Katherine Hempstead – The Health Care Blog

The “Health Tech Responds to COVID-19” Showcase Webinar!

Apr 28, 2021

By ELIZABETH BROWN

Catalyst @ Health 2.0 is excited to be hosting the Health Tech Responds to COVID-19 Showcase Webinar, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation! A little under a year ago, Catalyst, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, launched the “Health Tech Responds to COVID-19” platform to maximize the health tech community’s response to the pandemic. The platform features an “Always on” Rapid Response Open Calls (RROCs); a blog/informational website to showcase innovators and experts in this space, and the development of a comprehensive database that allows the public to search and filter for innovative solutions – SourceDB for COVID-19.

With RWJF’s support, Catalyst has opened up the platform to the larger digital health ecosystem and sought organizations interested in sourcing novel technologies, both COVID-19-specific and those with a broader scope. In this video, we hear from some of our Rapid Response Open Call hosts and participants as well as some special guests like John Brownstein discussing VaccineFinder and Jacob Reider talking about the problems of how to manage the vaccine process among the underserved. This is a great discussion of past, present, and future opportunities that have emerged with the global pandemic.

Elizabeth Brown is a Program Manager at Catalyst @ Health 2.0

Transparency a Go Go?

Feb 28, 2014• 4

By Katherine Hempstead

As the fashionistas might say, transparency in health care is having a moment. It made the PricewaterhouseCoopers top 10 list for 2014 industry issues, and there is every reason to expect transparency to be very visible this year and beyond.

Without a doubt, transparency is hot.

Despite this, there is increasing grumbling by observers who say that transparency is complicated and hard to operationalize. We also hear that transparency is “not enough” to constrain costs in our dysfunctional system, especially in the face of provider market power.

The word itself invites skepticism, in that it seems to over-simplify and promise a magical solution, as if daylight will provide health care pricing with a glow of rationality.

As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Transparency can and will provide information about price, quality, and consumer experience that market participants need in order to better understand the health care system and increase its value.

While this information is surely necessary, we have seen many examples of when it is not sufficient. Clearly, transparency is not the only tool that we need.

Here are a few thoughts about transparency issues for 2014.

Transparency tools will hit Main Street.

Increasingly, consumer-facing tools with various kinds information about health care prices are being created, whether it is okcopay or Change Healthcare. These entries join a growing list of transparency tools from carriers or third-party vendors.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Hospital Price Transparency challenge, designed to promote awareness of hospital charge data, had a record number of entrant and the winning submissions are downright inspiring. RWJF also awarded grants for research on the use of price data in health care, including a number of studies of promising transparency tools aimed at consumers and providers.

The field is becoming more crowded, and it is increasingly important to determine the optimal way to reach the consumer with price and quality information.

There will be greater focus on the customer experience.

There is no doubt that the customer experience in health care lags behind the rest of the service sector, and consumers are increasingly demanding responsiveness and convenience in their encounters with the medical profession. The growth of evening and weekend hours, email communications with physicians, and patient portals are all harbingers of a new age where medicine is far more customer friendly.

RWJF’s Open Notes initiative allows patients to share notes with their doctors, while the Foundation’s Flip the Clinic program completely reimagines the doctor patient encounter in the ambulatory care setting.