Episode 10 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Thursday, May 21th
Joining me were regulars: writer Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard), policy expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis), patient advocate Grace Cordovano (@GraceCordovano), radiologist Saurabh Jha (@RogueRad), employer consultant Brian Klepper (@bklepper1), Deven McGraw (@healthprivacy) and a guest, former ONC Consumer head Lygeia Riccardi, now at Carium Health (@Lygeia)! The conversation moved onto the new normal of telehealth, how much things would change in the future, and what the story with testing and opening up would look like. You can see the video below
If you’d rather listen, the “audio only” version is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels — Matthew Holt
Episode 9 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Wednesday (instead of our normal Thursday slot) on May 13th at 1pm PT- 4pm ET! Watch it below! Next week we’ll be back to Thursday
Joining me were health “IT” girl Jessica DaMassa (@jessdamassa), health futurist Ian Morrison (@seccurve), health economist Jane Sarasohn-Kahn (@healthythinker), patient safety expert Michael Millenson (MLMillenson), and MD & hospital system exec Rajesh Aggarwal (@docaggarwal). The conversation looked at the likelihod of big picture change, Medicare Advantage expansion, whether the move to remote care is real and sustainable, and at one point got us to war with China!
If you’d rather listen, the “audio only” version is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels from Thursday onwards— Matthew Holt
Smart Quarantine as the next step to combat COVID-19
As the nation and the world grapple with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is growing consensus among experts that we need a sustainable system of specific lockdowns, social distancing, and extreme resource provision in terms of labor, ventilators and PPE to arm hospitals and health providers as they deal with the onslaught of patients. Even while some American states start to slowly open up, we need a system that can manage COVID-19 over the coming months and years–especially if this Fall brings a second wave.
Writing in the NY Times on April 7, Harvey Fineberg and colleagues summarized an as yet overlooked issue. There are many patients who may or do have COVID-19, but are not sick enough to need hospital care, or who have been discharged from hospitals. We need to keep these patients away from hospitals but if they shelter in place in their household there is a high risk they will infect their families or housemates. This likelihood is even higher if they are homeless, incarcerated, or living in other group arrangements.
Instead of sheltering in place at home Fineberg and colleagues suggest those patients enter “smart quarantine” in temporary isolated accommodation, such as hotels or college dormitories, where they can be looked after by medical teams and tested semi-regularly. But whether they are at home or in temporary accommodation, leaving those patients with minimal support to be tested at the end of 14 days is not enough. A significant proportion of them will develop COVID-19 and some of those are going to be admitted to hospital. In addition several patients have been discharged from hospital, but still need to be monitored. We are going to need to be able to closely monitor a significant number of people even while the majority of them will need relatively limited amounts of care.
The good news is that we have had a couple of decades of development of the technologies and services required to both care for and monitor these patients, while keeping the main resources such as ventilators for those in hospitals. Pulling together available technologies and services, we will be able to quickly and accurately manage these patients, ensure their best outcomes, and spare scarce hospital resources. There are seven main components of this process, which I am calling “smart care in quarantine.”
The Process
Upon either a positive test for COVID-19 or a suspicion of those symptoms awaiting testing, patients can be admitted to isolation at home or in, say, empty hotels.
1. Monitoring equipment. Patients can be given FDA regulated monitoring devices which will work using bluetooth and WiFi (or 4G cellular). The main monitoring tools required are:
Matthew Holt talks to David Smith who is working on the Medicaid Transformation Project at Avia, which is looking at how hospitals & health plans can improve health outcomes and in turn, lose less money on Medicaid programs. David talks about the tremendous amount of capital being poured into Medicaid, and how the problem is only getting worse. So the focus of the project is trying to reduce healthcare delivery organizations’ spend on these services. At Avia, they are trying to take the best of model science and the best of digital capabilities to help create more efficient care models for their clients as well as reduce costs.
Zoya Khan is the Editor-in-Chief of THCB and a Strategy Manager at SMACK.health
Episode 8 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Thursday, May 7th at 1pm PT- 4pm ET! You can see it below.
Joining me were our regulars: patient advocate Grace Cordovano (@GraceCordovano), data privacy lawyer Deven McGraw (@HealthPrivacy), policy expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis), radiologist Saurabh Jha (@RogueRad) (who snuck in late), and writer Kim Bellard (@Kimbbellard). We had a great conversation including a lot of detail around access to patient records, and some fun about infectious disease epidemiologists behaving badly! If you’d rather listen, the “audio only” version is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels from Friday— Matthew Holt
Episode 7 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Thursday, April 30th at 1pm PT- 4pm ET! You can see it below. If you’d rather listen, the “audio only” version is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
Joining me were regulars futurist Ian Morrison (@seccurve), patient advocate Grace Cordovano (@GraceCordovano), quality expert Michael Millenson (@MLMillenson), with guests Raj Aggarwal (@docaggarwal) head of innovation at Jefferson Health System, and our very own health tech “IT girl” Jessica DaMassa (@jessdamassa) from WTF Health. We had a great conversation about the present and future of care delivery and finance. — Matthew Holt
Episode 6 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Thursday, April 23 at 1pm PT- 4pm ET! 4-6 semi-regular guests drawn from THCB authors and other assorted old friends of mine will shoot the sh*t about health care business, politics, practice, and tech. It’s available below and is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
Our lineup included: Saurabh Jha (@roguerad), Ian Morrison (@seccurve), Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard), Grace Cordovano (@GraceCordovano),Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis), Brian Klepper (@bklepper1), and a special guest – Alexandra Drane (@adrane, founder of Eliza, Queen of the Unmentionables, CEO of ArchAngels and sometimes Walmart cashier). Lots of great conversation especially around palliative care, patient experience, the real prevalence of COVID-19 and much more.
Episode 5 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed Thursday, April 16 at 1pm PT- 4pm ET! 4-6 semi-regular guests drawn from THCB authors and other assorted old friends of mine will shoot the sh*t about health care business, politics, practice, and tech. It tries to be fun but serious and informative! If you miss it, it will also be preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.
Deven McGraw (@healthprivacy), Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard), Grace Cordovano (@gracecordovano), Michael Millenson (@MLMillenson), and Dave deBronkhart (@ePatientDave) all discussed the recent news surrounding COVID-19, and their guesses on how it will impact the landscape of health care; from policy to practice — Matthew Holt
Indu & I have been talking about Flipping the Stack in health care for about 3 years. 2 years ago we wrote an article for a general hospital audience which appeared in the 2019 AHA SHSMD Futurescan magazine. I was talking about the changes in home monitoring that might come about due to COVID-19 and remembered this article. The one that got published went through a staid editing process. This is the original version that I wrote before which was rather more fun and hasn’t seen the light of day. Until now. Take a look and remember it is 2 years old–Matthew Holt
Over the past twenty-five
years most businesses have been revolutionized by the easy availability of
cloud and mobile-based computing systems. These technologies have placed power
and access into the hands of employees and customers, which in turn has created
huge shifts in how transactions get done. Now the companies with the highest
market value are both the drivers of and
beneficiaries of this transition, notably Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet
(Google), as well as their international rivals like Samsung, Baidu, Tencent
and Alibaba. Everyone uses their products every day, and the impact on our
lives have been remarkable. Of course, this also impacts how businesses of all
types are organized.
Underpinning
this transformation has been a change from enterprise-specific software to
generic cloud-based services—sometimes called SMAC
(Social/Sensors/Mobile/Analytics/Cloud). Applications such as data storage,
sales management, email and the hardware they ran on were put into enterprises
during the 80s and 90s in the client-server era (dominated by Intel and
Microsoft). These have now migrated to cloud-based, on-demand services.
Twenty
years ago the web was still a curiosity for most organizations. But consumers
flocked to these online services and in recent years businesses followed, using
GSuite, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Salesforce, Slack and countless other
services. Those technologies in turn enabled the growth of whole new types of
businesses changing sectors like transportation (Uber), entertainment (Netflix),
lodging (AirBnB) and more.
Figure 1. Growth in use of cloud data v s traditional data centers
What about the hospital?
Hospitals and health
systems were late comers to the enterprise technology game, even to
client-server. In the 2000’s and 2010’s, mostly in response to the HITECH Act,
hospitals added electronic medical records to their other information systems.
The majority of these were client-server based and enterprise-specific. Even if
they are cloud-based, they tend to be hosted in the private cloud environment
of the dominant vendors like Epic and Cerner. Of the major EMR vendors only
Athenahealth had an explicit cloud-only strategy, and its influence has been
largely limited to revenue cycle management on the outpatient side.
However, the hospital sector is likely to move towards the trend of using the cloud seen in other businesses.
Andy Slavitt, former Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and founder and partner at Town Hall Ventures, talks about how venture capitalists and health tech startups can help make healthcare more affordable and accessible for the 130 million Americans beyond the “Peloton crowd.” We ask Andy if he thinks “social determinants of health” is more than just an industry buzzword, get his advice for startups motivated to make a difference, and hear his predictions for what will change healthcare in this new decade.
Filmed at J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, January 2020.
