Jessica DaMassa asks me about Cricket Health’s $24m raise for kidney disease services, Rx.Health from Mount Sinai and a whole bunch of big money in little China. All in 2 minutes–Matthew Holt
Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 47
Jessica DaMassa asks me about Patrick Soon-Shiong and his Verity hospital chain going bankrupt, whether Peerfit can justify its $8m raise, and who I’m going to see at TechCrunch Disrupt this week–Matthew Holt
Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 46
Jessica DaMassa asks me about single payer polling high, big VC for women’s pelvic floor digital therapeutic Renovia, 23andme cutting off API access to its data, plus guest mentions for Shafi Ahmed and Glen Tullman. All in 2 minutes (more or less!)–Matthew Holt
Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 45
In this episode a not-too-happy Jessica DaMassa asks me about who’s on the Inc5000 list (Modernizing Medicine, Health Recovery Solutions, Definitive Healthcare, EngagedIN & uBiome), about Klara’s $11m round, and what I’ll be doing in NYC at the DHMP Matchmaking session on Thursday. Why so grumpy Jessica? Maybe it’s because this episode has the same number as our very grumpy President?–Matthew Holt
Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 44
Lotta $$ flowing around health tech services this week. Jessica DaMassa asks me about Alphabet/Google putting $375m into Oscar, Best Buy $800m for GreatCall, no money for med school at NYU & pain for patients in a Netflix movie. All in Health in 2 point 00 minutes!–Matthew Holt
In Search of Intra-Aero-Bili-ty
Another one of my favorites, although this one is much more recent than those published so far–dating back to only March 2015. It was the written version of a talk I gave in September 2014 following the birth of my son Aero on August 26, 2014. So if we are discussing birthdays (and re-posting classics as, yes, it’s still THCB’s 15th birthday week!) we might as well have one that is literally about the confluence of a birthday and the state of health IT, health business, care for the underserved and much more!
Today is the kick-off of the vendor-fest that is HIMSS. Late last week on THCB, ONC director Karen De Salvo and Policy lead Jodi Daniel slammed the EMR vendors for putting up barriers to interoperability. Last year I had my own experience with that topic and I thought it would be timely to write it up.
I want to put this essay in the context of my day job as co-chairman of Health 2.0, where I look at and showcase new technologies in health. We have a three part definition for what we call Health 2.0. First, they must be adaptable technologies in health care, where one technology plugs into another easily using accessible APIs without a lot of rework and data moves between them. Second, we think a lot about the user experience, and over eight years we’ve been seeing tools with better and better user experiences–especially on the phone, iPad, and other screens. Finally, we think about using data to drive decisions and using data from all those devices to change and help us make decisions.
This is the Cal Pacific Medical Center up in San Francisco. The purple arrow on the left points to the door of the emergency entrance.
Cal Pacific is at the end of that big red arrow on the next photo. On that map there’s also a blue line which is my effort to add some social commentary. To the top left of that blue line in San Francisco is where the rich people live, and on the bottom right is where the poor people live. Cal Pacific is right in the middle of the rich side of town, and it’s where San Francisco’s yuppies go to have their babies.
Last year, on August 26, 2014 at about 1 am to be precise, I drove into this entrance rather fast. My wife was next to me and within an hour, we were upstairs and out came Aero. He’s named Aero because his big sister was reading a book about Frankie the Frog who wanted to fly and he was very aerodynamic. So when said, “What should we call your little brother?” She said, “I want to call him Aerodynamic.” We said, “OK, if he comes out fast we’ll call him the aerodynamic flying baby.” So he’s called Aero for short.
Thus began the Quest for Intra-Aero-Bili-ty –a title I hope will grow on you. The Bili part will become obvious in a paragraph or two.
Something had changed since we had been at Cal Pacific three years earlier for the birth of Coco, our first child.
If you look carefully at the top of Amanda’s head, there’s now a computer system. Like most big provider systems, Sutter–Cal Pacific’s parent company–has installed Epic and it’s in every room or on a COW (cart on wheels). Essentially we have spent the last few years putting EMRs in all hospitals. This is the result of the $24+ billion the US taxpayer (well, the Chinese taxpayer to be more accurate) has spent since the 2010 rollout of the HITECH act.Continue reading…
Cats & Dogs: Can We Find Unity on Health Care IT Change?
Today we have a humming economy and insane politics. In early 2009 we were in economic meltdown and were about one week into the sanest, soberist Administration and even Congress over many recent decades. In February 2009 they passed a stimulus bill that had a huge impact on the health IT market (and still does). At that time there was much debate on THCB about what the future of health IT policy should look like and how the stimulus “Meaningful Use” money should be spent. My January 2009 summary of that whole debate introduced the notion of “Cats and Dogs in health IT”. They’re still around today. We’re reprinting it here as part of our 15-year THCB birthday party–Matthew Holt
Those of you paying attention for the past few days might have noticed on the one hand a sense of optimism and unity as Barrack H. Obama, somewhat somberly, began his presidency.
Meanwhile, over the past few weeks the fur has been flying among the electrons on THCB while some very knowledgeable and opinionated health care wonks and geeks have been battling it out about what exactly we should be doing in terms of federal health care IT spending.
Given that even among you smart THCB readers this may be all a little perplexing, I’m going to try to try to make what I hope are some elucidating comments to put this argument in context. I’m doing this partly because I’m perplexed too, but also because I think that there is some hope for a middle road.
First the basics: As sometime THCB contributor & uber-CIO John Halamka makes clear in this excellent post about The Greatest Healthcare IT Generation, some $20 billion of the soon to be passed “spend it as fast as you can” stimulus package is going to be targeted towards health care IT. Now, that’s by no means the biggest part of the $800 billion or so package, and it’s not even the biggest part of the health care spending in the bill. Nearly $87 billion or so is going to support Medicaid, although that will mostly will be replacing cuts being forced on states.
Why Hillarycare failed…and what we need to learn from that failure
By MATTHEW HOLT
In July 2005 George W Bush had relatively recently won a Presidential election in which the Republican won the popular vote (something that will likely never happen again) & the Republicans controlled all three branches of Government. Those of us liberals at the bottom of a dark trench were wondering if and how we’d get to health reform. So in another reprint to celebrate THCB’s 15th birthday, here was my then take on what went wrong in 1994 and what would happen next–Matthew Holt
There are lots of versions about what killed the 1993-4 health care reform effort. Hillary Clinton has now decided that the problem was the lack of incrementalism in her plan. Last week the New York Times said that since becoming a Senator:
“She has deliberately avoided the major mistake she made as first lady, namely trying to sell an ambitious plan to a public with no appetite for radical change. <SNIP>. She summed up her approach in the first floor speech she delivered in the Senate about four years ago, when she unveiled a series of relatively modest health care initiatives. “I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done,” she said, referring to the 1994 defeat of her health care plan.”
On the other hand, some people are still claiming victory for the plan’s defeat even if they were at most modest bit players. Here’s what one fawning bio says about former New York Lt Governor Betsy McCaughey
“A 35-year-old senior fellow named Elizabeth McCaughey…wrote an article for The New Republic on what she discovered in a close reading of the 1,431-page document containing the Clinton Health Care Plan: Namely, that it would put every citizen in a single government-operated HMO. That one article shot down the entire blimp, and Betsy McCaughey became a 35-year-old Cinderella. One of the richest men in America chose her as his wife, and George Pataki made her lieutenant governor of New York.”
Ignoring the fact that McCaughey spent her time thereafter putting poor New Yorkers into those HMOs she so despised, and then went off the deep end en route to divorce from Pataki, the rich guy, and reality (not necessarily in that order), it’s not really true that one article in The New Republic can be quite that influential. (Sorry Jon!). Even if the overly geeky Clintonistas in the White House did feel that they had to come out with a point by point rebuttal. And anyway, the article only came out in January 1994 by which time the die was more or less cast the other way. Again we have to look elsewhere for the explanation.
If you want to go back and spend a few minutes wallowing in the era of trial balloons and secret task forces, there’s a very interesting time line of the whole process on the NPR website, as well as a briefer information over at the Clinton Health Plan Wikipedia site.Continue reading…
Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 43
Jessica DaMassa cracks her whip and in just 2 minutes gets answers out of me about the bidding for #athenahealth, the new clinics at #Amazon, the #FDA approving #NaturalCycles as a contraceptive, and the tech giants getting on stage unprompted at ONC’s Blue Button 2.0 day to tell the world that they are going to fix the interoperability problem. Oh, and a shout out to THCB’s 15th birthday–Matthew Holt
As I’ve always suspected, Health Care = Communism + Frappuccinos
By MATTHEW HOLT
Happy 15th birthday THCB! Yes, 15 years ago today this little blog opened for business and changed my life (and at least impacted a few others). Later this week we are going to celebrate and tell you a bit more about what the next 15 years (really?) of THCB might look like. But for now, I’m rerunning a few of my favorite pieces from the mid-2000s, the golden age of blogging. Today I present “Health Care = Communism + Frappuccinos”, one of my favorites about the relationship between government and private sector originally published here on Jan7, 2005. And like the Medicare one from last week, it sure holds true today. Matthew Holt
Those of you who think I’m an unreconstructed commie will correctly suspect that I’ve always discussed Marxism in my health care talks. You’d be amazed at how many audiences of hospital administrators in the mid-west know nothing about the integral essentials of Marx’s theory of history. And I really enjoy bring the light to them, especially when I manage to reference Mongolia 1919, managed care and Communism in the same bullet point.
While I’ve always been very proud of that one (err.. maybe you have to be there, but you could always hire me to come tell it!), even if I am jesting, there’s a really loose use of the concept of Marxism in this 2005 piece (reprinted in 2009) called A Prescription for Marxism in Foreign Policy from (apparently) libertarian-leaning Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff. He opens with this little nugget:
“Karl Marx may have suffered a second death at the end of the last century, but look for a spirited comeback in this one. The next great battle between socialism and capitalism will be waged over human health and life expectancy. As rich countries grow richer, and as healthcare technology continues to improve, people will spend ever growing shares of their income on living longer and healthier lives.”
Actually he’s right that there will be a backlash against the (allegedly) market-based capitalism — which has actually been closer to all-out mercantilist booty capitalism — that we’re seen over the last couple of decades. History tends to be reactive and societies go through long periods of reaction to what’s been seen before. In fact the 1980-20?? (10-15?) period of “conservatism” is a reaction to the 1930-1980 period of social corporatism seen in most of the western world. And any period in which the inequality of wealth and income in one society continues to grow at the current rate will eventually invite a reaction–you can ask Louis XVI of France about that.
But when Rogoff is talking about Marxism in health care what he really means is that, because health care by definition will consume more and more of our societal resources, the arguments about the creation and distribution of health care products and services will look more like the arguments seen in the debates about how the government used to allocate resources for “guns versus butter” in the 1950s. These days we are supposed to believe that government blindly accepts letting “the market” rule, even if for vast sways of the economy the government clearly rules the market, which in turn means that those corporations with political influence set the rules and the budgets (quick now, it begins with an H…). Continue reading…
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