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THCB Gang Episode 61 – Thurs July 8

On Thursday’s #THCBGang Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) was joined by regulars, employer health expert Jennifer Benz (@jenbenz); patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@MLMillenson); THCB regular writer Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard);  privacy expert and now entrepreneur Deven McGraw  (@HealthPrivacy); and–we were thrilled to have back–fierce patient activist Casey Quinlan (@MightyCasey). Lots of discussion about Casey’s latest patient experience as she continues to undergo the #METSparty.

If you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels

The Art and Soul of Medicine Exist in the Ordinary

By HANS DUVEFELT

The Art of Medicine is Doing the Ordinary Well

Primary care doctors don’t usually operate any sophisticated medical instruments or perform any advanced procedures. But there is still art in what we do. We take care of ordinary ailments in ordinary people and that can be done well or not so well. There is no obvious glamor in it, but when our prescriptions, basic procedures or simple advice help people feel better, we live up to our own and our patients’ hopes and expectations – and some of the time, we even exceed them.

Art is art, regardless of the medium or subject. Weren’t the old Dutch masters’ most appreciated paintings depictions of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances? Not every artist gets to paint the Sistine Chapel.

So many things in our culture are at the two extremes of poorly done and exquisite: fast fashion or haute couture, drive-up burgers or five star restaurants. Fewer things are made with care by craftspeople for individual users. Medicine needs to be more like that in order to bring real healing in many conditions.

In our everyday encounters with our patients, we are often distracted by things other than what they expect or hope to get from us. We have agendas imposed on us for preventive care and public health purposes. It is sometimes hard to do your best if you can’t concentrate on the issue at hand. Art requires focus. It is not a casual endeavor. It requires attention to detail, just as much as a vision of the big idea. It is – or should be – for each of us, in order to do our best, to find the balance between those two aspects of our work.

The Soul of Medicine is Connecting as Humans

We are not technicians. We treat the whole person, because most things in primary care are diseases that affect more than just one organ. We now also, again (historically), accept that diseases of the body may have their root causes in what we call the soul. In order to know and treat another person, we must show our own. Only if we do that will we learn enough to be of any real help to the patient who hopes to trust us enough to take our advice. We must create connection.

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Make Mine Bioresorbable

By KIM BELLARD

I learned a new word this week: bioresorbable.  It means pretty much what you might infer — materials that can be broken down and absorbed into the body, i.e., biodegradable.  It is not, as it turns out, a new concept for health care – physicians have been using bioresorbable stitches and even stents for several years.  But there are some new developments that further illustrate the potential of bioresorbable materials. 

It’s enough to make Green New Deal supporters smile.

Bioresorbable stents and stitches are all well and good – who wants to be stuck with them or, worse yet, to need them removed? – but they are essentially passive tools.  Not so with pacemakers, which have to monitor and respond.  Medicine has made great progress in making pacemakers ever smaller and longer lasting, but now we have a bioresorabable pacemaker. 

Researchers from Northwestern University and The George Washington University just published their success with “fully implantable and bioresorbable cardiac pacemakers without leads or batteries.”  What their title might lack in pithy is more than offset by the scope of what they’ve done.  Fully implantable!  No leads!  No batteries!  And bioresorbable! 

Most pacemakers are, of course, designed to be permanent, but there are situations where they are implanted on a temporary basis, such as after a heart attack or drug overdose.  Dr. Rishi Arora, co-leader of the study, noted: “The current standard of care involves inserting a wire, which stays in place for three to seven days. These have potential to become infected or dislodged.” 

Dr. Arora went on to explain:

Instead of using wires that can get infected and dislodged, we can implant this leadless biocompatible pacemaker. The circuitry is implanted directly on the surface of the heart, and we can activate it remotely. Over a period of weeks, this new type of pacemaker ‘dissolves’ or degrades on its own, thereby avoiding the need for physical removal of the pacemaker electrodes. This is potentially a major victory for post-operative patients.

The device is only 15 millimeters long, 250 microns thick and weighs less than a gram, yet still manages to deliver electric pulses to the heart as needed.  It is powered and controlled using near field communications (NFC); “You know when you try to charge a phone wirelessly? It’s exactly the same principle,” GW’s Igor Efimov, a co-leader of the study, told StatNews. 

It dissolves over a period of days or weeks, based on the specific composition and thickness of the materials.

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The Science of Clinical Intuition

By HANS DUVEFELT

In 2002, Dr. Trisha Greenhalgh published a piece in the British Journal of General Practice titled Intuition and Evidence – Uneasy Bedfellows? In it she writes eloquently about the things Christer Petersson and I have written articles on and emailed each other about. He mentioned her name and also Italian philosopher Lisa Bortolotti, and I got down to some serious reading. These two remarkable thinkers have described very eloquently how clinical intuition actually works and describe it as an advanced, instantaneous form of pattern recognition.

Clinical Intuition (should we start calling this CI, as opposed to the other, electronic form of pattern recognition, AI – Artificial Intelligence?) begins with clinical patient experience but is cultivated through reflection, writing and dialogue with other physicians. And as Petersson and I have both written, there isn’t enough of the latter in medicine today. Both of us do as much reflecting and writing as we can, but we both know that more collegial interchange can make all of us better clinicians. Greenhalgh writes:

The educational research literature suggests that we can improve our intuitive powers through systematic critical reflection about intuitive judgements–for example, through creative writing and dialogue with professional colleagues. It is time to revive and celebrate clinical storytelling as a method for professional education and development. The stage is surely set for a new, improved–and, indeed, evidence-based–‘Balint’group.
— Read on www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1314297/

Bortolotti, the philosopher, makes the case that experts are more intuitive than novices, a skill that only comes with experience, and have developed advanced pattern recognition abilities that allow them to make decisions faster than possible when only using analysis and reasoning. Her article is quote-heavy. She writes:

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Matthew’s health care tidbits

Each week I’ve been adding a brief tidbits section to the THCB Reader, our weekly newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB that week (Sign up here!). Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt

In this week’s health care tidbits, a little bit of light was shone on two of the dirty tricks health insurers play. First San Diego is suing Molina, Centene (owner of Healthnet) & Kaiser for misleading patients about which providers are in their networks. Apparently Healthnet & Kaiser’s directories were 35% inaccurate and Molina 80%! Now this may be incompetence, but it is not only false advertising, it’s also a way of weeding out high cost patients who may leave when they can’t find a specialist that will take them–and of course avoiding a high cost patient is a nice earner for health plans.

The next trick is double billing. In this lawsuit unearthed by Bob Herman of Axios, Aetna which was being paid to manage an employer’s health network subbed out PT care to an Optum network. Optum then also charged an admin fee. Meaning the provider got less and the patient had to pay more. So while Aetna and United Healthgroup may appear to be fierce competitors, they’re happy to cooperate when it comes to ripping off their clients.

More bad behavior by health plans and I didn’t even mention them cheating on Medicare Advantage RAFs! But the CEO of Chenmed did.

If we are going to let health insurers profit from handling employer and taxpayer business, we should see those arrangements in the clear light of day. Time for some heavy handed Federal regulation, methinks.

Why I Seldom Recommend Vitamins or Supplements

By HANS DUVEFELT

People here in northern Maine, as in my native Sweden, don’t get a whole lot of natural sunlight a good part of the year. As a kid, I had to swallow a daily spoonful of cod liver oil to get the extra vitamin D my mother and many others believed we all needed. Some years later, that fell out of fashion as it turned out that too much vitamin A, also found in that particular dubious marine delicacy, could be harmful.

This is how it goes in medicine: Things that sound like a good idea often turn out to be not so good, or even downright bad for you.

Other vitamins, like B12, can also cause harm: Excess vitamin B12 can cause nerve damage, just as deficiency can.

Both B12 and D can be measured with simple blood tests, but the insurance industry doesn’t pay for screening. That is because it hasn’t been proven that testing asymptomatic people brings any benefit. In the case of B12, it is well established that deficiency can cause anemia and neuropathy, for example. But here is no clear evidence what the consequences are of vitamin D “deficiency”. A statistically abnormal result is not yet known to definitely cause a disease or clinical risk, in spite of all the research so far, but we’re staying tuned.

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#Healthin2Point00, Episode 220 | Olive’s massive raise, Ro buys Kit, plus funding for Tendo & SWORD

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, I’m cheering England’s win against Germany this week – but Jess keeps us on track with health tech deals. Olive gets another $400 million, bringing their total up to $902 million – with $802 million of that since March 2020. Tendo Systems gets $50 million in a Series A, working on communication between providers and consumers. General Catalyst strikes again, this time in a round with SWORD Health raising $85 million in a Series C, bringing their total to $135 million. This is an MSK company, with a lot of good investors here. Finally, Ro buys Kit an at-home testing company – how does Hims stack up now? And, in case you missed it, Sharecare hits the NYSE today – get the scoop from Jess’s interview with their CEO yesterday. –Matthew Holt

CONFERENCE UPDATE–Policies|Techies|VCs: What’s Next For Health Care?

By MATTHEW HOLT & JESS DAMASSA

Last month we told you about the new conference bringing together the CEOs of the next generation of virtual & real-life care delivery and all the permutations thereof. That’s all those companies raising huge venture rounds and really getting to scale. You’ll see them at Policies|Techies|VCs: What’s Next For Health Care?, and they include Glen Tullman (Transcarent), Jonathan Bush (Zus Health) Roy Schoenberg (AmWell) and 17 more leaders in digital health.

Now we are announcing another 16 great speakers, including 2 publicly-traded digital health company CEOs!  And we’ll announce a further 16 next week! You can register here or learn how to sponsor. This week’s new additions are:

Trulli

Owen Tripp
Grand Rounds

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Paul Johnson
Lemonaid Health

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Mario Schlosser
Oscar

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Anil Sethi
Ciitizen

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Ashwini Zenooz
Commure

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Russ Johannesson
Glooko

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Jim Pursley
Hinge Health

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Peter Hames
Big Health

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Daniel Brillman
Unite Us

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Arif Nathoo
Komodo Health

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Raj Singh
Accolade

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Tim Barry
VillageMD

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Steve Yaskin
Health Gorilla

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Sean Duffy
Omada Health

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Stephanie Papes Strong
Boulder Care

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Abner Mason
ConsejoSano

THCB Gang Episode 60 – Thurs July 1

Episode 60 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Thursday, July 1st. Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) was joined by policy consultant/author Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1); THCB Editor and soon-to-be medical student at Yale, and first time #THCBGang participant Christina Liu (@ChristinayLiu) and–making a rare but welcome appearance –venture investor & soccer mogul Marcus Whitney @marcuswhitney We had a great wide ranging chat about Medicaid, venture capital and the unnecessarily excessive rigors of applying to medical school, and what that means for health equity.

The video is below but if you’d rather listen to the episode, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

Go Ahead, AI—Surprise Us

By KIM BELLARD

Last week I was on a fun podcast with a bunch of people who were, as usual, smarter than me, and, in particular, more knowledgeable about one of my favorite topics – artificial intelligence (A.I.), particularly for healthcare.  With the WHO releasing its “first global report” on A.I. — Ethics & Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health – and with no shortage of other experts weighing in recently, it seemed like a good time to revisit the topic. 

My prediction: it’s not going to work out quite like we expect, and it probably shouldn’t. 

“Like all new technology, artificial intelligence holds enormous potential for improving the health of millions of people around the world, but like all technology it can also be misused and cause harm,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, said in a statement.  He’s right on both counts.

WHO’s proposed six principles are:

  • Protecting human autonomy
  • Promoting human well-being and safety and the public interest
  • Ensuring transparency, explainability and intelligibility 
  • Fostering responsibility and accountability
  • Ensuring inclusiveness and equity 
  • Promoting AI that is responsive and sustainable

All valid points, but, as we’re already learning, easier to propose than to ensure.  Just ask Timnit Gebru.  When it comes to using new technologies, we’re not so good about thinking through their implications, much less ensuring that everyone benefits.  We’re more of a “let the genie out of the bottle and see what happens” kind of species, and I hope our future AI overlords don’t laugh too much about that. 

As Stacey Higginbotham asks in IEEE Spectrum, “how do we know if a new technology is serving a greater good or policy goal, or merely boosting a company’s profit margins?…we have no idea how to make it work for society’s goals, rather than a company’s, or an individual’s.”   She further notes that “we haven’t even established what those benefits should be.”

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