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Tag: Podcasts

Frances Dare explains HITECH, really well

Frances Dare from Cisco is a buddy of mine who has more and more been their student of what's going on in Washington. Given that we just saw the biggest piece of health care IT legislation ever pass, I thought I'd check in with her. Frances, has really done her homework about exactly what's in that $19.2 billion pot and more (yes there's more than that) and how it's going to be spent.

This is a long(ish) and detailed interview, but if you care about IT in health care, I highly suggest you listen!

Cisco’s Frances Dare talks about Congressional action on health IT

Frances Dare is someone I’ve know for a long time in the health care IT world (sorry, Frances!). That means that she’s seen the painfully slow developments in many aspects of health IT since the 1990s, and has an experienced view of what’s coming along at what pace. These days Frances is a Director at Cisco focusing on health care, and more recently she’s taken an active role in Cisco’s health care lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill.

Given that we don’t spend much time on THCB talking about the impact of the Federal sausage-making process on health care IT, telemedicine, et al, I thought that getting the view of a major IT vendor about what they expect to come out of the current Congress would be pretty interesting. And it was. Here’s the Interview.

BTW, in the interview I get the name of Frances’ division at Cisco wrong, Frances is a Director in the ISBG which stands for Internet Business Solutions Group. (FD, I have done consulting work for Cisco in the past, even if I didn’t know the name of the group I was working for!).

Interview with Trizetto & Eliza

Due to poor planning on my part, this morning I was up scandalously early to talk with Gene Drabinksi, who runs the CareAdvance unit of Trizetto, and Alexandra Drane, President of Eliza.

Last week they announced a partnership that integrates the care management aspects of Trizetto’s services with the automated phone outreach provided by Eliza. It’s another step in the evolution of phone-based contact and personalization in health care — which, the careful THCB reader will have noted, I think is an important channel for delivering and capturing health information.

Of particular importance, is making useful that vast glob of data stored within a health plan by communicating about it with the members. It’s also always good to hear from some experienced and passionate players, and Alex and Gene certainly fit that bill. As I hadn’t had any coffee, I wouldn’t claim the same for myself!

Here’s the interview.

Interview with Sandeep Agate, REACH Call

We don’t talk much about traditional telemedicine at THCB, but remote care is not just for consumers. There’s also huge possibilities for clinicians to use these technologies to tap into expertise that can make specialty care more available and improve care in dramatic ways.

REACH call, which is a 2-year-old company from Georgia has an interesting and relatively cheap technology that gets vital expert specialty opinion to emergency rooms and enables stroke care to be significantly improved. I spoke to Sandeep Agate, REACH’s CEO last week and it’s a pretty interesting interview.

Matthew’s top podcasts this year

By THCB STAFFIpod

The Health Care Blog is working hard to bring readers more excellent content, but
the downside of that is great posts and podcasts quickly get buried. Here’s a quick list of Matthew’s top podcasts this year.

Adam Bosworth speaks about Google Health, Keas and everything By Matthew Holt

Adam_bosworth

After a long period of time I’ve finally wrestled Adam Bosworth to
the floor and forced the microphone to his mouth. Adam of course is the
software guru (he’s one of the originators of XML) who went to Google
to start Google Health,
and spent much of 2007 talking about how he hoped Google Health would
change health care. He then left Google Health (several months before
it launched in March 2008) and at the very end of 2007 founded Keas. Adam has very strong views on health technology, data, PHRs.
HealthVault & Google Health, and much much more. Listen to the podcast.

Cisco’s Frances Dare talks about Congressional action on health IT By Matthew Holt

Frances_dare_2Frances Dare has seen the painfully
slow developments in many aspects of health IT since the 1990s, and has
an experienced view of what’s coming along at what pace. These days
Frances is a Director at Cisco focusing on health care, and more
recently she’s taken an active role in Cisco’s health care lobbying
efforts on Capitol Hill. Here’s the podcast.

Interview with Trizetto & Eliza By Matthew Holt

I spoke this morning with Gene Drabinksi, who runs the CareAdvance unit of Trizetto, and Alexandra Drane, President of Eliza. They recently announced a partnership that integrates the care
management aspects of Trizetto’s services with the automated phone
outreach provided by Eliza. It’s another step in the evolution of
phone-based contact and personalization in health care — which, the
careful THCB reader will have noted, I think is an important channel
for delivering and capturing health information. Of particular importance, is making useful that vast glob of data
stored within a health plan by communicating about it with the members.
It’s also always good to hear from some experienced and passionate
players, and Alex and Gene certainly fit that bill. Here’s the podcast.

Interview with Kerry Hicks, HealthGrades CEO By Matthew Holt

HealthGrades has been busy. The publicly traded, pure-play provider
ratings company is changing the way it offers ratings, it’s publishing
a book, and it’s starting to rate drugs. It’s not alone. Last week,
Consumer Reports announced it also is getting into the business of
rating hospitals and using a model developed in conjunction with the
Dartmouth crowd. Plus, there’s the CMS effort. Given the way that
ratings are evolving and HealthGrades’ partnership with Google, (more
to come on Google from me separately soon) last week was a great time
to talk with HealthGrades Chairman & CEO Kerry Hicks. (Sadly it was before the Consumer Reports announcement but fascinating nonetheless). Listen to the podcast.

Kaiser tiptoes into HealthVault & tells THCB about it By Matthew Holt

Kaiser Permanente signed an extensive pilot with Microsoft, allowing
its 159,000 employees to copy their online health records into
HealthVault. This is a big coup for Microsoft and a fairly ambitious
move for KP which to this point hasn’t said much publicly about the
data transferability it was going to provide for its members. This is a
clear signal. Assuming that the pilot is a success, presumably all
Kaiser members using My Health Manager (over 2 million now and heading
to 3 million at years end) will soon be able to move their data to
HealthVault. We are potentially seeing the first real example of mass
scale data interoperability onto a platform not connected to a health
care organization. And obviously, Google is playing in this same space
too. Kaiser gave me a pre-release interview with with Peter Neupert, Corporate VP of Microsoft Health Solutions Group and Anne-Lisa Silvestre, VP of Online Services at KP. Listen to the Podcast.

The Long Baby Boom By Matthew Holt

I had a great chat with health care futurist Jeff Goldsmith
about his new book, the Long Baby Boom. We discussed the policy and
cultural issues of retirement, Medicare, Social Security, immigration,
end-of-life care and meaning… Listen to the podcast.

Caring.com & Trusera — two Health 2.0 newbies talk By Matthew Holt

Two of the more interesting newcomers in the Health 2.0 scene
gathered around the electronic water cooler, which is THCB’s podcast
series, to talk about what they’re up to and why they are worth looking
at. Andy Cohen is CEO of Caring.com and Keith Schorsch
is CEO of Trusera. Some of you may have seen Keith at the March 2008
Health 2.0 Conference. Andy is providing content checklists and much
more for those who have sick or frail parents, which will be most of
us. Keith is providing a sophisticated place for story telling and
information exchange for those facing serious health conditions. Both
have serious ambitions. Interesting stuff — listen to the podcast.

Continue reading…

Podcast with Marston Alfred, founder and architect of SugarStats

Marston Alfred, founder and chief architect of SugarStats.com chatted recently with me about his relatively new, Web-based program that allows diabetics to track their health statistics online.Sugarstats_2

Alfred described SugarStats as a portable PHR specifically for diabetics. He hopes diabetics use it to share their progress with others, such as family and doctors, and that by doing so it will improve their adherence to diet, exercise and medication schedules.

SugarStats launched publicly a year ago. It currently has about 4,000 users and gets an average of 10,000-20,000 unique visitors each month.

A diabetic himself, Alfred talks about the need for SugarStats and his hopes for the company’s future. Listen to the podcast.

Kaiser tiptoes into HealthVault & tells THCB about it, with UPDATE

Kaiser Permanente signed on this morning for a pretty extensive pilot with Microsoft,
allowing its 159,000 employees to copy their online health records into HealthVault. This is a big coup for Microsoft and a fairly ambitious move for KP which to this point hasn’t said much publicly about the data transferability it was going to provide for its members. This is a clear signal.Kp

Assuming that the pilot is a success, presumably all Kaiser members using My Health Manager (over 2 million now and heading to 3 million at years end) will soon be able to move their data to HealthVault. We are potentially seeing the first real example of mass scale data interoperability onto a platform not connected to a health care organization. And obviously, Google is playing in this same space too.

Once the data is collected in HealthVault, there are lots of possibilities for what can be done with that data, and what services can be offered.

Back in the days when Justen Deal was causing havoc with HealthConnect, I had a somewhat unorthodox interview with Permanente’s Andy Wiesenthal — in which (without KP’s PR folks knowing) I called him in a taxi on a cell phone late on a Friday night. Perhaps it’s a mark of how far THCB has come (you decide if it’s good or bad) that in regular business hours on Friday, KP’s publicity machine lined me up for a pre-release interview with Peter Neupert, Corporate VP of Microsoft Health Solutions Group and Anne-Lisa Silvestre, VP of Online Services at KP.

Continue reading…

The Long Baby Boom

Last Friday I had a great chat with healthcare futurist Jeff Goldsmith about his new book, the Long Baby Boom. We discussed the policy and cultural issues of retirement, Medicare, Social Security, immigration, end-of-life care and meaning in work.  With 76 million baby boomers heading towards age 65, these issues or of  great importance.

Here’s the interview.

Interview with Kerry Hicks, HealthGrades CEO

HealthGrades has been busy. The publicly traded, pure-play provider ratings company is changing the way it offers ratings, it’s publishing a book, and it’s starting to rate drugs. It’s not alone. Last week, Consumer Reports announced it also is getting into the business of rating hospitals and using a model developed in conjunction with the Dartmouth crowd. Plus, there’s the CMS effort.

Given the way that ratings are evolving and HealthGrades’ partnership with Google, (more to come on Google from me separately soon) last week was a great time to talk with HealthGrades Chairman & CEO Kerry Hicks. (Sadly it was before the Consumer Reports announcement but fascinating nonetheless).

Listen to the Kerry Hicks interview.

Caring.com & Trusera — two Health 2.0 newbies talk

Two of the more interesting newcomers in the Health 2.0 scene gathered around the electronic watercooler, which is THCB’s podcast series, to talk about what they’re up to and why they are worth looking at.

Andy Cohen is CEO of Caring.com and Keith Schorsch is CEO of Trusera. Some of you may have seen Keith at the March 2008 Health 2.0 Conference. Andy is providing content checklists and much more for those who have sick or frail parents, which will be most of us. Keith is providing a sophisticated place for story telling and information exchange for those facing serious health conditions. Both have serious ambitions.

Interesting stuff — listen to the podcast