new definition of digital health. In fact everyone piled in on that!—Matthew Holt

COVID-19 Answers Might Be Just a Click Away

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SPONSORED POST

By DAVID LEVESQUE

As more people die every day from COVID-19 (we were edging towards 20,000 casualties in the U.S. at the time this article was written), the answers to what a cure could look like are waiting to be discovered in EMRs and patients’ homes. We have the technology and business models to turn this data into insights, but we are stalling…  What seems to be the problem?

First this. It’s time to end the illusion that patients do not pay for healthcare. Whether it is out of pocket, paycheck, or taxes, U.S. citizens pay for 100% of the healthcare spend. It is indeed their healthcare. It follows logically from this that patients should be allowed and empowered to lower the cost and increase the quality of the care they receive. Receiving access to their own medical records is one important way to accomplish this.

In 2017, when I asked the World Economic Forum if there is a study on the cost of lack of interoperability in healthcare they said – “That’s a good idea.”

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