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Health 2.0 Pavilion @ Maker Faire Bay Area THIS WEEKEND

By MATTHEW HOLTThe Health 2.0 Pavilion is officially open for business at #m... on Twitpic

Maker Faire Bay Area is the worlds biggest DIY and tinkerers festival–at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds (about 20 mins south of San Francisco). I’ve heard it called a cross between the Home Depot & Burning Man. And this year for the first time, Health 2.0 is there with its own pavilion and lots of great speakers–and lots more hands on activity. Below is one photo and there are more on Health 2.0 News.

Here’s the Health 2.0 Stage schedule, with our own Lizzie Dunklee taking the stage at 11 am this morning to kick it all off.

Video Collage: KP Center for Total Health

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By MATTHEW HOLT

This week I spent quite a bit of time at the very new and very fancy Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health in Washington DC. It’s next door to a very large medical office building  (110+ docs) in which KP is showcasing its current integrated care model, and how far its come in its mid-Atlantic region. The Center is  a pretty fascinating place–part tech and idea showcase and part meeting room. Certainly no other health care organization that I’m aware of has spent so much on a place designed to stimulate the imagination and enhance conversation–under the nose of the folks on Capitol Hill. I won’t get into here whether this is how money should be spent in health care but on balance I’m a  fan. (FD KP is a sponsor of the Health 2.0 Conference I co-run).  Instead I want to try to give you a feel for the place, and why it fits their vision and what it’s trying to demonstrate.

I took a tour with some colleague journo/blogger types led by the always expressive Robbie Pearl (CEO of the Permanente Groups in N Cal and now DC too–the airlines thank him!) and with Phil Fasano, CIO of the whole organization. Robbie is not shy in voicing his opinions (as you’ll see) and Phil occasionally trots out the voice of caution to reel in Robbie’s vision a tad. It was great fun.

What was also fun was the cocktail party at the grand opening. There I met three of my favorite DC-based ladies in health: Deven McGraw, Regina Holliday & Cindy Throop. So we’ll start with that fun video, and then there’s a whole lot more from the tour of the center after the jump. All these videos are pretty short.

After that fun and games, lets head to the tour. This is a series of videos of me and a few others testing out the displays, and listening to Pearl &  Fasano, as well as asking them a couple of pointed questions.

But I’ll take the tour in order….after a quick thanks to Holly Potter, Danielle Cass, Ravi Poorsina & center boss Julie Norris who with a ton of their colleagues worked their butts off keeping hundreds of visitors informed and entertained.

First up, Robbie Pearl on the current state of the KP.org health record and why we shouldn’t have to put up with less; what he called the 19th century state of medicine. And I can assure that is on display in my wife’s OBGYN office every time I visit.Continue reading…

My personal start of year letter…

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By Matthew Holt

….is up over on my barely used personal blog. It’s a record of an email I send out about charities and causes I support (with a little bit of news about me and mine). If you’re interested it’s here

ACOR, Health 2.0 in the US & Europe: Gilles Frydman tells all

By Matthew Holt

Gilles Frydman is one of the leading ePatients. He started and runs ACOR (Association of Cancer Online Resources) and has discussed the role of engaged patients with rare diseases at the last few Health 2.0 Conferences. We’ll be hearing more from Gilles in the US this year, but first we’re inviting him to present at Health 2.0 Europe. His twitter name (@kosherfrog) reveals Gilles’ ethnic and national background, so we thought he was a very appropriate person to discuss both the future of online patient activism, and the Health 2.0 scene in the US and Europe.

Matthew says: Gilles, you’re best known for the ACOR list-servs which now see over 1.5 million emails a week go out in around 150 different cancer groups. Can you tell us how it started?

Gilles says: In 95 my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. She came home and told me of the diagnosis and I immediately went on the Net to find information about the disease and treatments

Matthew says: And what did you find?

Gilles says: Within 30 mins I had the BREAST-CANCER list and joined it. I didn’t follow protocol and jumped right in and asked about the diagnosis and what we were told was the treatment for it. Within 2 hours I had enough info to call back the surgeon and tell her we were going for a second opinion and that we would wait for the surgery she had told us was absolutely necessary. She “fired us” on the spot. Because we went for a second opinion!

Matthew says: I’m not surprised. Probably might happen today too

Gilles says: But as a result of  what I was told my wife didn’t have chemo. She didn’t have a radical mastectomy. She didn’t have brain, liver and bone scans. All of which would have been TOTALLY USELESS for the type of BC she was diagnosed with. Thanks to informed patients, she just had a lumpectomy and radiation. No piece of cake but MUCH LESS than chemo. So, that started me

Matthew says: So is that a typical interaction on ACOR?

Gilles says: YES. But ACOR can go into incredible depths. Not just pure info but also deep info mixed with profound human feelings

Matthew says: Can you give some examples

Gilles says: Just yesterday on one of the pediatric lists, a mother was writing about her son’s latest situation where all the doctors have now told them there is nothing more to be done. In short the woman writes about what can only be the worse possible situation for a mother, but she does so in an incredibly rational fashion.

Matthew says: What’s the scale  of ACOR activity now?

Gilles says: ACOR is a little under 60K active subscribers, over 165 groups, from 60 members to 3,000. Some of the groups generate close to 200 messages a day

Matthew says: What does it cost to run ACOR in both money and time, and how is it financed?

Continue reading…

Interview: TR Reid on healthcare reform around the world

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By Matthew Holt

TR Reid is a former foreign correspondent with the Washington Post. He spent two years (partly funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation) looking at health care systems across the world and has been featured heavily in many media venues lately asking the simple question, if everywhere else can cover everyone at half the cost, how do they do it?  I had a great and not too long interview with him last week.

His book is called The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care and here's an interview he did as part of Frontline's Sick Around The World.

Funnily enough I'm posting this from Barcelona, Spain where hopefully I won't have to use the healthcare system unless I get carried away with the late night Sangria…

Expect to hear a whole lot about this…

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By Matthew Holt

Seniors care about death panels (apparently) but they usually really care about drug prices and costs. Part of the political rationale for the Republicans passing Medicare drug coverage in 2003 was to deny the Democrats the ability to bundle seniors’ desire for drug coverage with a universal coverage bill. So far the Republicans have to say the least muddied the waters as to whether universal coverage is a good thing for Medicare recipients—or at least the ones that don’t care about their kids or grand-kids.

But there’s one minor trick. The deal with big Pharma that’s part of HR 3200 cuts the donut hole in half. That’s real money for seniors.

And when the cuts to Medicare Advantage become apparent, that donut hole is going to affect many more seniors who now are getting good benefits from Medicare Advantage and are pretty unaware about what’s about to happen to those benefits, according to this recent Silverlink/Suffolk University poll. (Hint, many Advantage plans will get much less generous).

In that case, knowing that there is something in the bill that helps them might change some seniors’ minds. Right now the Silverlink/Suffolk poll does not make happy reading for the Administration:

The survey also polled Medicare recipients on healthcare reform. Despite high levels of satisfaction and relatively strong amounts of optimism, nearly half of Medicare recipients polled (48%) say they do not believe the Obama administration is looking out for their best interests when it comes to healthcare reform. The remaining are split, with 28% believing the administration is looking out for them and 24% unsure.

What can $100 get you?

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By Matthew Holt

I don’t use THCB much to point out what good we all can do—I keep that for my year-end letter—but my favorite charity (Saigon’s Childrens Charity) is at its financial year end and just sent me the reports for the kids I support. I’ve asked people who want to talk to me in the past to “buy a kid a bike.” And as it’s late on a Friday and I’m about to go out and take my wife to dinner, I thought you might all think about alternate uses for the $100 I’m about to spend (Yes, she’s a cheap date). Here’s what $100 buys for a very, very poor kid in Vietnam (and because of the recession donations are off this year, so they need more help).

Continue reading…

We’ll be back here in 2016, unless

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By Matthew Holt

I’ve been meaning for a while to put up a common sense post that points out that if we don’t do reform now, we’ll end up with cost at close to $30K per family as opposed to the $15K as they are now, and in turn that will mean 80–100 million uninsured as opposed to 50–60 million we have now, and of course the end result will be a health care industry that looks like General Motors.

But luckily Joe Paduda just wrote the post for me and added a date—go read at Managed Care Matters.

Which just leads to one conclusion. The health care industry had better buckle down with the Blue Dogs, put more on the table, and get something passed that they can live with now. AND in addition, they need to figure out some way to stop the loony fringe at the town halls and listening to Rush Limbaugh from making the next best alternative be doing nothing—which is what they want.

Otherwise the conversation they’ll be having with the President and the Chinese central bank in 2016 will be very, very unpleasant.

Sunday mumbles

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By Matthew Holt

If you can’t quite remember why we’re doing this health reform stuff, here’s a very amusing defense of the current health care system by Jonathan Adler at Newsweek (hat-tip to Jon Cohn).

Meanwhile by any measure July was the most read month on THCB with sitemeter telling us that there were some 129,000 visits. Thanks to everyone for coming, but to be fair while we could expect health reform month to ramp up the visits a little, this shows the power of Google. If you search “Obama health care”, this excellent article by Bob Laszewski comes up near the top of the front page… Hopefully some of the new readers will see that it’s 18 months old and stick around to catch the new developments. But kudos to Bob L for doing such a great job here and of course on his own blog Health Care Policy & Marketplace Review.

Two rules by which to judge a health reform bill

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By Matthew Holt

Right now we have sausage-making going on in DC and lots of uninformed opinions and outright lies being strewn across the front pages and on cable from newly declared experts. I sat in an airport last night and heard 5 Wall Street pundits spewing rubbish about health reform on one cable show. It even included an aging upper-class British twit declaring that government health care was more expensive than private systems. Clearly he’d managed to miss comparing the 8% of GDP his (and my) original homeland spends on health care versus the 17% we spend here. Later on CNN had 4 random people including Christine Hefner—yes one of those Hefners—talking about it. I suspect that if you know something about health care and your name’s not Michael Cannon you’re just not allowed on cable TV.

But all the hot air aside, even those of us in the punditocracy who know something about the subject matter (i.e. anyone reading THCB) seem to be so deep in the weeds that we have lost the basics about what we should be looking for from a health care bill. So it’s time to make that very clear, and here in my not so humble opinion are the rules by which to judge reform.

Rule 1 A health care reform bill needs to guarantee that no
one should find themselves unable to get care simply because they
cannot afford it. Neither should anyone find themselves financially
compromised (or worse) because they have received care.

Rule 2 A health care reform bill needs to limit the amount of
GDP that is going to health care to its current level, with an overall
aim of reducing the share of health care going to GDP.

Continue reading…