Steve Brown is a genuine digital health OG. Starting with video games for kids with diabetes he eventually turned Health Hero into one of the first disease management companies. It was used in the VA to manage patients at home with CHF, diabetes and more and eventually sold to Bosch. Steve left health care for 15 years, but then at the start of this year had his own health issue. Which turned out to be cancer. He turned to AI and has built an amazing early stage patient facing AI doctor, called CureWise. It essentially has turned LLMs into multiple doctors. He gave me a full and fascinating demo. This is clearly the future but it’s also the present for Steve who is patient zero and the first user as well as the CEO. Amazing stuff. — Matthew Holt
Is In Car Health Monitoring the Answer? Maybe? Maybe Not So Much?
Patient monitoring outside the hospital has been a hot topic (and also a not so hot topic) for the past 15 years.
Starting back in the late 1990s with companies like Health Hero Network, a company whose products for patient home monitoring are still in use today, company after company has sought to bring a successful product to market. The holy grail: finding an easy, non-intrusive, and continuously reliable way to predict patients’ potentially serious medical problems when it is early enough to do something about them and prevent an acute and expensive episode of illness. Some of the newer companies are focused more on the wellness and tracking side of the equation, such as helping individuals see progress from an exercise or other preventive/health-inducing regimen.
So far this whole area has been a very tough nut for businesses to crack in the US in particular. While some studies have shown great positive effect, others have not. Insurance payment for these programs has been spotty at best and non-existent at worst; most of the current vendors are stuck in pilot hell without significant long term and widespread commitments from payers. There is a belief, veracity unknown as yet, that the proliferation of risk-based entities such as Accountable Care Organizations will change this and lead to broad adoption of ambulatory patient monitoring tools, angels will sing and a large number of hospitalizations and rehospitalizations will be avoided. That may be true, but remains to be seen.
