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Matthew Holt is the founder and publisher of The Health Care Blog and still writes regularly for the site and hosts the #THCBGang and #HealthInTwoPoint00 video shows/podcasts. He was co-founder of the Health 2.0 Conference and now also does advisory work mostly for health tech startups at his consulting firm SMACK.health.

So I’m on TV, unfortunately in piece of crappy reporting

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By Matthew Holt

So last month the nice people from KTVU (the local Fox affiliate in SF) came by to interview me and last night it aired. They’d been over at web-based EMR vendor Practice Fusion and had found out about EMRs. Then they came to interview me. I should probably have got the hint when reporter John Fowler kept on asking me about privacy concerns. I spent 20 minutes giving a balanced nuanced view about the advantages and problems of adopting medical records which is not exactly represented by the 6 second soundbite I get.

Unfortunately—despite the producer’s stated desire to use Bay Area people—Texan nut job Deborah Peel gets almost half the piece including almost all the interview content. (Apparently Deven McGraw couldn’t be tracked down? Maybe DC is too far away) And what does Deb Peel say? Well you know what she says…

Continue reading…

Fantastic job: HHS ONC subject matter expert on consumer e-health

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By Matthew Holt

Josh Seidman has written from ONC telling us about a fantastic job opportunity. You get to work with the brilliant folks at ONC on fun stuff regarding consumer e-Health. What does that mean? From the posting.

  • Forge alliances with consumer organizations, technology and care delivery innovators and consumer advocates to further the consumer e-health agenda.
  • Develop consumer oriented strategies across the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).
  • Serve as Project Officer providing project management oversight for contracts, including designing, developing and coordinating project management plans for policy initiatives in conjunction with the Division Director and the Office of Policy and Planning Director.

We’ve been very impressed by everything we’ve seen about ONC’s commitment to patient communication—not least the “sneaking-in” to the meaningful use requirements in Phase 1 of patient education materials (what Don Kemper calls Christmas in July). I can’t think of a more fascinating job for anyone who cares about online health.

So if you’re interested here’s the link to apply. 

Meaningful use, and cats & dogs

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By Matthew Holt

More than a year or so of squabbling is (sort of) over and today HHS announced its criteria for the first phase of meaningful use. Essentially the 25 criteria for qualifying for “meaningful use” (in other words who qualifies for the money) have been changed to 15 with a further 5 from a menu of 10. The details are here, and it looks like most of the percentages needed to qualify have been relaxed but not eliminated. The Dogs have clearly had a minor victory in that there are patient communication requirements in both the mandatory and optional criteria.

The most impressive part of the announcement (you can see it here) which included HHS Sec Sebelius, CMS head Berwick (not wearing his Che Guevara T Shirt) & ONC Director Blumenthal, was the two Reginas. First, Surgeon General Regina Benjamin explained how thrice her clinic was destroyed by nature, and how the second time she realized that while she had thought she couldn’t afford electronic records for her patients, she then realized that she couldn’t afford not to have them.

The other Regina was our friend Regina Holiday who made (to me) a surprise appearance and told the 73 Cents story in a heartfelt and powerful way. She’s really become the poster child for why access to health data matters to ordinary people, and we need to get her from the world of webinars, Health 2.0 Conferences and HHS announcements onto Oprah and the 6 O’Clock News right now.

And I’ll be suggesting that when I interview David Blumenthal in a little under 30 minutes.

And here's the 3mins audio of Regina Holiday at MU announcement

Wellcare, yes there’s more even without(?) Regi

By Matthew Holt

A few weeks back we welcomed John Goodman as a contributor at THCB. His first column was more than a tad critical of me for impugning the ethics of Harvard Business School Prof Regina Herzlinger. Herzlinger, you may recall made a boatload of money off her position on the board of directors of Wellcare. Wellcare was operating a Medicaid and Medicare HMO in Florida, while basically using that not-too-sacred trust as an excuse to defraud the taxpayer.

Due to the demands of reality cutting into my work-life, my blow-by-blow analysis of Wellcare’s bad behavior has waned a little, but here I instead commend to you the consistently great work of Roy Poses over at Health Care Renewal. Earlier this month Roy took a look at the latest chapter in the tawdry tale. I encourage you to read his article for the full tale, but essentially even despite the settling of the criminal and civil charges for theft of around $46m, there’s a brand new set of charges from the same period—this time theft is alleged of up to $600 million. This new set of allegations were collected by (FBI informant & Wellcare financial analyst) Sean Hellein who wore a wire for more than a year, and probably stands to make a packet in the qui tam suit.

And not that I’d further besmirch the reputation of Prof. Herzlinger, but the time period all this happened was while she was still on the board, and none of these were given as her expressed reasons for leaving. Then it struck me, is Regi in on the qui tam suit too? That would be the way to make serious money out of her insider knowledge.

Bizarre PR pitch of the year so far

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By Matthew Holt

I get emails from PR companies all the time pimping this or that client, but they don’t get a lot stranger than this one. (I‘ve hidden the names to protect the guilty):

Subject: Top 3 Reasons Why Health Insurers Are On Your Side…

Hi Matthew,

Health plans are typically portrayed as the evil empire, bent on raising premiums and squeezing every shred of patience out of their members. But, what if I told you that in reality, that isn’t the case?

Here are the top 3 reasons why your health plan really is in your corner and why it is in their best interest to keep you healthy:

1. The healthier you are, the more profitable it is for your insurance provider. Therefore they should go out of their way to keep you healthy with preventative care recommendations.

2. Your health insurer is in a position to get you access to the providers and specialists you want, when you want them. A plan biggest differentiator and selling point is its provider network. It benefits both the plan and the member to have the most skilled, sought after providers a part of the network.

3. Health plans have a 360 degree view of every member’s care. Unlike individual healthcare professionals, plans know every touch point their members have with providers and can make care recommendations.

How about a story that looks at why plans get a bad rap, and actions they are taking that are in their members’ best interests that aren’t typically publicized?

I can put you in touch with REDACTED of HEALTH IT VENDOR who can elaborate on the top 3 reasons and discuss steps that plans are taking to improve the flow of information between plans and providers and plans and members leading to more efficient and effective care.

What do you think?

Regards,
REDACTED

I thought that the careful THCB reader might come up with some interesting analysis about whether health plans are actually doing what this PR maven thinks they’re doing. And I’m sure one or two other THCB readers may not be convinced that insurers are “on your side”

Why England is out of the World Cup

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By Matthew Holt

Matthew holt

I don’t often write about Footy any more on THCB, but England is out of the World Cup today, stuffed 4–1 by Germany. So I thought I’d give my opinion, and for the moment I’m dropping my dual nationality and writing as an Englishman!

Why did we lose? Realistically England doesn’t have enough good players because England’s population is too small (50m vs 80m Germans) and—as pointed out in Soccernomics—the working class ethos against middle & upper class kids limits our potential pool of players even more—as England’s working class population is falling relatively as more kids go to college. In general England could improve our football team by changing its economy to match the slums of Argentina’s or Brazil’s but I wouldn’t take that as a fair trade. After all, the US dominates international sport (except its fifth most important sport soccer) because it has a huge urban underclass with a great feeder system (that’s colleges!) to getting them into basketball/American Football/Track etc. And it may well be that with more and more kids from the big urban centers getting into soccer, America can only improve. It’s a decent prediction that the US will win the World Cup in the next 50 years or so. Unlikely that England ever will again.

Continue reading…

Radio Stardom and the World Cup

By Matthew Holt

I (and a few THCB friends like Brian Klepper, Maggie Mahar, Michael Millenson & Barbara Ficarra) have been doing quick spots on KOMO a talk radio station in Seattle. We’re on every Tuesday & Friday at about 10.25 EST. Usually I forget to record it but today I captured my 60 seconds of joc(k)ular wisdom on the topic of whether late goals in the World Cup are bad for your health?

Here’s the interview…(only 90 seconds!)

Soccer bad for your health?

A NY Times guest (inadvertently) spanks its professionals

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By Matthew HoltMatthew

A couple of weeks back two New York Times reporters (Abelson & Harris) decided to take on the orthodoxy of the Dartmouth school. Frankly their efforts reminded me of England’s performance in the world cup so far—abject and inept and leaving the fans hoping for much better. Within a few hours the mainstays of Dartmouth (Fisher & Skinner) responded correctly accusing Gardiner and Harris of shaky reporting. Although that original article was particularly muddled, there are indeed legitimate questions about some of the Dartmouth research, raised by serious academics (including on the august pages of THCB), but few of those made their way into the hodgepodge that was that original article. And now in their response to the response, Abelson & Harris have descended further into the mire.

The new argument is basically this. Yes, the Dartmouth academics have done all the corrections to regional data that the NYTimes duo accuse them of not having done. But they’re not available on the website within a click, not always portrayed in the maps in the Atlas, and (horror of horrors) you’d have to read Health Affairs to find out what they’d done. And that some of the academics who read Health Affairs hadn’t carefully looked at the maps which showed unadjusted data.

So now it’s not an academic issue or a misstatement. It’s an issue of poor user interface design! Well I guess we’re used to that in health care!

Continue reading…

Alere interviewed at AHIP

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By Matthew Holt

At the AHIP conference in Vegas earlier this month I sat down with the CEO of Alere, Tom Underwood, and long-time friend of The Health Care Blog, Gordon Norman (Alere’s SVP of Innovation). I asked Tom about the services they provide within personal health support and their recent acquisition of RMD Networks. 

Gordon got the big question: does disease management program really work? Tom got the easy questions about the future of the business.