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Tag: Matthew Holt

Certifying apps? Happtique’s big new idea

Happtique has been spending a lot of effort cataloging all the health, clinical and fitness Apps in the Apple App Store, Google Play and more. Their goal is to create prescribable apps, and proprietary app stores for providers. The idea is that a hospital or clinic can help its physicians suggest the right apps to patients by giving them a select group to choose from, and by having them cataloged in a way that is far more detailed than Apple or Android can do.

That in itself is a big advance, but even though they’ve cataloged 15,000 of the approx. 40,000 health apps out there, they don’t think it’s enough. Happtique is introducing a new certification program today. The idea is to have all apps assessed both for technical proficiency and also for content. Happtique will be reviewing the applications for technical, security and privacy–in other words, where any data goes and whether the app does what it says it does. In addition it’ll assess whether the app links properly to a particular devices or a particular EMR–something that presumably is pretty important to users. (I had an Android phone once which a major tracking device could not link to, even though the device had an Android app!). Here’s the release.

Happtique’s partners (academic med center group AAMC, nurse credentialers CGFNS International & testing lab Intertek) will provide clinicians and other experts who will review the apps for content. The idea here is not to rate or review the content but to see whether the content is from a valid source, and is true to what it says it is.

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Welcome to Healthcare IT Live!

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This time the camera was turned on THCB’s Matthew Holt. Tim Cook of Healthcare IT Live! interviewed Matthew for the web show, which takes place weekly on Google+ Hangouts. Click for a list of the show’s upcoming guests.

Aetna’s Martha Wofford Talks Technology Development

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Matthew Holt spoke to Martha Wofford, head of Aetna’s CarePass platform, at the 2012 mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C. last week. Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini had just delivered a keynote and announced that his company will release the CarePass mobile app in March 2013. CarePass is a web portal where patients can connect data from their different personal applications. Here Holt speaks to Wofford about the development of Aetna’s technology offerings. He also asks her how much of an impact she thinks this tech can have on wasteful spending in the U.S. health care system.

Laughing at the Chutzpah of the Right on Medicaid

There’s no one that pisses off the right in this country as much as Paul Krugman, and there’s nothing that pisses off the right as much as welfare for the poor. So when Krugman wrote recently in the NY Times supporting a program that is welfare for the poor, and describing how Romney/Ryan would decimate it, well you can expect an explosion from the GRWC. Yes the topic of today’s right-eous indignation is Medicaid.

The place to go to see that explosion is the comments section of John Goodman’s blog. That’s the halcyon world where the poor are oppressed by government programs and would much rather be set free to swim in the happy waters of the free market. Goodman proves to himself that studies showing that people without health insurance on average die prematurely must be wrong because they’re not seen in any “credible, peer-reviewed social science journal” — just in biased rubbish like the American Journal of Public Health and reports from the crack-smoking wackos at the Institute of Medicine.

Having read the comments on Goodman’s article I’m very surprised that Heartland’s Peter Ferrera hasn’t gone on welfare to show how it’s now a guaranteed path to unlimited riches (as opposed to say the tough job of taking payola from a convicted felon) and that Goodman himself hasn’t rejected his health insurance and gone naked on the income of the single mom & waitress in Dallas that Uwe teased him about a few years back. After all it would give him so much buying power to impact the market!

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Hey, Known Spender!

The most remarkable thing about Health 2.0 this time around, at least for me? The growing number, and percentage, of attendees old enough to get a reference like “Hey, Known Spender.”

If that wordplay evokes the trumpet blare of the brass band that accompanied one of the more pernicious and offensive TV ad campaigns of the 1970s (derived from the 1966 musical Sweet Charity), then you would have had more company than usual at last week’s 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

For all you Gen X’ers, Y’ers, and Millennials pitching your ever more nifty wares this time around: those horrific ads featured a slinky woman – made-over from the ‘60s musical’s stripper chorus to a ‘70s “empowered” glamour-gal – crawling all over some dude in a tux and singing “Hey, Big Spender, spend a little time with me.” The ads were unambiguous proof that American culture’s direct equation of cash and sex pre-dated the 1980s.

The “Known Spenders” who spent a little time at Health 2.0 this year were, for the most part, old enough to remember that ad. And they are actually make a living today working in corporate health care jobs. They’re the people they call “The Suits” in Hollywood, and they can actually get your products out of beta and into the real world. The slow steady creep of relevance not just of Health 2.0 as a marker of the market, but of the entire dream of consumer health IT, can be measured by the slow steady influx of the salt-and-pepper folks my own age who work for health insurance companies, employer groups, hospital systems, and drug companies. Six years ago, at the inaugural 2.0, The Suits were nowhere in sight. This year, they were everywhere you looked, kicking tires and taking business cards. Skepticism was abundant among those I talked with, as it should be with industry lifers who have endured two full cycles of health IT hype. (Healtheon and Revolution Health were the market toppers of valuation, grandiosity, and absurdity; if the current boom goes bust, we lifers know exactly who it will be.)

Among the two dozen or so people I’ve known over the years and who have yet to be paroled from health care, the consensus at 2.0 was “these are mostly good products, not companies, there is too much overlap, they have too narrow a scope of functionality, and many need to be rolled up. But a few actually have replacement revenue potential.”

As for the first part of that consensus, nothing new here. Nor anything new about the classic chicken-and-revenue problem that has hampered Health 2.0 start-ups from the start. I’m hardly the first, and surely won’t be the last, to point out the obvious: health care is not lacking for great consumer information products, services, systems, or apps; those products etc. are lacking users, adoption, exposure, traffic, critical mass, revenue. By “revenue” I mean “cash,” from paying customers, not promises, sales pipelines, booked revenue, or even signed contracts with guarantees. And I certainly don’t mean investors’ cash. I’m talking about revenue from consumers, patients, providers, or any of the myriad third parties who are spending money today – just not happily.

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Demo: Healthline Launches BodyMaps for the iPad

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Health information and education company Healthline Networks launched the BodyMaps iPad application today. BodyMaps, which displays rotatable high-resolution 3D illustrations of human anatomical structures, was created with GE Healthymagination in partnership with Visible Productions. Here you’ll see Senior Director of Product Management at Healthline John Emerson demo the app on his iPad, and CEO West Shell talks about his own recent experience using BodyMaps at his orthopedic surgeon’s office.

A Life in the Day of an EIR: Health IT Ain’t No Bubble for Venture Capital (…. so apply for the DC to VC Health IT startup showcase)

Everyone is always asking me what it is like being an EIR and why I decided to do it after my 5+ years working on Google Health.  First of all, for those of you who are not familiar with the term – an EIR stands for either Entrepreneur in Residence or Executive in Residence.  In the case of Morgenthaler Ventures, they were looking for a person with extensive experience in the Health IT sector at an executive level. This differs from a more traditional EIR title (entrepreneur in residence) where you are asked to incubate a startup from scratch with some support and resources.  As an Executive in Residence, I work hand in hand with the firm’s partners to author the current health IT investing thesis, map out the industry, source companies that match our areas of interest, and help with diligence. The goal of my EIR term is to find a company that Morgenthaler can invest in and then join that company as part of the executive team. I picked Morgenthaler Ventures because of their track record in health IT (invested in Practice Fusion before Health IT was in vogue) and their leadership in the industry with the creation of the first DC to VC conference.

In its 3rd year, DC to VC was initially started by Rebecca Lynn, IT Partner at Morgenthaler Ventures to bring the venture capital community together with Washington D.C. policymakers.  This year, I am proud to say that I am co-directing the DC to VC event and the health IT startup contest along with Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya from Health 2.0. The contest will take place on the last day of the 2012 Health 2.0 Annual Fall conference in San Francisco on October 10, 2012.  Online applications open today, June 4, 2012 and stay open until August 3, 2012.

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The first Sex::Tech hackathon

I’m on the board of ISIS, a wonderful organization led by the irrepressible  Deb Levine, that helps deal head on with issues of youth sexuality, mediated by technology. The annual conference is in three weeks, and there’s a hackathon the day before — Matthew Holt

ISIS is hosting our first ever hack-a-thon, together with our partners TechSoup. A hack-a-thon is a live event bringing together developers, designers, innovators and entrepreneurs to build exciting new apps and tools, in this case to improve young people’s health and wellness.

Theme: The Unmentionables

This short and focused event – 1 day only – will result in the rapid development of interesting concepts and working prototypes that will be developed further by the participating teams back at their desks and at future hack-a-thon events, with ISIS and TechSoup as partners for future product development and distribution.

Challenge: Design an app to solve the challenge of providing honest, real-time, private data from youth and young adults about “unmentionable” activities, like sexual behavior, substance use, sadness, and relationship drama to researchers and program experts who work with youth.

Date: March 31st, 2012Continue reading…

The bleak state of the (health care) economy

Health care spending increased at 3.9%, its slowest rate for decades in 2010 following a slowdown in 2009. Merill Goozner has the play by play but it’s clear that the numbers are starting to reflect what Jeff Goldsmith said in his keynote at Health 2.0 last year.–even the health care industry can not grow geometrically forever.

But there’s something hiding in these data. Recently I gave an update for a talk that I’d given 15 years before at the Oregon Medical Association. I reviewed the 2010 year forecast I did for IFTF in 1997 and I was struck by how in our scenarios we had overestimated the per capita spend on health care, but underestimated its share of GDP. That meant while overall health spending didn’t grow as fast over the decade as we’d forecast, the economy grew much slower. And of course the big jumps in health care as share of GDP that we saw in 1991-4 and 2007-9 came when the economy tanked

As we enter the 7th year of our lost decade with the stock market starting to predict a double dip recession, and real unemployment in the high teens, we face the prospect of getting to 20% of the GDP going to health care via not a boom in spending brought on by the ACA or a rich economy making rational choices, but by default. Of course these days the loonies in the Tea Party are reminding us of  the other meaning of the word default!

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Interview with Sona Mehring, CEO, CaringBridge

Late last week, I had a chance to talk with Sona Mehring, CEO of CaringBride. For those going through challenges with their health, CaringBridge provides free and easy to create websites that allow family and friends to share in their journey, and provide support and encouragement.

Sona will be on the main stage at the Health 2.0 Conference this fall during our session, In Conversation with Three CEOs, but we just couldn’t wait until September to talk with her! In the interview below, Sona tells the story behind starting CaringBridge, their non-profit model and how providers are integrating the sites into patient care.