Today on THCB Spotlights, Matthew Holt interviews CJ Wilson, the CEO of MyHealth.US. MyHealth.US provides wearable QR codes for instant access to emergency health information, as well as a digital platform to track your health data and house medical records. CJ shows us some of their offerings and explains how they’re working with unions and schools in NYC along with the company’s future plans for funding and growth.
THCB Gang Episode 63 – Thurs July 22
Episode 62 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Thursday, July 22nd. Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) was joined by regulars: patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@MLMillenson); fierce patient activist Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey); and futurist Ian Morrison (@seccurve).
We got into it on delta variant, medical debt at $140bn, the NYPD vaccination rate being 20 points below the state average, diversity as structural problem in medical school and beyond, and whether we could give everyone in America concierge primary care (the numbers add up! Almost…)
Then video is below. If you’d rather listen, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
Next week #THCBGang is off on vacation!
Health Care Should Go (Micro) Nuclear
By KIM BELLARD
I think of hospitals as the healthcare system’s nuclear power plants. They’re both big, complex, expensive to build, beset with heavy regulatory burdens, consistently major components of their respective systems (healthcare and electric generation) yet declining in number. Each is seen to offer benefits to many but also to pose unexpected risk to some.
Interestingly, there’s a “micro” trend for each, but aimed towards different ends.
Micro hospitals have been with us for several years. They usually have only around ten beds, along with an emergency room, lab and imaging. Dr. Tom Vo, CEO of Nutex Health, says: “We position ourselves between urgent care and a big hospital.” A micro-hospital Chief Medical Officer admits: “We still partner with our larger hospital partners for patients who might require surgery or intensive care.”
They’re not trying to reinvent hospitals so much as to support them and offer more convenience to patients. Not so with micro reactors; they’re looking to revitalize their industry, which is in trouble.
According to the U.S. Energy Administration (E.I.A.), there are 94 U.S. nuclear reactors, at 56 nuclear power plants, in 28 states. Only one new reactor has gone active in the U.S. since 1996, while almost two dozen are in various stages of decommissioning and only two new ones are under construction. Overall, the U.S. gets about 20% of its power from nuclear reactors, while 13 countries get at least a quarter of their electricity from nuclear, with France leading the pack at 75%.
We talk a lot about transitioning away from using fossil fuels to generate electric power, but none of the renewable options currently offers a realistic path towards replacing them. Nuclear power is the proven alternative, but, as Dan Van Boom wrote in CNET, nuclear power has a PR problem. No one wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard, no matter how big that backyard is.
Continue reading…Matthew’s health care tidbits
Each week I’ve been adding a brief tidbits section to the THCB Reader, our weekly newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB that week (Sign up here!). Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt
In this week’s health care tidbits, Shannon Brownlee and her fellow rebels at the Lown Institute decided to have a bit of fun and compare which non-profit hospitals actually made up for the tax-breaks they got by providing more in community benefit. A bunch of hospitals you never heard of topped the list. What was more interesting was the hospitals that topped the inverse list, in that they gave way less in community benefit than they got in tax breaks. That list has a bunch of names on it you will have heard of!
Given how many of that list run sizable hedge funds and then do a little health care services on the side, perhaps it’s time to totally re-think our deference to these hospital system monopolies. And I don’t just mean making it harder for them to merge and raise prices as suggested by Biden’s recent Executive Order.
THCB Gang Episode 62 – Thurs July 15, 1pm PT- 4pm ET
Episode 62 of “The THCB Gang” will be live-streamed on Thursday, June 17th at 1pm PT -4PM ET. Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) will be joined by regulars futurist Jeff Goldsmith; policy expert consultant/author Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1); Suntra Modern Recovery CEO JL Neptune (@JeanLucNeptune); and medical historian Mike Magee (@drmikemagee).
If you’d rather listen, the “audio only” version it is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels a day or so after the episode — Matthew Holt
Meet Wheel: The Mysterious, White-Label Telehealth Startup Bolstering ‘Next-Gen’ Virtual Care
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Stealthy telehealth startup Wheel just closed a $50M series B and CEO Michelle Davey is here to reveal the mystery behind the company’s very behind-the-scenes approach to selling white-label virtual care. The business model is built on a network of clinicians that Wheel has curated and credentialed specifically for virtual care delivery – for a rotating cast of clients, under any brand, at any time. Unlike the market-leading incumbent telehealth co’s that also sell virtual care infrastructure, Wheel does NOT have a patient front door, isn’t angling for one, and is so protective of its clients’ brands that Michelle won’t even name names about who her company is working with. She simply describes her clientele as those in the biz of “next gen” virtual care: retail players, care-plus-pharmacy-delivery startups, asynchronous care providers, labs, remote patient monitoring companies, and so on.
Wheel experienced 300% year-over-year growth — and 1200% growth from Q4-2020 to Q1-2021 — but is it sustainable as the pandemic wans and other plug-and-play telehealth infrastructure services also gain market traction and funding? And, what about the common criticism that telehealth is too transactional and that both patients AND physicians prefer the opportunity to build deeper relationships? Do providers really want to practice for multiple companies at the same time? We get a look inside Wheel’s 90% clinician retention rate to see what else might be satisfying the clinician’s need to connect, and talk about areas for growth now that the company’s received fresh funds.
THCB Gang Episode 61 – Thurs July 8
On Thursday’s #THCBGang Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) was joined by regulars, employer health expert Jennifer Benz (@jenbenz); patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@MLMillenson); THCB regular writer Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard); privacy expert and now entrepreneur Deven McGraw (@HealthPrivacy); and–we were thrilled to have back–fierce patient activist Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey). Lots of discussion about Casey’s latest patient experience as she continues to undergo the #METSparty.
If you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels
THCB Gang Episode 60 – Thurs July 1
Episode 60 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Thursday, July 1st. Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) was joined by policy consultant/author Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1); THCB Editor and soon-to-be medical student at Yale, and first time #THCBGang participant Christina Liu (@ChristinayLiu) and–making a rare but welcome appearance –venture investor & soccer mogul Marcus Whitney @marcuswhitney We had a great wide ranging chat about Medicaid, venture capital and the unnecessarily excessive rigors of applying to medical school, and what that means for health equity.
The video is below but if you’d rather listen to the episode, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
Go Ahead, AI—Surprise Us
By KIM BELLARD
Last week I was on a fun podcast with a bunch of people who were, as usual, smarter than me, and, in particular, more knowledgeable about one of my favorite topics – artificial intelligence (A.I.), particularly for healthcare. With the WHO releasing its “first global report” on A.I. — Ethics & Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health – and with no shortage of other experts weighing in recently, it seemed like a good time to revisit the topic.
My prediction: it’s not going to work out quite like we expect, and it probably shouldn’t.
“Like all new technology, artificial intelligence holds enormous potential for improving the health of millions of people around the world, but like all technology it can also be misused and cause harm,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, said in a statement. He’s right on both counts.
WHO’s proposed six principles are:
- Protecting human autonomy
- Promoting human well-being and safety and the public interest
- Ensuring transparency, explainability and intelligibility
- Fostering responsibility and accountability
- Ensuring inclusiveness and equity
- Promoting AI that is responsive and sustainable
All valid points, but, as we’re already learning, easier to propose than to ensure. Just ask Timnit Gebru. When it comes to using new technologies, we’re not so good about thinking through their implications, much less ensuring that everyone benefits. We’re more of a “let the genie out of the bottle and see what happens” kind of species, and I hope our future AI overlords don’t laugh too much about that.
As Stacey Higginbotham asks in IEEE Spectrum, “how do we know if a new technology is serving a greater good or policy goal, or merely boosting a company’s profit margins?…we have no idea how to make it work for society’s goals, rather than a company’s, or an individual’s.” She further notes that “we haven’t even established what those benefits should be.”
Continue reading…Health Tech: Part II –Powering Up The Vision
By MIKE MAGEE
Few can disagree that, in the fog of the Covid 19 pandemic, health technology entrepreneurs have been on a tear. In the first year of Covid’s isolation induced new reality, digital health companies experienced a $21.6 billion investment boost, double that of the prior year, and four times 2016 funding.
By year two, the investment community exhibited some signs of self-restraint by raising a few open ended questions. For example, in early 2021, Deloitte & Touche led a Future of Health panel at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference, reporting that “panelists suggested that entrepreneurs need to go beyond products that simply improve processes or solve existing problems.”
Panelists predicted that virtual health delivery services will expand; consumers will demand greater involvement including expansion of home diagnostics; and investment driven mergers and acquistions will explode – all of which has proven to be true.
Adding push to shove, Deloitte added this final nudge: “Entrepreneurs who define new markets, dominate them with a strategy people can understand, and extract value will likely be the most successful.”
Forty years ago, in the early beginnings of Health Tech, words similar to those above triggered cautionary tones from traditionalists. For example, Dr. John A. Benson, Jr., then President of the Board of Internal Medicine, stated “There is a groundswell in American medicine, this desire to encourage more ethical and humanistic concerns in physicians. After the technological progress that medicine made in the 60’s and 70’s, this is a swing of the pendulum back to the fact that we are doctors, and that we can do a lot better than we are doing now.”
He accurately described the mood then, and for most of the 20th century, of academic clinicians toward technology, a complex love-hate relationship that has rejoiced and cheered on progress, while struggling to accept and master change in a manner that would avoid driving a wedge between academicians, clinicians and patients.
Continue reading…
