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Tag: health innovation

Watch This Space: 3 Phenomena That Will Drive Health Care Innovation in 2019

By REBECCA FOGG 

Back at their desks after the holidays, health care payers, providers and policymakers across the country are staring down their list of 2019 priorities, wondering which they can actually accomplish. Innovation to improve care quality and reduce costs will top many lists, and progress on this front depends, in no small part, on conditions for such innovation in the health care marketplace. Here are three phenomena unfolding there that I’ll be following closely this year to understand what innovators are up against, and how they’re responding.

  1. The legal battle over the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Over 20 million previously uninsured Americans acquired health insurance between 2010 and 2017, many due to the ACA’s premium subsidies, ban on pre-existing condition restrictions, and Medicaid expansion. At the most fundamental level, this coverage expansion has vastly improved one of the most important conditions for a healthy population—access to health care. But it also supports innovation toward better, more affordable care.Coverage expansion means providers get reimbursed for more of the care they deliver to patients who are unable to pay, which strengthens their financial position. It also enables some patients to maintain more continuous health insurance coverage, hence see a doctor more regularly over time. This, in turn, facilitates providers’ development of more effective approaches to management of long-term, chronic disease, which causes untold suffering and costs the U.S. hundreds of billions in direct medical costs.
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The Importance of Patient Engagement in Post-Acute Care

Brian Holzer, patient engagement, post-acute care

By BRIAN HOLZER MD, MBA 

Leaders in hospitals and health systems as well as post-acute care providers such as skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and Home Health Care (HHC) agencies operate in a complex environment. Currently, the health care reimbursement environment is largely dominated by fee-for-service models. However, acute and post-acute leaders must increasingly position their organizations to prepare for, and participate in, evolving value-based care programs—without losing sight of the current fee-for-service reimbursement structure.

With that said, the call to action for acute and post-acute providers working at both ends of the reimbursement spectrum is real. The time is now to innovate, test and adopt new post-acute care models to support each patient’s transition from hospital to post-acute settings, and eventually home to enable a better care experience for patients and their care teams.

This is especially relevant for Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs) and chains that meet the current Medicare requirements for Part A coverage. Increasingly, the SNF industry is under pressure from the Medicare program to improve coordination and outcomes. Medicare’s hospital readmission policy and value-based purchasing program (VBP), bundled payments, and ACOs encourage SNFs, and other post-acute settings, to avoid readmissions. In addition, earlier this year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized a new patient-driven payment model (PDPM) for SNFs, which will go into effect on October 1, 2019. The overhaul of the entire system will require significant staff focus and operational changes.

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THCB Spotlight: Jesse Ehrenfeld, AMA

By ZOYA KHAN

Today, we are featuring Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld from the American Medical Association (AMA) on THCB Spotlight. Matthew Holt interviews Dr. Ehrenfeld, Chair-elect of the AMA Board of Trustees and an anesthesiologist with the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. The AMA has recently released their Digital Health Implementation Playbook, which is a guide to adopting digital health solutions. They also launched a new online platform called the Physician Innovation Network to help connect physicians with entrepreneurs and developers. Watch the interview to find out more about how the AMA is supporting health innovation, as well as why the AMA thinks the CVS-Aetna merger is not a good idea and how the AMA views the role of AI in the future of health care.

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.

Integrating in Health Care: 6 Tools for Working Across Boundaries

By REBECCA FOGG 

Today’s health care providers face the formidable challenge of delivering better, more affordable and more convenient care in the face of spiraling care costs and an epidemic of chronic disease. But the most innovative among them are making encouraging progress by “integrating”—which in this context means working across traditional boundaries between patients and clinicians, health care specialties, care sites and sectors.

The impulse to do so is shrewd, according to our innovation research in sectors from computer manufacturing to education. We’ve found that when a product isn’t yet good enough to address the needs of a particular customer segment, a company must control the entire product design and production process in order to improve it. This is necessary because in a “not-good-enough” product, unpredictable and complex interdependencies exist between components, so each component’s design depends on that of all the others.

Given this, managers responsible for the individual components must collaborate—or integrate—in order to align components’ design and assembly toward optimal performance. IBM employed an integrated strategy to improve performance of its early mainframe computers, and this enabled the firm to dominate the early computer industry when mainframes weren’t yet meeting customers’ needs.

In health care delivery, such integration is analogous to, but something more than, coordinated care. It means assembling and aligning resources and processes to deliver the right care, in the right place, at the right time. This type of integration is a core aspiration of innovative providers leading hot-spotting and aging-in-place programs, capitated primary care practices, initiatives addressing health-related social needs, and other care models that depart from America’s traditional, episodic, acute-care model. How are they tackling it? They’re leveraging very specific tools to facilitate work across boundaries. Here are six of the most common we uncovered in our research:

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Health Care-Related Public-Private Partnerships Will Likely Become the Norm in 2019

By MARY SCOTT NABERS 

The United States ranks number one in the world for health care spending as a percentage of GDP. That sounds great… but, for instance, Texas ranks only 11th worldwide when it comes to performance. That’s because of access to care.

The country’s health care rankings are likely to get worse as 673 rural hospitals in the U.S. are at risk of closing. Here’s what has happened: the need for care greatly outpaces available funding, especially for public hospitals. Something must be done.

If public funding is no longer available, alternative funding can be secured in numerous ways. The simplest way to access alternative funding is through a public-private partnership (P3) engagement. However, alternative funding for public hospitals, health care clinics and university medical centers can be found from other sources as well. Finding funding is not a problem when private-sector investors, large equity funds, pension programs, asset recycling and EB5 programs all stand ready to invest in public-sector projects.

Moving to a P3 health care model would allow hospitals to secure immediate funding and utilize private-sector expertise and best practices while transferring all risks. The launch of health care P3s would also ensure new construction, new jobs and hundreds of additional health care options for people.
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Health in 2 Point 00 Episode 58

Today on Episode 58 of Health in 2 Point 00, Jess and I have more to share from Exponential Medicine, but this time we’re at the Health Innovation Lab checking out all of the startups. In this episode, Jess and I talk to Meghan Conroy from CaptureProof about decoupling medical care from time and location, Care Angel‘s Wolf Shlagman about the world’s first AI and voice powered virtual nursing assistant, and highlight Humm’s brain band which improves working memory, concentration, and visual attention. We leave you with some parting words from Godfrey Nazareth: “Let’s set the world on fire. Let’s change the world, with love.” -Matthew Holt 

The Case for Open Innovation in Health | Sara Holoubek of Luminary Labs

“Most large healthcare companies will have numerous teams – innovation teams, maybe a venture fund, business units – all doing different things,” says Sara Holoubek, CEO of Luminary Labs, a consultancy known in healthcare for its expertise staging open innovation challenges. “How much more powerful would it be if everyone agreed on a common investment thesis? ‘We know our business model is changing and, therefore, where is our big bet?’”

The ‘big bet’ is not always easy for stakeholders in healthcare companies to agree on. Hence, Sara’s advocacy for open innovation, a methodology built for collaboration both internal and external to the organization. She’s been masterminding challenges, hackathons, participatory design sessions, and the like in healthcare for years, helping pharma companies, health plans, health systems and government organizations gain access to new ideas from external problem solvers and startups.

Open innovation not only brings much-needed agility to the way these big companies develop products, build partnerships, or pivot into new markets, but it also helps clarify which business problems the organization is actually trying to solve.

Large organization or small, how do you know when it’s time to take your innovation efforts outside? How do you make sure that your open innovation attempt is truly a ‘challenge’ and not just a splashy brainstorming session or hackathon to nothing?

A few weeks back, Luminary Labs published ‘The State of Open Innovation Report’ in effort to help benchmark the practice and build its business case as a worthwhile methodology for business innovation. Seeds of the report can be found in this interview. Listen in as Sara defines the practice and shares her tips and best practices.

Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare by meeting the people who are going to change it. Find more WTF Health interviews here or check out www.wtf.health

Health in 2 Point 00 Episode 53

Where is Matthew Holt reporting from today? He is at the Novartis Biome Launch Event! And that’s not all, we have some special guest stars for you: Unity Stoakes from StartUpHealth and Zoya Khan from THCB & SMACK.health! Join Jessica Da Massa, as she asks Matthew about what the Novartis’s Biome Event is, updates from StartUp Health (they have a print magazine now!), and talks about JP Morgan Week coming up in January!

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