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TECH: Tell us about your Health 2.0 company

We’re
collecting information about companies in the Health 2.0 space. And
have been for some time. Unfortunately what that usually means is that
really interesting companies email us, then email us again to ask why
we didn’t respond to the last email. The result is too many really
great applications we’d love to hear about getting lost in our
in-boxes.

So we’re trying something else instead.

Tell us about your organization using this form,
and you may end up being mentioned in dispatches, featured at a Health
2.0 Conference, or landing the VC meeting of your dreams.  Well perhaps
not all or in fact any of those …but if you want us to pay attention
to your company, this will get it into a systematic review process
starring our crack staff.  Otherwise you may face the peril of being
lost in the email queue.

Editor’s Note: While the emphasis in the sign up process in the
linked form is very much on start ups and new ventures, we encourage
you to get in touch even if you are working on a small project.

POLICY: Wrong, but wrongly influential

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At the recent PRI meeting, one loony lambasted me for failing to agree with her that all the problems of the US health care system were due to all that care bing wasted on illegal immigrants. I asked her to provide me with photographic evidence of cancer patients swimming the Rio Grande…

But a UCLA study has found that even adjusted for age and health status:

Illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to use hospital emergency rooms in California, according to a study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

Of course this isn’t news to us wonks, but here’s a quiz for ya; which one of me and the loony will be voting in the Republican primary? That tells you lots about our health care policy options.

POLICY: Me and the Republicans on NPR (no, not really)

So you can listen to my NPR appearance in Los Angeles on Air Talk hosted by Larry Mantle here (works better in Real Player). The other guest was veteran UCLA Professor Rick Brown, who was playing the lefty here–while I was doing my best to play the straight man and give a vaguely direct explanation of what I thought the Republicans were up to. If you’re as confused by Romney as I am, here’s the weekend headline about wanting coverage for all in 4 years that I’m referring to. That puts him to the left of Obama!

BTW I did this call on a cell phone from a hallway in San Francisco’s most expensive hospital (no prizes for guess which one) so my voice quality is a little spottier even than usual. Still it’s a short and relatively interesting piece.

An EHR We Can All Agree On, by Eric Novack

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NovackI have written about this previously directly and tangentially, but given that this is ‘open enrollment
’ period (for those who still have more than one choice), it is worth repeating.

I report this as a part owner of a small business whose costs are increasing every year while revenues are decreasing.

Therefore, I present to you all the new, improved EHR: Effective Hourly Rate.

The EHR should be given to all employees of all companies.

What it will consist of is simple: all of the total compensation divided into what that rate would be on an hourly basis. Let’s give an example:

Current situation:

Employee paid $18.00 per hour

Employee gets 3 weeks paid vacation (or 120 hours of ‘paid time off’) and does not miss other days (we will assume no overtime payments)

Assuming that this covers a full 52 weeks at 40 hours per week that equals 2080 hours in a year.

A bit more math: $18 x 2080 = $37,440.00

And that is all an employee sees.

Continue reading…

TECH: Bosworth launches new Health 2.0 venture

After several months of sometimes crazed speculation in the
blogosphere and tech press about his last project, former Google Health architect
Adam Bosworth says he is launching a new Health 2.0 company. The new firm,
which will be known as Keas, will be based in San Francisco.

Bosworth is scheduled to deliver the
closing keynote at the World Healthcare and Innovation Congress in Washington
D.C. December 9-11. The title of his speech will be “"Physics, Speed
and Psychology:
What Works and What Doesn’t in Healthcare and Why." The name is a play
on the headline of a talk Bosworth gave a year ago at Google’s  New
York offices dissecting the reasons that AJAX
(the now ubiquitous web development technique designed to speed web
page performance that he played a major role in creating while with
Microsoft) failed when it first came out. That talk was called
“Physics, Speed and Psychology: What Works and What Doesn’t in
Software and Why.”

Comment on the Health 2.0 Blog

POLICY: Wealth, fame and public radio

Those of you in Southern Calfornia, or listening in online,will get to hear my dulcet tones on “AirTalk with Larry Mantle” on 89.3 KPCC-FM and 89.1 KUOR-FM at 11 am PST this very morning. I’m going to be talking about the Republican candidates health care proposals. What? You didn’t think I knew that they had any? I guess they just counldn’t scrape up anyone else who claimed that they knew anything at all….

Here’s the link to the show’s webpage

Physicians: Sermo allowing docs to discuss chart errors about them! by Matthew Holt

Sermo got some press this week about a thread that’s of lots of interest to all of us–medical errors and inaccurate records:


Several years ago, Botney visited a specialist to check out a
bothersome lump in his cheek. He took some medicine and the problem
went away.Out of curiosity, Botney thumbed through his chart and was
surprised to find a note from the doctor saying he had a stroke."I
never even had the symptoms of a stroke. No visual changes, no
weakness, no numbness, nothing," Botney, an anesthesiologist at Oregon
Health & Science University, said in a telephone interview from
Portland.

The key difference here is that
physicians were talking about this with other physicians. The next
question is whether this will blossom as an issue because it’s now
being talked about online? Or will it get hidden under the medical
carpet as has been the issue of medical errors for all these years?

Also worth noting that one of the leading docs in the patient safety movement, Bob Wachter, has a new-ish blog out too that’s well worth a look. I’m happy to report that Bob is also now a contributor at THCB. If you haven’t yet, immediately sally forth and read his recent posts "Dennis Quaid’s Kids – Are VIPs Safer?" and  "When is a Medical Error a Crime." Both have interesting comment threads developing.Comment on this post at the Health 2.0 Blog

 

Health 2.0 Second Life–maybe I can be convinced, by Matthew Holt

Despite all the hype, I’ve been very down on Second Life.  I’ve downloaded the app, logged on, blundered
around and never figured out how to make it work. I spent my first 4
goes trying and failing to get off the first island where you’re supposed to do a series of tests. There’s no
tutorial, no clear explanation of how to make your avatar move around,
and almost no help. That’s why despite 2 million downloads only some
30–50,000 people seem to be regular users.

But despite that, I managed to be introduced to some people with
various disabilities and various conditions who were using Second Life.
Last week I logged on with their help and met them. They helped me
teleport over to their island, and they spoke with great hope and
expectation about the power they felt that Second Life gave people who
had problems leaving the house, meeting others, and generally dealing
with some of the every day activities of daily life.

I’ll tell you more as this goes on, and as I get permission to share
more. But perhaps I can be convinced that the problems Second Life
gives the initial user can be overcome. And perhaps something very
valuable can be created there that has very positive health benefits.

Comment on this post at the Health 2.0 Blog

HOSPITALS: Dennis Quaid’s Kids – Are VIPs Safer? By Bob Wachter

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Robert_wachterRobert Wachter is widely regarded as a leading figure in the modern patient safety movement. Together with Dr. Robert Goldman, he coined the term "hospitalist" in an 1996 essay  in The New England Journal of Medicine.  His most recent book, Understanding Patient Safety, (McGraw-Hill, 2008) examines the factors that have contributed to what is often described as "an epidemic" facing American hospitals. His posts appear semi-regularly on THCB and on his own blog "Wachter’s World."
The Entertainment Blogosphere was atwitter this week with the story
of actor Dennis Quaid’s twin
newborns, who reportedly received a
1000-fold heparin overdose at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in La La
Land. Cedars’ Chief Medical Officer Michael Langberg may win this
year’s Oscar for fastest public apology – having learned the lesson
from the 2003 Duke transplant error, where the hospital stonewalled for a week or so, adding chum to the media feeding frenzy.

The
error came during heparin line flushes, when a 10,000 units/ml solution
of heparin was mistakenly substituted for the intended 10 units/ml
solution. Although the cases required pharmacologic reversal of the
anticoagulant effect, thankfully there were no bleeding complications.

These cases come on the heels of last week’s report
out of Dallas that the state-supported UT-Southwestern kept an “A-list”
of potential donors and assorted bigwigs. Apparently, when these folks
come to the hospital or clinic, they may get a personal greeting, a
preferential parking spot, perhaps even an escort to their appointment.
My friends at Health Care Renewal, who chronicle and condemn healthcare’s corporate influences, were shocked. Shocked!

I’m
not. Every hospital I know keeps some sort of a VIP list, a tripwire to
alert the organization of the arrival of a dignitary or billionaire.
Even when there isn’t a formal list, you can be sure that a single call
to the CEO’s office is more than enough to lift the velvet rope. That’s
a simple fact of life, and to me not worthy of a big fuss.

Continue reading…

TECH: An appeal for help on visualization software

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An old colleague writes to me from the land of multiple project coordination hell.

We’re managing about 60 concurrent projects in just one of our teams, and dozens of other concurrent projects with other teams.  We’re rapidly becoming victims of our own success as we receive funding for more and more concurrent projects. We’re looking for better options for visualization software for how to provide quick, useful views of multiple dimensions of each project both for our program management perspective, as well as from the perspective of packaging information for our executives.  In the past, you have reviewed this space, and I just wondered if you could recommend a few products that might help us manage this space.  thanks for any help on this topic.

I haven’t looked at this space in some time, but if you have any suggestions please put them in the comments!

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