Do you know about WOWs…they’re COWs but better! That’s workstations on wheels and computers on wheels. The way to get computers mobile by the bed side. Here is Keith Washington, the General Manager of Flo standing by his new model the 1800 (which is worth more than my car!). Here’s his explanation of Flo and their products.
First interview is Peter Seiff from Aethon who make the tug robot which potentially could change how hospitals move stuff around, and very nifty it is too. Here’s the interview.
Jeff Greene believes that his "elegant" solution can change health care delivery in one of the toughest places in America to do it–the wild medical mid-west. Jeff claims that the only two places on earth where life expectancy is falling are sub-Saharan Africa and Oklahoma City. (I assume Iraq is soon joining that list!) His company MedEncentive offers a simple way of physicians to follow guidelines, patients to get informed about their care, and apparently payers to save lots of money. Before you dismiss it, listen to this podcast.
(Technical note–For some bizarre reason Jeff’s channel was recorded a few seconds ahead of mine. So he’s answering my questions a little before I’ve finished asking them. Or alternatively, he’s psychic. At any rate it sounds a little odd. But I know you lot never listen to me on these podcasts anyway!)
WorldDoc is a company that sells an interesting mix of a consumer web tools based on PHRs, care management software and transparent PBM services. Its current customers are employers and regional TPAs & HMOs. I spoke with CEO Rahul Singal about the company, their business, and what he thought about the future of consumer services in health care. And to find out, you can listen to this podcast.
Matthew Holt: Well hello again. It’s Matthew Holt at THCB and it’s time for another podcast. This one is also about technology, somewhat different than some of the technology we’ve been talking about recently. We’re now back in the world of technology to help improve health and health management, in particular connecting with health plans. Today we have David Blauer who is the CEO of Click4Care. David, how are you?
David Blauer: I’m doing well, thanks. Thanks for having us.
Matthew: Great. Let’s start off with the basics. Click4Care has been around for a few years now and has been known to some of us on some sort of inside baseball view of the world in terms of what’s going on within health plans. It’s pretty fair to say you guys have been building out your product line and building out your client base without making a lot of marketing publicity splash. You coming on this show is part of changing that. Can you give me a quick background as to what the basic business problem is that Click4Care is helping to solve and how you’re solving it?
David: Sure. Our application is built on the premise that preventive healthcare is more effective than reactive healthcare. When we formed the business, we took a look at the industry. Like everybody else, I think, we noticed that if you look at any P&L for a health plan, 85% of the costs for that plan are being driven by medical costs rather than administrative costs. People had spent a lot of time, at that point, trying to refine and skinny down administrative costs as far as they can refine them. But people haven’t found technologies to address the 85% of the cost structure that comprised medical costs. When we looked further, we saw that the sickest 1% of an insured population was driving 40-50% of all those medical costs. The sickest 5% of any insured population was driving nearly 90% of those medical costs. If you continued to drill down, you found that the people responsible for those small percentages were typically moribund, chronically ill people. It became clear to us that there needs to be a technology platform that enables people to identify those risky people driving all the costs and automate the workflows throughout the supply chain to support those people who are driving all those costs in a preventative way that prevents them from incurring those costs by staying healthy.
This was a total pleasure. Yesterday I got to spend an hour talking with Dr. Brent James, one of the leaders in the patient safety movement, instituting process change in health care, and the man responsible in large part for InterMountain Healthcare’s status as the health care system known for delivering some of the best quality care in America (and the world). Brent of course was on the IOM Committee responsible for the "To Err is Human" report and is involved in the new IHI "5 Million Lives" campaign. Brent has much to say about all of that and a lot more, and it is fascinating stuff.
So for your year-end enjoyment here’s the podcast of our conversation. (A transcript will be up in a few days).
My erudite tones from the YourCall radio show on Monday–available streaming or in MP3 for download
This is the transcript from the recent Health 2.0 Communities podcast–original post here.
Matthew Holt: Welcome to another podcast here at the Health Care Blog. This is Matthew Holt, and with me today are two more leaders of what we’re starting to call the Health 2.0 Movement. They are Daniel Palestrand, founder and CEO of Sermo, a community-focused site that focuses on physicians, and Unity Stoakes, President & COO of Organized Wisdom, which is a community site focused on patients and consumers. Good afternoon, both of you.
Daniel Palestrand: Thank you very much. Nice to be here.
Unity Stoakes: Likewise, Matthew. Thank you for setting this up.
Matthew: Let’s start off by getting right into it. I suspect that a lot of people reading the blog haven’t heard of Sermo or Organized Wisdom, and you guys are on different sides of the same coin. This is all to do with the open health care issue, and the idea of getting many more voices online. Daniel, why don’t you start off? Tell us a bit about the core idea behind Sermo, what it does, and what kind of activities are going on on your side?
Daniel: Sure. Up until about fifteen months ago, I was a surgical resident at one of the hospitals here in Boston. I had done some startups in ’98 and ’99, but really had no near-term plans to go back to the business world.
I started seeing a trend more and more with my colleagues, where we would be talking about cases or recent news in the mainstream press — perhaps a new revelation about a new approach to treating a disease, or a problem with a drug or device, or a new resistant form of bacteria. What we were remarking on was that we had inklings of this — it had come up in conversation weeks or months ago — that there was an idea there. We realized that this wasn’t a fluke event. So often in the trenches of medicine, at the bedside, in grand rounds, physicians were talking about these phenomena long before it appeared in the conventional press. That set me about thinking: what would you have to do to capture these clinical insights and make them useful?
My starting point was coming up with a business model. I had done other startups that involved physicians and health care IT, and I knew that trying to get people to part with money is particularly difficult in health care IT. So from the start, we had a model where we would not have physicians paying for anything. We would look to get the parties who find value in the information to pay — to underwrite the business model.
My second thought was, assuming we could get physicians to make these insights, how would we distinguish the signal from the noise? I had had enough experience with my early work with the CDC and Device Registry to know that getting the initial observations isn’t the challenge. The real challenge is separating the signal from the noise in the background. What I wondered was, could you create a model whereby the valuable information would be determined by the users themselves — in other words, the people on the front line.
That was really when Sermo was born. In our model, we have a system where any licensed and credentialed physician can submit an observation, but what really distinguishes the value of that observation is the degree of corroboration that it gets from other physicians. It started out with a very simple, basic idea. We were thrilled to see that it was a very patentable and fundable idea, and has now turned out to be extremely scalable. We are seeing an incredible torrent of information coming out of our system.
We’re now a thriving young startup company, part of what we’ve realized is a much broader trend, variously called social media, Web 2.0, or prediction markets. We’re very excited to see other companies, like Organized Wisdom, tapping into the same trends.
Unity: I’m actually the president and co-founder of Organized Wisdom. We’re a health-focused social networking site. The easy way to think about what we’re doing is that we’re a mash-up between WebMD and Myspace.com. We’re really focused on integrating expert content with user-generated content, and eventually flaring in industry content and research from health organizations as well.
We got started… actually, my partner Steven Krein and I have been in the online space for the last twelve years. We took a company called Promotions.com public in the late ’90s. It was an online marketing company that was later acquired by iVillage. So we spent many years seeing a lot of these community trends taking shape in other industries, but we didn’t see a lot of progress being made with online health. At the same time, over the last couple of years, we’ve seen eight out of ten people going online to search for health information. We’ve also seen a lot of research indicating that people are turning to their friends and family to get health information. So we got the idea to combine the two and really try to create a community for consumers, patient experts and leaders of health organizations to come together and share their wisdom and knowledge in an organized, structured way… to build a very useful, helpful knowledge base covering thousands of health topics, conditions and diseases, so that any consumer needing health information could easily come in and find the information that they need.
Moving on from the Health2.0 conversation about search and transactions, this week I’ve moved into the really new, new thing. Both the companies on this podcast are at the cusp of health and communities, and both have offerings whose age can be measured in the weeks rather than years. One, Sermo represented by founder & CEO Daniel Palestrant, is for physicians. The other, Organized Wisdom respresented by Co-Founder and President Unity Stoakes, is for patients.
Both are getting at something that was never really made accessible before. Collecting, rating, codifying, ranking and making available the informal but very important experiences, wisdoms and discoveries of doctors and patients. Again really interesting stuff. The Podcast is about 60 minutes long and has good sound quality. (Transcript will be up in a few days).
Here’s the transcript from last weeks podcast. It gives you a window into one of the hot areas at the moment, Health2.0 (perhaps I should trademark that quick!). The participants are three leaders of new online health focused companies, all of whom are relatively new and very ambitious. The original podcast post is here.
Matthew: Welcome to another THCB podcast. I’m Matthew Holt. Today is pretty exciting. I have got three of the leaders in what’s starting to be called the Health 2.0 movement. Those of us who were around the first time when things got crazy in Silicon Valley in the late 90’s when Netscape and Healtheon came on the scene are somewhat nostalgic for the days when you would go to parties and people would try to recruit you for a job just because you were standing around drinking. And those of us who have lived through the e-health bust are particularly upset about what happened next!But it looks like in the last couple of years, mostly in the last year or so, there’s a lot more interest in health care online, health care search, and health care information. And a lot of that has to do with what’s happened with the Google IPO and how successful Google has been creating a business out of search. Obviously a lot of the buzz in Silicon Valley and on the Internet in general has to do with that.But what I thought we’d do today is take a look at this Health 2.0 movement. So I’ve assembled three individuals who are leaders of companies, all of them at this stage relatively small companies, and all relatively new companies. But all of them are doing something very interesting in a slightly different segment of health care and health care online, or as it’s now starting to be called, Health2.0.And just before I introduce them, I’d also point out that just yesterday Dmitriy Kruglyak at HealthVoices started a manifesto called the Health Train, The Open Healthcare Manifesto, which is a new sort of manifesto promoting the idea of open health care. I’m one of the people who signed that, and I think it’s quite an exciting time in general for the concept of new types of open online heath care.So with that, let me tell you who I’ve got on the conference call with me. I have
- Dean Stephens, who is the president and CEO of Healthline, based in San Francisco,
- Tom Eng, who is the Chairman of Healia, based up in Seattle, and
- Chini Krishnan, who is the CEO and founder of Vimo.
And the good news here is that Vimo was until very recently called Healthia, but for the context of this conversation, thank God, changed it’s name. [laughter] And I had to let Chini come in because when I went to visit Vimo they gave me a T-shirt. And I’ll be expecting the other two of you guys to be sending one along soon. [laughter]Now with that, I want you each to give a brief introduction to your company.
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