Category: Health Tech

23andMe punk rock partying, price cuts and on vid on D

Sep 9, 2008• 2

By Matthew Holt

23andme is having a gobbing party in NYC tonight—presumably at the Roxie. You didn’t know punk was back, did ya?

Indu will be there (sadly I had to stay chained to the computer). But there’s a little more 23andme news today in that they’ve dropped their core price to $399 and have inked a deal to get access to Ancestry.com’s database of users. Not quite an impulse purchase yet, but still getting down there.

And if you want to know what 23andme is up to, you can see Linda & Ann’s interview/demo at All things D last May. Of course you can see Linda at Health 2.0 next month, but I’m not sure we’ll be quite the pushovers Mossberg & Swisher are…at least we’ll keep them to 3.5 minutes!

I’m still trying to figure out whether the DTC genomic market is a gimmick or actually has some value (and I don’t mean value the way a VC does! I mean whether society should be spending health care dollars on genomics when we do such a shitty job treating diseases we do understand). But it’s good to see some real activity in at least postulating the concept.

Adam Bosworth speaks about Google Health, Keas and everything

Sep 3, 2008• 2

By Matthew Holt

Adam_bosworth After a long period of time I’ve finally wrestled Adam Bosworth to the floor and forced
the microphone to his mouth. Adam of course is the software guru (he’s one of the originators of XML) who went to Google to start Google Health, and spent much of 2007 talking about how he hoped Google Health would change health care. He then left Google Health (several months before it launched in March 2008) and at the very end of 2007 founded Keas. Adam will be at the Health 2.0 Conference and while Keas is in stealth mode at the moment, he may just be ready to show us all a bit of Keas’ technology by then.

But he also has very strong views on health technology, data, PHRs. HealthVault & Google Health, and much much more. Listen to the interview.

Google’s strategy (mostly outside of health care)

Sep 3, 2008

By Matthew Holt

VC Fred Wilson explains where he thinks Google is going in Chrome, Android, and The Cloud. The Health 2.0 team is about 3 months into using Google Docs (especially the spreadsheet) and although Docs continues to have its teething troubles, like Fred we are hooked. I suspect we and Fred’s shop are not alone

BTW, I read the Chrome comic book today and it is a thing of beauty — taking really tough technical concepts and explaining them simply and not condescendingly. I’ll for sure be downloading Chrome when I get the chance.

Meanwhile, in health care last week David Kibbe interviewed Ronnie Zeiger at Google as part of the Great American Health 2.0 Tour. The Googleplex was a little empty as half the employees seemed to be at Burning Man. But a little way into the public release of Google Health, it does seem as they’re happy with what’s happening so far, and they remain committed to taking it seriously. (I sense a bottle of fine wine coming my way ).

On the other hand, I know for sure that Microsoft continues to take its health care business very seriously too. And yes, you’ll be able to see both of them at Health 2.0.

Obama and Krugman — almost mirror each other

Aug 29, 2008• 9

By Matthew Holt Obama

I thought Obama was fabulous last night at the convention. He’s a great speaker, but
also able to gently laugh with his audience. His introduction showed what a tough road he had. If the Republicans manage to convince the American people that a black kid with a single white parent living in middle America is an elitist son of privilege then Karl Rove is better than I thought.

He was happy to rip McCain not on personality but on the issues. I’d like to have seen a lot more from the Democrats at this convention ripping Bush and Cheney on personality, personal corruption and the issues, and I wish Kerry had done even more in 2004, but that’s water under the bridge.

But the key point is that for most Americans things aren’t going well. Paul Krugman, who’s had his differences with Obama says it well today showing just how much key Republicans are out of touch — especially on the economy and health care.

Of course all he has to do is quote Phil Gramm, who appeared in Obama’s speech, and John Goodman who didn’t but does make it into Krugman’s column today. Goodman, of course, was pilloried in THCB yesterday. But I still think it’s a triple bluff on his part.

Two Boston Health 2.0 companies show a little more

Aug 29, 2008

By Matthew Holt

Two MD-run Health 2.0 companies in Boston had decent interviews recently in which they told a little more about themselves.

American Well’s Roy Schoenberg was interviewed by Health Business Blog’s David
Williams. It’s a long and thorough interview although Roy doesn’t tell anything particularly new, it’s as good a summary of what he thinks their business will be as I’ve seen anywhere. And they get all those fun trips to Hawaii too!

Meanwhile, across the Charles River in Cambridge Sermo’s Daniel Palestrant is making a
little more public. It’s no longer just Pfizer, now most of the big pharma companies are dipping their toe in the Sermo pond, as he tells Xconomy. What he won’t tell anyone yet is how deep their feet are in, but Sermo which reached more than 70,000 signed up docs recently — Sermo from less than 10,000 only 18 months ago — is clearly basing most of its business plan on getting big pharma to move from experimenting with it to using Sermo as a mainstream educational and marketing channel. As I’ve said before, this makes lots of sense for Sermo and its users. Whether it helps big pharma remains to be seen!

But the good news is that Daniel is not shy with his advice to other Health 2.0 Companies. “You Will Not Pay Your Bills with ads by Google,” he says.

Why not, Daniel? It works pretty well for Google!

(Both Roy of American Well and Daniel of Sermo will be at Health 2.0 next month, of course!)

Is John Goodman joking or just mean?

Aug 28, 2008• 34

By Matthew Holt

The uninsured numbers went down a touch because in 2007 Medicaid expanded. In 2008 they’ll go up as unemployment increases and S-CHIP coverage is cut. Really this doesn’t change too much.

Right-wing nut jobs all over the Internet are saying that uninsurance doesn’t matter. It’s surprising that one of the more sensible right-wingers has joined in and now says that the uninsured don’t exist.

But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care).

Cisco’s Frances Dare talks about Congressional action on health IT

Aug 26, 2008

By Matthew Holt Frances_dare_2

Frances Dare is someone I’ve know for a long time in the health care IT world (sorry, Frances!). That means that she’s seen the painfully slow developments in many aspects of health IT since the 1990s, and has an experienced view of what’s coming along at what pace. These days Frances is a Director at Cisco focusing on health care, and more recently she’s taken an active role in Cisco’s health care lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill.

Given that we don’t spend much time on THCB talking about the impact of the Federal sausage-making process on health care IT, telemedicine, et al, I thought that getting the view of a major IT vendor about what they expect to come out of the current Congress would be pretty interesting. And it was. Here’s the Interview.

BTW, in the interview I get the name of Frances’ division at Cisco wrong, Frances is a Director in the ISBG which stands for Internet Business Solutions Group. (FD, I have done consulting work for Cisco in the past, even if I didn’t know the name of the group I was working for!).

The first one’s always free….but will you buy a kid a bike?

Aug 25, 2008

By Matthew Holt

Many times because I’m an independent consultant, blogger or general self-appointed health care know-it-all people want to talk to me. And I’m always happy to talk. Sometimes these conversations turn into business for me or THCB or Health 2.0, but sometimes they don’t. What I tell anyone who wants my time is that the "first one is always free."

Saigon

Meanwhile, as part of her return from a back injury my wife Amanda has bought a bike and is training for a triathlon later this Fall. It’s also renewal time for our favorite cause the Saigon Childrens Charity. Much of its resources are spent buying rice for poor families so that they don’t need to send kids out to work, and so the kid can go to school instead. With the price of rice doubling this year, things are getting tougher for the charity and the kids.

Who’d be a pollster, eh

Aug 22, 2008• 4

By Matthew Holt

HSC says that the number of Americans going online for healthcare goes way up:

In 2007, 56 percent of American adults—more than 122 million people—sought information about a personal health concern from a source other than their doctor, up from 38 percent, or 72 million people, in 2001, according to a national study released today by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC).

Harris Interactive says it’s gone down ;

Ten years ago, in 1998, the Harris Poll began measuring the number of people going online for health care information. At that time we reported that 54 million people had done so at least once. Since then the number of those people, whom we labeled “cyberchondriacs,” have increased almost every year, reaching 110 million in 2002, and 160 million in 2007.

This year, the Harris Poll finds only 150 million who claim to have gone online to obtain health care information. Of course, 150 million is still a huge number and includes 66 percent of all adults and 81 percent of those who are online.

Extra points if you can spot the flaw in my reasoning. (Yes, it’s easy but I’ve been up late watching the Olympics….even though I said I wouldn’t)

Health IT policy: the fur is flying

Aug 19, 2008• 11

By Matthew Holt

Some fur is flying in the rarefied world of health IT policy geeks this morning. Health Affairs has three articles. The first from Markle’s Carol Diamond, writing with Here Comes Everybody author and Internet guru Clay Shirky, more or less says that obsessive attention to rigid standards is not helping and actually may be hindering the IT adoption process. And yes, in case you were wondering they do mean CCHIT and ONCHIT’s current policies and agenda which has been going for four years and which they’re accusing of “magical thinking.” Instead, we need new policies which target desired outcomes measured in improved patient care, instead of assuming that creating new technology standards will get us there. And by policies I think they mean money, and its redirection by current payers. After all, if putting in a RHIO costs hospitals operating revenue in reducing admissions and tests, why would they do it?