Dor Skuler is CEO of Intuition Robotics the maker of ElliQ — a remarkable AI robot that is a companion for seniors. I had a lot of fun meeting ElliQ and asking Dor about how she works. This is a wide-ranging interview with Dor and with ElliQ. She tells us about Florence Nightingale, what Dor should do with his kids and really gives you the idea of how she relates to seniors. There’s a ton of capabilities–you really have to watch the whole thing–but the end result is that Medicaid plans including NY and Washington State have determined that ElliQ allows people to stay at home longer and saves $$ on nursing home care. A fascinating view into the present and the future of how AI and robotics is changing the world–Matthew Holt
Ben Salter, SafeRide Health
Ben Salter is the Chief Product Officer of SafeRide Health. They are one of the biggest players in non-emergency medical transport (NEMT) working predominantly for health plans that have Medicaid or Medicare Advantage members. Getting people to their appointments is a big deal–think disabled or sick people who will miss clinical appointments if they can’t get there. Ben showed a demo of how their system works, what it looks like for call center staff or members using it directly, and how that then actually gets someone a ride to where they need to go–Matthew Holt
Bevey Miner, Consensus Cloud Solutions
This is a transcript of my HIMSS interview with Bevey Miner, EVP Healthcare Strategy & Policy at Consensus Cloud Solutions. Usually I’d show the video but in this case my fancy new microphone didn’t work so you’d only hear a one sided conversation. Luckily Youtube’s transcript somewhat came to the rescue–Matthew Holt
Matthew: Another THCB Spotlight, I am here with Bevey Minor who a year ago I interviewed as Consensus Cloud Solutions and now your sign says eFax. So, what the hell happened?
Bevey: Interesting question, Matthew. The company is Consensus Cloud Solutions. And the company’s always been Consensus Cloud Solutions since we spun off and went public ourselves. You’ll notice at our booth we’ve got the eFax brand — it’s eFax by Consensus Cloud Solutions. The reason we are showing up as eFax is because this year at HIMSS we really wanted to set the record straight: digital cloud faxing is not the problem with interoperability. Paper faxes are, but digital cloud faxing is not the problem.
The problem is all this unstructured data — all the unstructured data that happens with faxes, with scanned images, with TIFF images. All that unstructured data can’t be queried. It can’t be part of TEFCA. You can’t query what you can’t find.
Cloud faxing is send and receive all day long, and we do that very well and have been doing it for 27 years. About three years ago, we introduced an intelligent extraction solution. That solution doesn’t even have to start with the fax, but it allows the “find” piece to actually become the critical thing that we need to do. CMS defines interoperability as send, receive, find, and integrate. Fax technology handles send and receive all day long, but can’t find. So once we introduced a “find and intelligent extraction” solution, we can fire up TEFCA.
I’ve talked to a lot of regulators, including Dr. Thomas Keane and Amy Gleason with the CMS Align networks. You can’t ignore this pile of unstructured data and just assume the industry is going to go magically everything’s on FHIR. We’re all using FHIR because all of this stuff has really important patient information in it.
What we want to solve in the industry is: don’t say we have to axe the digital cloud fax. Let’s axe the paper fax machine. Digital cloud faxing isn’t going away — in fact, it’s growing, especially as we get rural health off of paper fax machines. The next level of maturity is digital cloud faxing. From there, once it’s digital, now you can do all sorts of things with it.
When we introduced electronic health records during meaningful use — I was at Allscripts at the time — our dream was that we would take this paper record and transform it into an electronic health record, so we could just get rid of the paper. Once we did that and there were discrete data elements in that EHR, we could do population health, clinical decision support, efficacy, all sorts of things — because there are discrete data elements now inside that electronic health record. That’s what a digital fax will do with the capability to do intelligence on top of it.
So we want to make the industry understand that the fax is not the problem. Extracting it and getting rid of all that unstructured data is the solution.
Continue reading…Samira Daswani, Manta Cares
Samira Daswani is CEO of Manta Cares. Her career in consulting and digital health startups took a left turn when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had 18 months of visits with 123 appointments, 5 ER visits and much more. And it was very hard to manage her journey. So she built a paper based map/guide and started distributing it via hospitals in the gift shops and elsewhere. Manta Cares is the digital instantiation of that cancer map with symptom tracking and an AI chatbot on top of the map. Samira demoed it extensively for me. She raised some seed funding, and is now building it out for 80% of cancers–Matthew Holt
Adrian Owen & Faraz Shafaghi, Creyos
I spoke with neuroscientist Adrian Owen, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer & Faraz Shafaghi, Chief Product Officer, at neurological testing company Creyos (which rhymes with “chaos”). Their cognitive assessment platform gives a baseline of neurological function and is essentially getting objective data at a point of care. This can now be done as part of the annual wellness visit (in fact it’s officially required under Medicare!), and there are things you can do about it. We dove into how it works, Faraz showed a whole demo of the test itself, Adrian explained what the impact of testing will be, and they shared Creyos’ progress in moving into practice.–Matthew Holt
Dayne Williams, Quantum Health
Quantum Health is one of the biggest and original navigation companies. Dayne Williams came out of retirement to take over as CEO after Zane Burke retired for personal reasons (to care for a relative). Quantum has in recent months added two acquisitions, Embold Health that analyzes which are the best doctors to go to, and CirrusMD which is a online telehealth & primary care company. I started though asking Dayne, with health plans and primary care docs, why do we need navigators? That’s a layup for him, but this is a great explanation of how Quantum is the front door/first call for the employees of its clients–what they call first time intercept–and where it’s going with that trust–Matthew Holt
Philippe Pouletty, Carvolix
Philippe Pouletty is a physician who’s an inventor, French venture capitalist, and the founder of Carvolix. Carvolix is a medical technology company that is introducing AI into cardiology. Before Carvolix, Philippe was the founder of Abivax, which makes drugs for chronic inflammatory diseases like ulcerative colitis. He’s been working on helping French medical products develop before having to sell to bigger US companies, and Carvolix is the latest. It’s an AI system that guides cardiologists and a robot that places heart valves. It’s of particular interest to me, as I need a new heart valve. I had a long and interesting discussion with Philippe about the future of cardiology, particularly heart valve replacement, and also about their upcoming product, a robot to bust brain clots–Matthew Holt
Peter Stetson, TigerConnect
Peter Stetson is the CMIO of TigerConnect. It’s now calling itself an AI platform to connect people, especially workflows between doctors, nurses, EMTs and devices. Until recently he was CMIO at Memorial Sloan Kettering, so I asked him about what the real problems in communications were. He believes it’s all about routing the calls to the right people and figuring out which is the right person to get the message escalation based on context. That can be in the hospital, or in the home. Tiger’s evolution has been to work on that orchestration. Peter gave the example of orchestrating surgery to improve patient care & save hospitals money, but similar issues are triggered by sepsis, heart attacks, etc, all in the Tiger system, increasingly automated off devices. And I raised the issue of where does Epic stop and where does Tiger start. Always controversial these days. But Peter is confident Tiger is “safe” for now!—Matthew Holt
Cody Simmons, DermaSensor
Cody Simmons is the CEO of DermaSensor. I met him when he won the Digital Health Hub Foundation award for diagnostic tools last year. DermaSensor is a device designed to detect early skin cancer using Spectroscopy. Right now only 8% of those with potential skin cancer get the recommended screening. It’s another area where technology can potentially democratize medicine. DermaSensor is aiming for the primary care market. Cody shows how the tool works and explains how the PCP can both improve screening for their patients, and also make money from doing that–otherwise of course they wouldn’t do it! As you can imagine both the technology, the FDA approval process and the roll-out is pretty complicated. Cody explains all–Matthew Holt
Tom Kelly, Heidi Health
Tom Kelly is the CEO of Heidi Health, another of the many ambient AI scribes that is spreading its wings to other roles, including bringing its own AI Open Evidence competitor! He calls it an AI care partner. Heidi started in Australia, and quickly moved to the UK and Canada, but now are in over one hundred countries. More recently they have come to the US and have now four major health systems and a lot of other mid market users. Tom think’s Heidi will soon do all the “work around the work”, and he doesn’t think it has to be deeply integrated with the EMR. He sees that as a superpower as doctors don’t want to be in the record. Is he right? Are scribes and ambient AI going to be separate? Does the scribe have to be a medical device, as it does in the UK? Will patients use it? Lots of questions about the future and Tom has lots of answers. Some might even be right!–Matthew Holt
