THCB

Categories

Above the Fold

Some People Don’t Think Like Doctors (!)

By HANS DUVEFELT

This may come as a surprise for people with business degrees:

Doctors don’t really care when a test was ordered. We care about our patient’s chest X-ray or potassium level the very moment the test was performed. We also don’t care (unless we are doing a forensic review of treatment delays) when an outside piece of information was scanned into the chart. We want to know on which day the potassium was low: Before or after we started the potassium replacement, for example.

In a patient’s medical record, we have a fundamental need to know in what order things happened. We don’t prefer to see all office visits in one file, all prescriptions in another and all phone calls in a third. But that seems to be how people with a bookkeeping mindset prefer to view the world. In some instances we might need that type of information, but under normal clinical circumstances the order in which things happened is the way our brains approach diagnostic dilemmas.

Yes, I have said all this before, but it deserves to be said again. Besides, only 125 people read what I wrote about this six weeks ago, while almost 10,000 people read my post about doxepin.

Patients’ lives are at stake and, in order to do our job, we need the right information at the right time, in the order we need it, even if the bookkeepers prefer it a different way.

Continue reading…

#Healthin2Point00, Episode 202 | Virta, Seqster, Kaia, Capsule & Accolade acquires PlushCare

On Health in 2 Point 00, Jess and I talk about TDOC earnings before getting into today’s deals. First, Virta Health scores $133 million in a round led by Tiger Global for its keto diabetes reversal program. Seqster raises $12 million in its Series A, and there are some interesting investors in this one. MSK startup Kaia Health raises $75 million, bringing its total to $123 million. Online pharmacy Capsule raises $300 million, bringing its total to $570 million. Finally Accolade acquires virtual primary care platform PlushCare in a $450 million deal. —Matthew Holt

THCB Gang Episode 52, Thursday April 29

Thursday’s #THCBGang was another with a special guest. Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) was joined by regulars, employer health expert Jennifer Benz (@jenbenz); patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@MLMillenson); WTF Health host & Health IT girl Jessica DaMassa (@jessdamassa); & Consumer advocate & CTO of Carium Health, Lygeia Ricciardi (@Lygeia).

Our special guest was Shantanu Nundy @DrNundy who is Chief Medical Officer of Accolade and more importantly author of new book Care After Covid. We dug into the question about what the post-covid health care system will look like, while I let slip why I’m grumpy Accolade just paid $450m for Plushcare! (You have to wait for the very end for that!)

Then video is up below. If you’d rather listen, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes  & Spotify channels.

#Healthin2Point00, Episode 201 | European Funding Deals – complete with accents!

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, we’re back from our 200th episode celebration! In Episode 201, we have an all-European funding deals episode for you, and I even attempt to answer every story in an accent relevant to the company. First, French insurance company Alan raises €185 million. Scottish company Current Health raises $43 million in a Series B for remote patient monitoring. Thankfully we have an English company in the mix, Proximie raises $38 million, bringing their total to $48 million – they do AR for the OR. Kry, a Swedish telehealth company with 3 million visits, raises $316 million bringing their total to $570M. Finally, German company Caresyntax raises $100 million bringing their total to $177M doing data analytics around surgery. —Matthew Holt

The Market Forces Behind Vaccine Passports

• 4

By SAURABH JHA

Unlike medical meetings, rendering Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony isn’t easy on Zoom, so the local orchestra has been furloughed and their members work for Uber.  The opera house wants to reopen, preferably before we reach the elusive herd immunity threshold. They mandate vaccinations for their artists, not least because the performers can keep their masks off. Should they extend this requirement to their patrons?  

Vaccine passports, proof of immunity against SARS-CoV-2, to work, dine, fly or watch shows, are controversial. Opponents say they blithely disregard decency, are operationally onerous, and hurt liberty. Worryingly, they create a caste system, which wouldn’t be as concerning if based on just immunology. Such a two-tiered system could sadly mirror societal inequities because it’s the poor who may disproportionately be left unvaccinated. Supporters of vaccine passports further the very structural disadvantages they seek to end.

When arguments are too compelling they likely betray an obvious simplicity. Too often arguments against mandates assume they’d be a government fiat. The opponents recline on the country’s inherently liberal streak conjuring visions of rugged individuals fighting unelected bureaucrats. They say with undisguised pride “this isn’t who we are. We’re the US, not New Zealand. We can’t be controlled.”

This narrative is so tightly embedded in right-of-center discourse that it’s now folklore bordering on an Ayn Rand fairy tale. The narrative is nonsense. The state is too incompetent to either govern adeptly or tyrannize efficiently. Case-in-point: CDC’s easily forgeable paper vaccine certificate. If the state were serious about prying on people’s antibodies, it’d have made the immunosurveillance digital.

The obsession with big government should be antiquated. By censoring content, Facebook and Twitter showed that freedom can more efficiently be curtailed by the private sector. Bottom-up censorship is arguably more powerful than top-down censorship because it has buy-in from a segment of the market. It may very well be the private sector which demands vaccine passports, which begs two questions – why and why not?

Continue reading…

The “Health Tech Responds to COVID-19” Showcase Webinar!

By ELIZABETH BROWN

Catalyst @ Health 2.0 is excited to be hosting the Health Tech Responds to COVID-19 Showcase Webinar, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation! A little under a year ago, Catalyst, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, launched the “Health Tech Responds to COVID-19” platform to maximize the health tech community’s response to the pandemic. The platform features an “Always on” Rapid Response Open Calls (RROCs); a blog/informational website to showcase innovators and experts in this space, and the development of a comprehensive database that allows the public to search and filter for innovative solutions – SourceDB for COVID-19.

With RWJF’s support, Catalyst has opened up the platform to the larger digital health ecosystem and sought organizations interested in sourcing novel technologies, both COVID-19-specific and those with a broader scope. In this video, we hear from some of our Rapid Response Open Call hosts and participants as well as some special guests like John Brownstein discussing VaccineFinder and Jacob Reider talking about the problems of how to manage the vaccine process among the underserved. This is a great discussion of past, present, and future opportunities that have emerged with the global pandemic.

Elizabeth Brown is a Program Manager at Catalyst @ Health 2.0

Sharecare’s SPAC IPO: A Second Success for WebMD Founder Jeff Arnold?

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Sharecare, the population-health-slash-care-navigator of the stars (literally, celebrity doc Dr. Oz is a co-founder, and Oprah’s Harpo Productions, Sony Pictures Television, and Discovery Communications are partners) is about to hit the public market via a $4-Billion SPAC IPO with Falcon Capital. Jeff Arnold, co-founder, CEO, and Chairman drops in to talk about how he plans to make Sharecare even more successful than the first healthcare business he founded-and-exited, WebMD.

The Sharecare ecosystem is sprawling. The company’s been around for more than a decade, acquired about a dozen digital health point solutions and health tech businesses, and built a population health analytics platform that’s interwoven consumer, employer, provider, and health plan data for years. Now, the business is even getting into providing Health Security verifications for hotels, restaurants, and the like to prove that their facilities meet guidelines for health and hygiene protocols, cleaning standards, physical distancing and other health requirements implemented in the Covid-19 era.

So, how does Jeff anticipate meeting shareholder expectations for growth? The investor deck touts a future of recurring revenue driving sustainable 20% year-over-year growth; Jeff talks through each of Sharecare’s verticals in detail so we can learn how.

Healthcare’s Million Dollar Blocks

• 1

By KIM BELLARD

Since I first heard about them, I have been fascinated, and dismayed, by the concept of “million dollar blocks.”  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it doesn’t refer to, say, Beverly Hills,  Chicago’s Gold Coast, or Manhattan’s Hudson Yards — areas where the wealthy congregate.  No, it refers to city blocks for which society spends over a million dollars annually to incarcerate residents of that block.

I, of course, have to think about the healthcare parallels.

The concept dates back many years, credited to Eric Cadora, now at Justice Mapping, and Laura Kurgan, a professor of architecture at Columbia University, where she is the Director of the Center for Spatial Research (CSR).  The power of the concept is to use data visualization to illustrate the problem. 

Here, for example, is CSR’s map of Brooklyn for prison spending:

CSR describes the findings as follows:

The maps suggest that the criminal justice system has become the predominant government institution in these communities and that public investment in this system has resulted in significant costs to other elements of our civic infrastructure — education, housing, health, and family. Prisons and jails form the distant exostructure of many American cities today.

Continue reading…

Health in 2 Point 00 — The 200th Episode Special!

Believe it or not, Jessica DaMassa and I have been banging out digital health tech & funding news for 200 episodes of this oh-so-cute little show. To celebrate, after several takeover episodes when Jess replaced me with a number of special guests, this time four of the digital health & health care digerati replaced Jess to ask me some oh so serious questions. It’s a special edition with guest appearances from Glen Tullman, Eugene Borukhovic, Lisa Suennen & Ian Morrison, as well as plenty of BS from us two regulars! — Matthew Holt

Please Sign Below: Fraudsters Phishing for Physician Signatures

• 3

By HANS DUVEFELT

Almost every day I catch a suspicious fax needing my signature. Often it is an out of state vendor who wants my permission to provide a back brace for a diabetic patient, a continuous blood glucose monitor for a non-diabetic or a compounded (custom made) ointment of some sort that makes no sense from what I know of that patient’s history.

Often, I get a fax appearing to be from Walgreens, just asking me to sign and certify that so-and-so is under my care. Those faxes have Walgreen’s logo, my patient’s correct address and my own DEA and NPI numbers already printed. The problem is that 90% of my patients don’t use Walgreens 20 miles north or south of my clinic, but the local Rexall pharmacy. Once, I called the phone number on the fax and it just rang and rang.

I am convinced that his is just an illicit way to collect physician signatures, so the scammers won’t even have to get my signature on one form at a time. This way it’s like they’ve got their own rubber stamp to use again and again.

I suspect these scams are successful often enough to be quite profitable. I know this because I sometimes sign these forms almost automatically before I catch myself and toss them in the shred box under my desk.

One of the many dirty little secrets in medicine is that doctors get so many papers to sign that there is actually no way we could read them all before scribbling our signature if we still want to see patients, meet clinic revenue projections and match our own productivity quotas.

Continue reading…
assetto corsa mods