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OK, trying more AI to write this

by MATTHEW HOLT

In the far oft halcyon days of last month, I used an AI system from Lex.Page  to write something about digital health. In the past few days the world has gone nuts about a new AI author called ChatGPT. So I tought I would compare and contrast.

Last month Lex.page was asked about Digital Health and it said

Digital Health is one of the most rapidly growing and important sectors in health care today. It is a broad term that encompasses the use of technology to improve health and health care.

Today I asked ChatGPT the same thing. In fact I just wrote “Digital Health” as the Q and this was the A

Digital health, also known as telehealth, is the use of digital technologies to deliver healthcare services remotely. This includes the use of video conferencing, mobile health apps, remote patient monitoring, and other digital tools to provide healthcare services to patients. Digital health can be used to improve access to primary care, reduce costs, and improve patient outcomes.

OK, pretty much a longer version of the same thing but with more details. So then I went BACK to Lex.page to ask it. But I had to ask it “What is Digital Health”

Digital health is a term used to describe the use of technology to improve healthcare. It covers everything from diagnostic tools and monitoring devices to electronic medical records and healthcare analytics. It’s an exciting and rapidly evolving area that has the potential to revolutionize the delivery of healthcare.

So in a month Lex.page has gotten a lot better!

Last month Lex.page said in response to my question/statement, “The biggest challenges for primary care are”

-Access to care

-Cost of care

-Quality of care

So it seems that digital health can help with all of those things. By providing tools that help patients better self-manage their health, digital health can help to improve access to care. By providing tools that help to lower the cost of care, digital health can help to make care more affordable. And by providing tools that help to improve the quality of care, digital health can help to make

I put the same sentence into GPTChat and at the bottom it told me Warning: Your text ends in a trailing space, which causes worse performance due to how the API splits text into tokens. But I asked it anyway and it gave me

A: 1. Accessibility: Ensuring that everyone has access to quality primary care services.

I surmised that it had more answers so I kept hitting submit! It got to another 12 answers with no new question!

Q: A: 2. Cost: Finding ways to make primary care services more affordable and accessible to all. Q: A: 3. Workforce: Recruiting and retaining a sufficient number of primary care providers to meet the needs of the population. Q: A: 4. Technology: Incorporating new technologies into primary care to improve efficiency and patient outcomes. Q: A: 5. Coordination: Improving the coordination of care between primary care providers and other healthcare professionals. Q: A: 6. Quality: Ensuring that primary care services are of the highest quality and meet the needs of patients. Q: A: 7. Education: Educating patients about the importance of preventive care and the value of primary care services. Q: A: 8. Mental Health: Integrating mental health services into primary care to better address the needs of patients. Q: A: 9. Population Health: Developing strategies to improve the health of the population as a whole. A: 10. Data: Utilizing data to inform decision-making and improve patient outcomes. A: 11. Payment: Developing new payment models that incentivize quality care and reduce costs. Q: A: 12. Social Determinants of Health: Addressing the social and environmental factors that influence health outcomes.

OK so those are all separate statements, but it’s pretty damn impressive. How is Lex.page doing? Well I asked it’s chatbot the same statement and it now answered:

The biggest challenges for primary care are likely to be related to access and cost. In many areas of the world, access to quality primary care is limited by geography, poverty, or both. Cost is also an issue, especially in countries with expensive healthcare systems. Additionally, many primary care providers struggle to effectively manage chronic conditions, such as diabetes and hypertension, due to a lack of resources, funding, and staff. Finally, the rapid advancements in technology have presented a challenge in terms of staying up to date with the latest medical developments.

That’s not only pretty smart but it’s quite an advance on the answer it gave me to the same vague question/statement just 31 days ago.

We are seeing a technology emerge right before our eyes.

Presumably the next step is to set it to read some of my favorite pieces on THCB and just have it write for me! Then I will be happily replaced by a robot!

New VC Fund Angelini Ventures Launches to Find Next Big Digital Health & Biotech Disruptors

BY JESS DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

NEW VC Fund! Angelini Ventures just launched their $300 million dollar investment fund to support early-stage biotech and digital health startups in the US, Europe, and Israel. CEO & Managing Director Paolo Di Giorgio and Managing Director Elia Stupka explain the fund’s thesis which is different than the usual corporate investment funds because of its “very long-term” strategy and interest in supporting disruptive health innovation that doesn’t necessarily need to relate to the core businesses of its multi-national parent, Angelini Industries. Find out more – including details about where this fund has already placed some investment dollars – from this quick chat in Milan.

THCB Gang Episode 108, Thursday December 1

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday November 17 were futurist Jeff Goldsmith; THCB regular writer and ponderer of odd juxtapositions Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard); patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson); fierce patient activist Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey); and Olympic rower for 2 countries and all around dynamo Jennifer Goldsack, (@GoldsackJen). This was quite the conversation!

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

THCB Quickbite: AJ Loiacono, CEO, CapitalRx

AJ Loiacono, CEO of CapitalRx, in a quickbite interview with The Health Care Blog’s Matthew Holt. CapitalRx is up to 1.5m members serviced both as a PBM and as a tech company administering pharmacy benefits using its tech platform. AJ says they’ve demonstrated to the market that they can service customers of any size, and the employer groups are starting to ask the right questions about pharmacy costs.

Is Care Navigation Healthcare’s Next ‘Gold Mine’? Quantum Health’s Move to Win Over Larger Employers

BY JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

One-to-watch as a potential health tech IPO this year is care navigator Quantum Health, and I’m talking to CEO Zane Burke about both their breaking new product launch AND the key differences between Quantum and the increasingly competitive field of other employer benefits advocacy-based businesses like Accolade, Rightway, and Transcarent.

Private equity backed, two-decades old, and EBITA positive, Zane says Quantum Health is delivering an ROI of “over two-and-a-half to one” to its client roster of 450 top large, self-insured employers and saving more than 14% on all healthcare costs over time. The new product – Quantum Health Access – is a streamlined, more flexible version of the soup-to-nuts Complete Care offering capable of yielding these results, and it’s being offered to give the largest of employers (those big enough to be working with multiple health plans, for example) a way to start out with Quantum’s data-driven navigation tools without a total overhaul of their current benefits situation.

Zane explains Quantum’s “real-time intercept tool” and how it not only helps engage high-utilizers in an employer’s plan (aka those who spend more than $10,000 in claims), but how 85% of the time it catches them on their care journey before they’ve spent a thousand dollars – creating an early opportunity to provide better routing and, ultimately, reduce overall costs. The upside for Quantum? “Employers have long thought of the carriers as this is their responsibility, but the carriers are really maximizing around their siloed system to pay a claim, do the disease management, get you off the phone and into somebody else’s queue,” explains Zane. “Our model is, ‘hey…every single one of those interactions is a gold mine.’”

We get further into the details around the new Quantum Health Access product, and, more importantly, what Zane sees as Quantum’s key point of differentiation against Accolade, Rightway, Transcarent, and the rest. Tune in around the 20-minute mark to hear this bit and to find out what Quantum’s doing with provider data that makes “everybody else that talks that game” look like they are just playing “Pick Up Sticks.”

THCB Gang Episode 106, Thursday November 10

After an early Fall hiatus, THCB Gang is back!! Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) for #THCBGang on Thursday November 10 were medical historian Mike Magee (@drmikemagee); futurist Jeff Goldsmith; THCB regular writer and ponderer of odd juxtapositions Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard); and policy consultant/author Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1). You can imagine that elections were on our collective minds.

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

Virtual Care Regulatory Round-Up: Ro’s Z Reitano & Virtual-First’s Power to Control the Care Journey

by JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF Health

“What happens when there is a massive shift of where the beginning of a journey occurs…that sort of affords the opportunity for everyone after that to be disintermediated.” So says Zachariah “Z” Reitano, co-founder & CEO of Ro, arguably one of the most successful OG virtual-first care companies which has been providing telehealth-plus-testing-plus-pharmacy-delivery (and now a whole lot more) via its Roman and Rory brands since 2017.

As health tech companies – and now, more and more incumbent orgs and retail health providers – evolve their own “omnichannel” strategies, we talk to Z about Ro’s direct-to-patient care model, and what we can learn from its successful operation and expansion as one of the first “digitally native” healthcare providers.

To Z, the technology is just an enabler to a larger shift in how people are ultimately gaining more control over their health. Technology can turn luxuries into commodities, he says, and, at Ro, that’s translating into a concept they’re calling “goal-oriented healthcare,” which is basically providing the “luxury” of giving a patient what they want, when they want it; easily, conveniently, and affordably.

In short, Z explains: “Patients come to us, and they say what they want to achieve: ‘I want to lose weight…I want to have a child…I want to improve my mental health…I want to improve my skin…I want to have better sex.’ And then, we help them from beginning to end in the most convenient and effective way possible.”

The role of digital in all this is critical. It allows for costs to be stripped out, for providers to be able to practice at the top of their licenses, and for data to be shared between provider and patient asynchronously (aka conveniently.) But, it sounds like what’s most exciting about ‘virtual-first’ to Z is the “first” part – having the opportunity to initialize the relationship with the patient, then “raise the standard of where we guide people afterwards, and have the opportunity to disintermediate and really heavily influence the entire patient journey.”

Oooohh – can’t hear enough about this! Tune in to find out more about how Z sees virtual-first care as changing patients’ relationships with the healthcare system AND, because we had to talk a little policy too, get his thinking on how barriers like state licensure that are often looked at as constraints to ‘virtual care at-scale’ might also be evolving to help enable that shift.

* Special thanks to our series sponsor, Wheel – the health tech company powering the virtual care industry. Wheel provides companies with everything they need to launch and scale virtual care services — including the regulatory infrastructure to deliver high quality and compliant care. Learn more at www.wheel.com.

And you thought Mastadons were extinct…

by KIM BELLARD

Until last week, for me, “mastodon” only meant the giant animal that went extinct several thousand years ago (I was, it appears, unaware of the heavy metal band Mastodon). Now, as the result of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, many Twitter users are being forced to take a look at alternatives, such as the social networking site Mastodon.

It’s possible that we are about the witness the Myspace-ization of Twitter, brought down by competition, bad management, and bad product decisions. In my usual “there must be a pony in here somewhere” fashion, there may be some lessons in the Twitter saga that healthcare might want to pay attention to.

As most know by now, Mr. Musk has been a Twitter power user for many years, and a frequent critic. In March of this year he started discussions about purchasing it. In short order, he threw out a bold bid, was rejected then accepted by Twitter’s board, tried to get out of the deal, was sued by Twitter, and closed the deal late last month. 

Then things got really rocky.   

Mr. Musk tried to reassure squeamish advertisers, only to make them and others even more nervous when he retweeted some disinformation. After a spike in hate speech on the site, he promised that, as much as he was buying Twitter out of his love for free speech, Twitter “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Then he shocked observers (and Twitter employees) by suddenly laying off half the workforce, including much of the content moderation staff. Some are now being asked back, being told they were laid off “by mistake.”   

He then floated a balloon about charging $20 a month for Twitter’s blue verification, had a tweet argument with Stephen King about it, then went forward with a $7.99 plan, only to be punked by users illustrating the flaws. At this writing, the plan now appears to be on hold, at least until Tuesday’s mid-term elections. 

Advertisers appear to be fleeing, or at least curtailing spending.

As The Wall Street Journal put it: “In Elon Musk’s first week at Twitter Inc., he flouted much of the advice management gurus have dished out for decades.” It’s no wonder many Twitter users are looking at Mastodon.

Continue reading…

I’m trying to get AI to write this!

• 2

By MATTHEW HOLT

So it’s a new world in blogging about health care, and when I want to write about Digital Health or primary care, I’ve been told that this system at Lex.Page can do it for me

So here goes and lets see what it says about Digital Health or primary care

Digital Health is one of the most rapidly growing and important sectors in health care today. It is a broad term that encompasses the use of technology to improve health and health care.

OK so it wrote that. Which isn’t bad but not too helpful

Perhaps I can ask it whether it thinks that digital health will have a big impact on the future of primary care

The system at Lex writes that it does think digital health will have a big impact on the future of primary care.

So now it’s just spitting back at me what I asked it. Not too sure how to get it to write more for me

I then asked it to follow this sentence — The biggest challenges for primary care are

-Access to care

-Cost of care

-Quality of care

So it seems that digital health can help with all of those things. By providing tools that help patients better self-manage their health, digital health can help to improve access to care. By providing tools that help to lower the cost of care, digital health can help to make care more affordable. And by providing tools that help to improve the quality of care, digital health can help to make

That is pretty damn good given it’s a machine just guessing what I want it to write, even if it didn’t finish that last sentence. I can imagine that pretty soon I’ll be able to spit one of my talks into it and it will be able to write an article out of it quickly. I’ll be playing around with Lex and I can give some invites — if you want one, let me know.

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