If you work in a large organization, especially one that has been around for at least a few decades, the words “legacy system” probably strikes angst in you. If you’ve dealt with such an organization, legacy systems probably contributed to problems you may have had with them. Think about health insurance claims systems, hospital billing systems, financial institution account records, or practically any government system.
Though these systems run practically every aspect of our lives, we don’t give them a second thought because, for the most part, they function. It doesn’t even occur to us that IT is something that needs constant attention to be kept in working order.”
Because they usually work OK, management often doesn’t want to risk the potential disruption of replacing or modernizing them, so they get older and older, with more and more layers built on them, and with the people who originally built them or understand the language they are written in (e.g. COBOL) gone.
On today’s Health in 2 Point 00, Jessica is distracted playing video games, and rants about the unbearable maleness of wearables. Meanwhile Komodo Health raises $50m for more analytics (presumably of patients playing Pong), Picnic Health gets $25m as PHRs will not go away, Hazel Health gets $33 million to take telehealth back to school, and then there’s Amazon Halo — and our stars’ alter egos make an appearance — Matthew Holt
As we witnessed in last week’s Republication convention, when in doubt, go with the golden oldies. Australian songwriter Peter Allen said as much in the fourth stanza of his classic song, “Everything Old Is New Again”, which reads:
“Don’t throw the past away
You might need it some rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again”
In fact, there’s nothing original in Trump’s playbook, and that includes his postal service gambit. Manipulating and militarizing the US Postal Service dates back to 1873 in the form of one Anthony Comstock, a zealot who was fond of describing himself as a “weeder in God’s garden.”
A savvy New York City insider, he created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice declaring himself committed to stamping out smut. But to accomplish this task, he needed a hammer. He turned to political allies in the United States Postal Service who provided him with police powers and the right to carry a weapon.
Still, the weapon was of little use without a law to enforce. So he turned to his friends in industry who reached out to Congress. “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” was passed on March 3, 1873, ch. 258, § 2, 17 Stat. 599. Forever after known as the Comstock Law, the statute’s lofty intent was “to prevent the mails from being used to corrupt the public morals.”
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess might be a little wary of my colonoscopy story, but it reveals just how well insurance companies communicate. In this episode, Jess and I cover GoodRx filing an S1 to go public, Trellus Health raising $5 million in seed funding for its platform for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and other chronic conditions, Klara Health raising $15 million for patient engagement, and Castor raising $12 million for its clinical trial platform. —Matthew Holt
In Partnership with the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, Resolve to Save Lives, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Maryland, Catalyst @ Health 2.0 is excited to announce the launch of The COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge. The COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge is looking for novel analytic approaches that use COVID-19 Symptom Survey data to enable earlier detection and improved situational awareness of the outbreak by public health and the public.
How the Challenge Works:
In Phase I, innovators submit a white paper (“digital poster”) summarizing the approach, methods, analysis, findings, relevant figures and graphs of their analytic approach using Symptom Survey public data (see challenge submission criteria for more). Judges will evaluate the entries based on Validity, Scientific Rigor, Impact, and User Experience and award five semi-finalists $5,000 each. Semi-finalists will present their analytic approaches to a judging panel and three semi-finalists will be selected to advance to Phase II. The semi-finalists will develop a prototype (simulation or visualization) using their analytic approach and present their prototype at a virtual unveiling event. Judges will select a grand prize winner and the runner up (2nd place). The grand prize winner will be awarded $50,000 and the runner up will be awarded $25,000.The winning analytic design will be featured on the Facebook Data For Good website and the winning team will have the opportunity to participate in a discussion forum with representatives from public health agencies.
Phase I applications for the challenge are due Tuesday, September 29th, 2020 11:59:59 PM ET.
Learn more about the COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge HERE.
Challenge participants will leverage aggregated data from the COVID-19 symptom surveys conducted by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland, in partnership with Facebook Data for Good. Approaches can integrate publicly available anonymized datasets to validate and extend predictive utility of symptom data and should assess the impact of the integration of symptom data on identifying inflection points in state, local, or regional COVID outbreaks as well guiding individual and policy decision-making.
These are the largest and most detailed surveys ever conducted during a public health emergency, with over 25M responses recorded to date, across 200+ countries and territories and 55+ languages. Challenge partners look forward to seeing participant’s proposed approaches leveraging this data, as well as welcome feedback on the data’s usefulness in modeling efforts.
Indu Subaiya, co-founder of Catalyst @ Health 2.0 (“Catalyst”) met with Farzad Mostashari, Challenge Chair, to discuss the launch of the COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge. Indu and Farzad walked through the movement around open data as it relates to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the challenge goals, partners, evaluation criteria, and prizes.
With 3 consecutive days of $100M in funding, here is the most confusing (or rather the most confused we have been) Episode 147 of Health in 2 Point 00. Jess asks me about Verily partnering with Swiss Re to get into the stop-loss insurance game, Prescryptive Health raising a $26M Series A for their maybe GoodRx-like or PBM platform, Sonde Health acquiring NeuroLex for its vocal biomarkers platform, Aetion reopening their Series B and raising another $19M to the $36M they have already raised, and Otsuka after investing millions of dollars in Proteus, deciding to buy the rest of it with $15M, but we don’t know why any of these deals happened –Matthew Holt
Privacy concerns across the country continue to increase, and consumers expect their healthcare information to be private. Headline-making data sales, skepticism of Silicon Valley privacy practices, and COVID-19 contact tracing concerns compounded with a general lack of consumer awareness have continued to generate an ongoing storm ofnegative press and political scrutiny.
With COVID-19 continuing to rampage throughout the country, there is a need for the contact tracing and other technology applications to assess public health. At the same time, changing HHS rules are giving Americans more access and control over their own health data. Both availability and the promise of positive impact of data on people’s lives has never been greater.
Despite the critical need and incredible potential, there is still a great deal of confusion, lack of awareness and heightened concern among consumers. Studies show that the vast majority of Americans think the potential risks of data collection outweighs the potential benefits.
Clamping down on data privacy stifles innovation, and moving forward as we’ve been doing presents a potential privacy minefield. So, what should the healthcare industry do about it?
Meaningful Use was a vision for EMRs that in many ways turned out to be a joke. Consider my list of Meaningful U’s for medical providers instead.
When electronic medical records became mandatory, Federal monies were showered over the companies that make them by way of inexperienced, ill-prepared practices rushing to pick their system before the looming deadline for the subsidies.
The Fed tried to impose some minimum standards for what EMRs should be able to do and for what practices needed to use them for.
The collection of requirements was called Meaningful Use, and by many of us nicknamed “Meaningless Use”. Well-meaning bureaucrats with little understanding of medical practice wildly overestimated what software vendors, many of them startups, could deliver to such a well established sector as healthcare.
For example, the Fed thought these startups could produce or incorporate high quality patient information that we could generate via the EMR, when we have all built our own repositories over many years of practice from Harvard, the Mayo Clinic and the like or purchased expensive subscriptions like Uptodate for. As I have described before, I would print the hokey EMR handouts for the Meaningful Use credit and throw them in the trash and give my patients the real stuff from Uptodate, for example.
I’d like to introduce an alternative set of standards, borrowing the hackneyed phrase, with a twist. MEANINGFUL U’S for medical providers:
Can we call this digital health anymore? What do we call it? On Episode 146 of Health in 2 Point 00, Jessica DaMassa asks me about Amwell filing for their S1, Lyra Health getting $110M to develop their mental health platform, PatientPop raising $50M to improve SEO for doctors and patients (they also brought Johnathan Bush on their board!), Brightline closing $20M for their behavioral health platform for kids, and Science 37 getting $40M for their site-less clinical trials — Matthew Holt
Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess asks me about the big news that Google Cloud has entered into a partnership with Amwell and invested $100 million into the company—looks like their IPO is really a thing! OneDrop gets $98.7 million in a partnership with Bayer, following at $40 million partnership last November, in a funding and development agreement. Outset Medical files their S1 and is going to go public, looking for $100 million for their portable dialysis system, and finally Podimetrics raises another $8 million for their foot ulcer detection platform for diabetics.—Matthew Holt
