THCB Spotlights – Page 25 – The Health Care Blog

The THCB Gang: Episode 5

Apr 15, 2020

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

THCB Spotlights: CY5

Oct 3, 2018

By ZOYA KHAN

I know we have been bombarding you all with a bunch of videos and announcements, but there are some really interesting pieces of health tech that are launching and events that are happening in the Fall. Today I wanted to spotlight another really cool startup that Matthew met with at #TechCrunchDisrupt18 called CY-5 (pronounced Sci-5, trust me Matthew & I kept calling it C-Y-5). Their company is developing biometric temporary tattoos to track your vitals. Right now their tattoos can measure your heart rate and your inter-cranial pressure. Also, strangely enough, their tattoos are designed and printed onto a special paper that conducts electricity- that means it requires no exterior electricity source to monitor your biometrics! It is all in the design of the product that powers the tattoo. Their focus right now is to test their product out in the elderly population. For all of you out there that can’t get real tattoos, this would look really cool plus it would track your vitals and keep you healthy- double win.

Zoya Khan is the Editor-in-Chief of THCB as well as an Associate at SMACK.health, a health-tech advisory services for early-stage startups.

Cirrus MD — Text Connecting Your Doctor

Mar 1, 2017

By MATTHEW HOLT

Last week was HIMSS17, the biggest health IT conference and as per usual I ran around interviewing various techies. I’ll be releasing these interviews over the next few days and weeks–Matthew Holt

First up is a rather fun live demo I did with Cirrus MD‘s medical director Blake McKinney. Cirrus MD is a niche player in the telehealth space, and has spent the last few years building out a text-based tool which is now being rolled out in Colorado and Texas. How does it work in practice? Well funnily enough, I happened to have a medical condition that needed to be checked out by a doctor. So here’s a real impromptu demo that shows how it works and gives a good idea of the user experience.

PODCAST/CONSUMERS/TECH: Interview with MaryAnn Stump CEO, Consumer Aware–HealthFacts.org

Mar 15, 2007• 2

This is the transcript of my interview last month with MaryAnn Stump CEO, Consumer Aware. Consumer Aware is the BCBS Minnesota subsidiary that puts out the web site HealthCareFacts.org which ranks and rates hospitals and clinics. Unfortunately I had some technical problems with this podcast recoding, but 95% of what Mary Ann was saying is here—and she said a lot! The original audio podcast is here

Matthew Holt: This is Matthew Holt with The Health Care Blog, and I’m back with another podcast on the blog. Today I’m very excited that I’m talking with Mary Ann Stump, who is, among her many other titles, the president of Consumer Aware. Which, Mary Ann, you’ll explain to us, is a subsidiary of Blue Cross of Minnesota. Tell us a bit more about what you do, and about what else you’re doing at Blue Cross of Minnesota.

Mary Ann Stump: Ok. Well first of all, good to talk with you Matthew. I appreciate the opportunity. About a year and a half or so ago…I’ve been working with Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota for about 16 years now. About a year and a half ago, when I had been working diligently in this whole space of consumer information‑‑that became known more formally as “transparency”‑‑our CEO and I were talking one day. I said, “You know, I think we really need a team. Sort of a garage type of situation, a learning laboratory where we can really start devoting‑‑with a particular number of people that have an interest in advancing a whole vision around effective and useful consumer information‑‑ someplace where we can sort of work on this in addition to thinking about the business the way that it is today.”

We had an affiliate organization that essentially was doing managed‑care tools. Really as you know, the whole managed‑care movement is not only changing significantly, but I think the kinds of things we were doing historically are not the kinds of things that we’re going to need as far as the future is concerned.What he suggested was: Why don’t we take that particular affiliate organization‑‑that I like to think about as a garage so to speak‑‑and say let’s set off deliberately to start to look at how we were going to do things differently as far as consumer information is concerned. Based not only on what we know but where we want to start to see people moving. From being the usual recipient approach to health care and really with the consumer at the center, being customers of care. What are the kinds of tools we would develop in that regard? I’d already been working on a couple things, and so essentially we formalized not only the expectations but the opportunity to be able to accelerate that. So Consumer Aware was born.