Tag: Michael Millenson

Google Is Quietly Infiltrating Medicine — But What Rules Will It Play By?

Jan 7, 2019• 2

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

With nearly 80 percent of internet users searching online for health-related information, it’s no wonder the catchphrase “Dr. Google” has caught on, to the delight of many searchers and the dismay of many real doctors.

What’s received little attention from physicians or the public is the company’s quiet metamorphosis into a powerhouse focused on the actual practice of medicine.

If “data is the new oil,” as the internet meme has it, Google and its Big Tech brethren could become the new OPEC. Search is only the start for Google and its parent company, Alphabet. Their involvement in health care can continue through a doctor’s diagnosis and even into monitoring a patient’s chronic condition for, essentially, forever. (From here on, I’ll use the term Google to include the confusing intertwining of Google and Alphabet units.)

The Reality of Bush I on Health Care and Its Lessons for Today

Dec 3, 2018• 2

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

Former President George H.W. Bush may have been every inch the caring individual portrayed in the eulogies of those who knew him, but when it came to health care reform, two words characterized his attitude: Don’t care.

However, compared to Congressional Republicans, Bush was a profile in conservative courage – a lesson with unfortunate parallels to now.

I covered health policy as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune during the Bush years. One strong memory, confirmed by checking original sources, was the presidential debate on Sept. 25, 1988 between Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. When Bush was asked what he’d do for the 37 million people without health insurance – about one in seven Americans – he answered that he would “permit people to buy into Medicaid.”

I remember turning from the TV to my wife and saying, “I have no idea what he’s talking about.” Neither, apparently, did anyone else. A Washington Post story that followed, headlined, “Bush’s Mysterious Medicaid Plan” noted that seeking details from the Bush campaign yielded “answers [that] are contradictory.” The story added that “Bush had never publicly mentioned the idea” until the debate.

The Internet of Medical Things Gold Rush (And My Grandfather’s Wooden Leg)

Nov 12, 2018• 5

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

The most intriguing aspect of the recent Connected Health Conference was the eclectic mix of corporations claiming cutting-edge expertise in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT).

HP, a legend in computer hardware, was touting a service that scoops data from Web-enabled home devices such as bathroom scales up into the cloud and then manages the information on behalf of your doctor. This presumably fulfills their corporate vow to “engineer experiences that amaze.”

Verizon, not content with deploying its cable TV clout to “deliver the promise of the digital world,” is connecting to a chip on the lid of your pill container that can monitor whether you’re taking your medications.

Even Deloitte, rooted in corporate auditing, has translated its anodyne assertion that “we are continuously evolving how we work” into a partnership with Google. DeloitteASSIST uses machine learning to translate verbal requests from hospital patients into triaged messages for nurses.
Continue reading…

Medicare Holds Out Promise of Health Record Access Revolution

Jul 10, 2018• 8

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

This is the second of two posts from the Society of Participatory Medicine about the important policy issue regarding portability of our medical records. The first provided background, with link to a PDF of the comments SPM submitted, largely authored by Michael Millenson, who provides this essay for context.

The Trump administration is proposing to use a powerful financial lever to push hospitals into making the patient’s electronic medical record interoperable – that is, readable by other care providers – and easily available to patients to download and organize via an app.

The possible new mandates, buried in a 479-page Federal Register “Notice of Proposed Rule Making” from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), could become part of hospital “conditions of participation” in Medicare. That means if you don’t do it, Medicare, which accounts for about a third of an average hospital’s revenues, can drop you from the program.

In a comment period that closed June 25, we at the Society for Participatory Medicine registered our strong support for taking the administration rhetoric heard earlier this year, when White House senior advisor Jared Kushner promised a “technological health care revolution centered on patients,” and putting it into practice. The American Hospital Association (AHA), on the other hand, while professing its support for the ultimate goals of interoperability and patient electronic access, was equally strong in telling CMS it was going too far, too fast and with too punitive an approach.

SPM’s comments on important proposed CMS interoperability rules

Jul 9, 2018• 1

By E-PATIENT DAVE DEBRONKART

This is the first of two posts from the Society of Participatory Medicine about an important policy issue regarding portability of our medical records. The second part will be published tomorrow and is written by Michael Millenson, who did the lion’s share of this work, as noted below.

Our Society’s Advocacy and Policy chair Vera Rulon @VRulon has submitted our comments on the proposed rules that have been discussed at great length on social media.

These regulations are a big deal for participatory medicine – they’re the successor to the Meaningful Use rules that have governed patient access to their chart, among other things. The regulations do this by altering how a hospital gets paid based on how well their data moves out of their computers. We want this; we believe it is essential in enabling patients and families to achieve the best possible care. (More on this in Millenson’s companion post.)

Not surprisingly, some hospitals don’t like new rules that affect how they get paid, and have lobbied heavily to NOT be required to give us our data. Some observers say there are ulterior motives – for instance see these 30 seconds of Yale cardiologist Harlan Krumholz at Connected Health 2016, on how a health system CEO told him flat out:

‘Immigrants’ Bring Patient Engagement Energy

May 21, 2018• 1

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

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…

Don’t Like Obamacare? Do We Have a Plan For You!

Mar 17, 2018• 12

MICHAEL MILLENSON

Struggling to break free from Obamacare oppression, Idaho is offering low-cost health plans that achieve this goal by avoiding covering anyone who’s been sick in the past and skimping on coverage for any diseases that might make you sick in the future. These strategies are, inconveniently, explicitly banned by the Affordable Care Act.

Fortunately, I have a solution perfect for Idaho and other GOPers eager to emulate Idaho’s example. My plan covers young and old, sick and healthy, fitness buff and couch potato, all for the same incredibly low price. No one, and no illness, is excluded.
Welcome to the Placebo HMO, dedicated to serving every American who fervently believes you don’t need real health insurance.

We’re a faith-based plan that offers empathetic, sincere and personalized advice from a broad range of highly skilled actors pretending to be doctors. Whether it’s a “seen everything” veteran like Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep in The Post or a bright-eyed idealist like Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land, we provide unparalleled freedom of provider choice that plans dependent on actual doctors cannot match.

What Baseball Can Teach Doctors

Nov 16, 2017• 5

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

Baseball, like medicine, is deeply imbued with a sense of tradition, and no team more so than the New York Yankees, disdainful of innovations like placing players’ names on the backs of their jerseys and resistant to eroding strict standards related to haircuts and beards.

It’s why doctors and patients alike should pay special attention to why the Yankees parted ways with their old manager and what they now seek instead. In a word: “collaboration.”

That’s the takeaway from a recent New York Times article examining why the Yankees declined to re-sign manager Joe Girardi despite his stellar “outcomes” (to use a medical term); i.e., the best record in baseball during his 10 years at the Yankees’ helm. But Yankees executives believe the game has changed. The model for future success is the Los Angeles Dodgers, the tradition- and cash-rich franchise on the opposite coast that went to this year’s World Series while the Yankees sat home.

The new way to win? According to Dodgers executives, it requires a combination of statistical analysis, shared decisions and communication between and among all stakeholders based on collaborative relationships.

Could OpenNotes Transform the Analytics Marketplace?

Oct 18, 2017

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

Could OpenNotes help push predictive analytics from paternalism to partnership?

As new payment incentives make it profitable to prevent illness as well as treat it, new technology is offering the tantalizing prospect of accurately targeting pre-emptive interventions.

At the recent Health 2.0 Annual Fall Conference, for example, companies like Cardinal Analytx Solutions and Base Health spoke of using machine learning to find those individuals among a client’s population who haven’t yet been expensively sick, but are likely to be so soon. Companies seeking to make that information actionable touted their use of behavioral theory to “optimize patient motivation and engagement” via bots, texting and other technological tools.

Being able to stave off a significant amount of sickness would constitute extraordinary medical progress. Along the way, however, there’s a danger that an allegiance to algorithms will reinforce a paternalism we’ve only recently begun to shed. A thin line can separate engagement from enforcement, motivation from manipulation, and, sometimes, “This is for your own good” from “This is for my bottom line.” It is here where OpenNotes could play a critical role.

In a recent article for The BMJ, I proposed a concept called “collaborative health” to describe a shifting constellation of relationships for maintaining wellbeing and for sickness care. Shaped by each individual’s life circumstances, these will sometimes involve the traditional care system, as “patient-centered care” does, but not always.

It’s Time to Truly Share the Chemo Decision With Cancer Patients

May 10, 2017

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

You (or a loved one) has cancer, but the latest round of chemotherapy has unfortunately had only a modest impact. While you’re acutely aware of the “wretchedness of life that becomes worn to the nub by [ chemotherapy’s] adverse effects” you’re also a fighter.

How do you decide whether to continue with chemo?

The answer to that question is both intimately personal and inextricably tied to health policy. Cancer is the leading cause of death among those aged 60 to 79, and it is the second leading cause of death for all Americans. With expenditures on cancer care expected to top $158 billion (in 2010 dollars) by 2020, the financial and emotional stakes are both high.

How do you decide whether to continue with chemo?