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Tag: Healthcare

Why A Diverse and Inclusive Healthcare Innovation Workforce Matters

By ANDRÉ BLACKMAN

There I was, my 10th-grade science fair. My mother made sure I had a tie that fit properly and a shirt that was perfectly pressed. I stood among my peers with our cardboard presentation displays highlighting what we did to make it to this point. I was a little nervous but also extremely proud of myself and excited to see the looks on the judge’s faces when they saw what my project was about:

“The Effects of Enzymes on DNA”

Boom. Oh, I wasn’t doing something that many people had seen already — I was working inside an NIH facility with a brilliant scientist mentor/coach, to get this done. The memories of taking multiple modes of transportation after school throughout the week for what seemed like forever wore me down enough to make sure that I knew this was going to be worth it. And then after the judges were introduced to all of our concepts and families poured throughout the gymnasium to see what we all came up with — now was the moment of truth.

Sweaty palms and teenage anxiety wouldn’t deter me. First place goes to….oh ok, yeah of course, they deserved that. They worked really hard I’m sure. Second place goes to….oh wow, I didn’t make second place? At least, I’ll get something. After a third place winner was announced and the applause faded. I looked, stunned, over at my mother in the audience whose face was covered in tears. I was ready for the night to be over. Did I not wear the right tie? Did I seem too confident? Not confident enough? The questions would consume me until later that evening when my science teacher told me that the judges thought I cheated or didn’t actually do any of the work.

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What Keeps United Healthcare, Mayo Clinic & Medtronic Up At Night? | Shaye Mandle, Medical Alley

By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Medical Alley has been bringing together Minnesota’s biggest healthcare players for 35 years, leading collaborative conversations that include the largest health insurance company in the US, United Healthcare, and leading care innovators like Mayo Clinic and Medtronic. So what’s the word on the street…er, alley? Shaye Mandle, President & CEO of Medical Alley, dishes on the neighborhood gossip: the challenge of defining the cost of care delivery, who’s leading the conversation on innovation, and which neighbors are missed at this Minnesota party (looking at you Target and Best Buy — come on over!)

Filmed at the Together.Health Spring Summit at HIMSS 2019 in Orlando, Florida, February 2019.

Jessica DaMassa is the host of the WTF Health show & stars in Health in 2 Point 00 with Matthew Holt.

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

Make Hackathons Fair Again

By FRED TROTTER

On Oct 19, I will begin to MC the health equity hackathon in Austin TX, which will focus on addressing healthcare disparity issues. Specifically, we will be using healthcare data to try and make an impact on those problems. Our planning team has spent months thinking about how to run a hackathon fairly, especially after the release of a report that harshly criticized how hackathons are typically run.

A Wired article written earlier this year trumpets a study called “Hackathons As Co-optation Ritual: Socializing Workers and Institutionalizing Innovation in the ‘New’ Economy,” which criticizes the corporate takeover of hackathons. Hackathons are inherently unfair to participants according to these two sociologists.

They argue that hackathons have become a way for corporations to trick legions of technologists into working for free. To a sociologist, that looks like exploitation, and it is hard to see how they are wrong.

After reading the article, I was struck by how many things about typical hackathons are backward:

  • Hackathons romanticize workaholism and celebrate insomnia – With hackathons typically running 24-72 hours straight, sleep is for the weak. Those who don’t sleep are seen as heroes.
  • Junk food is the only option – Most hackathons provide unhealthy snacks, high in fructose and low in protein. Participants are expected to fuel their unpaid work sprints with sugar and caffeine. These are frequently the only eating options available.
  • Healthy work patterns ensure that there are breaks. Opportunities to chat, or walk and take a break from work. And the idea of encouraging people to get up and move, let alone stretch, is unheard of at these hackathons. Hundreds of geeks, unable to shower, or leave the room, can create a pretty bad smell.
  • Judging is at best arbitrary, and in some cases completely rigged, with winners sometimes chosen in advance.

On occasion, I have seen harder stimulants used. Although I have never seen anyone on cocaine win, it does make for super-engaging project presentations. The presentations were not good, mind you, just engaging… In the “Holy Moses, this guy is about to present when he is clearly high AF” sense.

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The Biggest Trend You’ve Probably Never Heard Of: A Status Report on 138 Healthcare ICOs

Vince Kuraitis
Robert Miller

By ROBERT MILLER & VINCE KURAITIS

You’ve probably heard of Bitcoin, but we doubt you’ve heard of Dentacoin, MedTokens, or Curecoin.

These are healthcare specific cryptocurrencies born from Initial Coin Offerings or ICOs. In this article, we’ll briefly recap the trend of ICOs (aka token offerings) and provide you with a summary financial analysis of how this trend has played out among 138 healthcare ICOs. The results to-date are enlightening, but disappointing. We believe there’s still potential for some projects to be successful.

Background

What’s an ICO? Here’s a quick take from Wikipedia and we’ll point you to an Appendix that will guide you to additional resources:

An ICO is a type of funding using cryptocurrencies…In an ICO, a quantity of cryptocurrency is sold in the form of “tokens” (“coins”) to speculators or investors, in exchange for legal tender or other cryptocurrencies. The tokens sold are promoted as future functional units of currency if or when the ICO’s funding goal is met and the project launches.

Autonomous Research found that ICOs raised over $7 billion in 2017 and are slated to raise $12 billion in 2018, with some mega projects raising billions of dollars each.

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‘Immigrants’ Bring Patient Engagement Energy

An Irish software expert who’d been helping companies sell on eBay walks into a room with a Slovenian inventor who’d built a world-class company in the “accelerator beam diagnostics market.” (Don’t ask.) What they share is not just foreign birth, but “immigration” to health care from other fields. Both have come to the MedCity Invest conference in Chicago seeking funding for start-ups focused on patient engagement. They’re not alone in their “immigrant” status, and their experience holds some important lessons.

Eamonn Costello, chief executive officer of patientMpower, works out of a rehabbed brick building in Dublin next to the famed Guinness brewery at St. James Gate. An electronic engineer who’s worked at companies like Tellabs, Costello became interested in healthcare in 2012 when his father was in and out of the hospital with pancreatic cancer. What struck him was the lack of any monitoring on how patients fared between doctor appointments or hospitalizations.

When in 2014 a friend working in healthcare approached him, they looked at building an app for different illnesses.Continue reading…

Losing Net Neutrality Could Be Bad For Your Health: Here’s Why

The US Federal Communication Commission’s reversal of Obama-era net neutrality regulations sets the stage for broadband internet service providers (ISPs) to slow or block certain content from reaching their customer’s screens. This is likely to have a significant and potentially negative impact on a healthcare system poised to go fully virtual in the coming years.

Healthcare consumers already depend heavily on internet search results for advice when making healthcare purchases. Coupling preferred content with existing search engine optimization strategies will undoubtably steer consumer behavior. What will be the result? The American healthcare market is unique, both in its expense (higher than any other nation), and its shocking lack of value. Some of this is due to misinformed consumers swayed by direct-to-consumer marketing. Arguably, repealing net neutrality may amplify the problem.

Even more troubling is the prospect of an ISP partnering with a health delivery system. Telehealth – the use of electronic communication technology for healthcare delivery – will become standard of care in the coming years. National telehealth have already managed to get a foothold in today’s highly competitive healthcare market, supplying a disruptive and potentially cost-containing force in the healthcare market. With the elimination of net neutrality, larger, more well-established healthcare delivery systems, seeking to defend or expand their marketshare, can now partner with ISPs to preserve internet “fast lanes” for realtime video doctor’s visits. Smaller, possibly disruptive companies, unable to make these same financial commitment to ISPs, may be marginalized or lost.

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Will Federal Court Back Rules Treating Health Insurance as a Utility, Not a Luxury?

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On June 14, 2016 a Federal Court ruled that broadband internet is as essential to American as phones, electricity, water and sewer systems and should be available to all Americans as a utility, rather than a luxury that doesn’t need close government supervision.

In the United States, public utilities are often natural monopolies because the infrastructure required producing and delivering a product such as electricity or water is very expensive to build and maintain.  As a result, they are often government monopolies, or if privately owned, the sectors are specially regulated by a public utilities commission which severely limits the profits for the private utility company and the associated costs passed on to consumers of that utility.

There is nothing more essential to the lives and well being of Americans than health insurance and therefore healthcare is the ultimate utility.

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“Healthcare” vs. “Health Care”: The Definitive Word(s)

A recent contributor to this blog wondered about the correctness of “health care” versus “healthcare.” I’d like to answer that question by channeling my inner William Safire (the late, great New York Times language maven). If you’ll stick with me, I’ll also disclose why the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is not abbreviated as CMMS and reveal something you may not have known about God – linguistically, if not theologically.

The two-word rule for “health care” is followed by major news organizations (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) and medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine). Their decision seems consistent with the way most references to the word “care” are handled.

Even the editorial writers of Modern Healthcare magazine do not inveigh against errors in medical care driving up costs in acutecare hospitals and nursinghomes. They write about “medical care,” “acute care” and “nursing homes,” separating the adjectives from the nouns they modify. Some in the general media go even farther, applying the traditional rule of hyphenating adjectival phrases; hence, “health-care reform,” just as you’d write “general-interest magazine” or “old-fashioned editor.”

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Why Apple iPad will Dominate in the Enterprise

Ok, before I even begin, let me put it right out there: I’ve been using Apple products since I first got my hands on one of those cute little Mac SEs in the late 80′s having given up my spanking, brand new Compaq 386 with 64kb of RAM and a dual 3.5 & 5.25 floppy drives to a post doc at MIT who traded me the Compaq, which he needed to finish his thesis, for his Mac. I never looked back. I will attempt to keep that bias in check in this post.

Tomorrow, Apple will formally release the iPad 2, a device that has seen extremely strong adoption in the healthcare sector and even one of the HIT industry’s leading spoke persons, John Halamka of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital (he’s also Harvard Med School’s CIO) spoke to the applicability of the iPad in the healthcare enterprise in the formal iPad 2 announcement last week.

The iPad 2 release is happening while most other touch tablet vendors including HP, RIM, Cisco and those building Android-based devices struggle to get their Gen 1 versions into the market. Of these other vendors, only Android-based devices are available today, including among others the Samsung Galaxy and the Motorola Xoom.

But it is not so much the new features in the iPad 2 (e.g., lighter weight, faster processor, two cameras, etc.) that will continue to make the iPad the go to device for physicians and healthcare enterprises, it is the process by which Apple vets and approves Apps that are available in the App Store. Apple imposes what at times for many App developers is an arduous and at times capricious approach to approving Apps. This approval process is in stark contrast of the one for Android, which is based on an open, free market model letting the market decide as to which Apps will succeed and which will not.Continue reading…

Let’s Face(book) the Hard Truth About Healthcare

‘In the time when new media.

Was the big idea.’

These two lines at the end of the album track  ‘Kite’ earned U2 a place in a recent list of suspect popular song lyrics. Some Health 2.0 vendors are also struggling to get ‘social media’ to rhyme with  ‘healthcare’ but will no doubt carrying on trying to do so. With Goldman Sachs throwing $1.5 billion in Facebook’s direction it makes sense for anyone in the online health business to position themselves as close to the social media company as possible, on the off chance that they will be able to pan a few nuggets out of the fast flowing stream of cash.

While no doubt some of the funds the bank is putting together will be used for healthcare related applications it is not immediately obvious what Facebook can do that Google and Microsoft have not already tried. Both these companies are trying to sell to healthcare providers whose business models if they do exist are confused and, in some cases failing. One way to gain a better understanding of the healthcare market is to view it as a mathematical equations that can be solved by eliminating one variable at a time.

So What If The UK’s National Health Service Did Not Exist?

You log on to NHS.uk and are greeted with a message saying “Sorry, this service has been discontinued. The UK government can no longer afford to provide you with healthcare.” And that is it, apart one last piece on advice. “Please take care.” This presumably aimed at Darwin Award candidates who were hoping to break the land speed record using fireworks and a skateboard and fully expect the local hospital to fix any resulting damage. Also perhaps directed at anyone with a grumbling appendix thinking of entering a baked bean-eating contest. (More about these people later.)

So what difference would it make if there were no healthcare provider? For a start everyone in the UK, apart from the 1.3-million ex-NHS workers, would be £1600 a year better off. A young person leaving school would have saved enough to pay for their university education. A young couple in their mid twenties would have saved enough to put a down payment on their first house. OK average life expectancy would fall and the last couple of years (or most likely months) of a person’s life would probably be more unpleasant, but the proceeding sixty five or so years would be a lot better. There, two of the government’s major economic headaches eliminated in a stroke – an unfortunate turn of phrase in this case. With an extra £100 billion per annum sloshing around in the economy most of the 1.3 million former NHS employees would be able to find new jobs.Continue reading…

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