The Health Care Blog – Page 149 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

Kids & Mental Health: Brightline Aims to “Grow Up” Pediatric Behavioral Health Care with Tech

Sep 16, 2020

By JESSICA DAMASSA

Despite the fact that kids make up 20% of our national patient population and that their parents are likely just the tech-savvy market of health consumers that most digital health companies are targeting with their own virtual care solutions, very little has been done to use technology to ‘transform’ the way that they take care of their kids. One of the founders hoping to push this market into a growth spurt is Naomi Allen, co-founder & CEO of pediatric behavioral health company Brightline.

From seed to Series A in just 8 months ($25M total funding), Brightline is already looking to scale out its full-stack clinical model to help tackle the behavioral health issues that are often under-diagnosed and under-treated in kids. Naomi says that 75% of all severe mental illness manifests before age 14, but that only 1 in 5 kids will ever even get a behavioral health diagnosis. And more shocking? Of those that are diagnosed, only 1 in 5 of those kids will ever even receive any care.

The supply-and-demand equation is off — stymied not only by a clinician shortage, but by literally poor reimbursement from health plans concerned about the lack of quality metrics, measurements, and processes in pediatric behavioral health despite the prevalence of those kinds of quality guidelines around adult mental health care.

So, how is Brightline going to fix this? Technology, clinicians, coaches. A full-stack clinical model with a “scaffolding” of support for parents built around it using telehealth, digital tools, and, for those health plans, metrics. Tune in to find out more about their business model, what Brightline’s kids are saying, and how you can find their services yourself if you think your child might need help.

THCB’s Bookclub, September 2020 – NEO.LIFE

Sep 16, 2020

By JESSICA DAMASSA & MATTHEW HOLT

The THCB Book Club is a discussion with leading health care authors, which will be released on the third Wednesday of every month.

This month we hosted Jane Metcalfe (Founder of NEO.LIFE) to talk about her 2020 book NEO.LIFE. You can get a copy of it here!

NEO.LIFE is a very unusual book. It’s over 25 very short chapters (ranging from 1 page to 78) which include interviews, concepts, art, science, science fiction, and one short story. All from different authors or groups of authors that are all edited into place by Jane Metcalfe and Brian Bergstein.

The topic is the future of humans! And the loose focus is on biotech, human engineering, and well watch along and get a copy!

You can see the video below (and the podcast version will be in our iTunes & Spotify channels very soon).

In October the THCB BookClub will feature Mike Magee’s book, Code Blue.

Hospitals Must Give Up Power to Save Healthcare

Sep 16, 2020

By KEN TERRY

(This is the sixth in a series of excerpts from Terry’s new book, Physician-Led Healthcare Reform: a New Approach to Medicare for All, published by the American Association for Physician Leadership.)

As hospital systems become larger and employ more physicians, healthcare prices will continue to rise and independent doctors will find it harder to remain independent. Hospitals will never fully embrace value-based care as long as it threatens their primary business model, which is to fill beds and generate outpatient revenues. To create a viable, sustainable healthcare system, the market power of hospitals must be eliminated.

Federal antitrust policy is not adequate to handle this task. Even if the Federal Trade Commission had more latitude to deal with mergers among not-for-profit entities, the industry is already so consolidated that the FTC would have to break up health systems involving thousands of hospitals. Such a gargantuan effort would be practically and legally unfeasible.

All-payer Systems

The government could curtail health systems’ market power without breaking them up. For example, either states or the federal government could adopt “all-payer” models similar to those in Maryland and West Virginia. Under the Maryland model introduced 40 years ago, every insurer, including Medicare, Medicaid, and private health plans, pays uniform hospital rates negotiated between the state and the hospitals.

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 151| MDLive (not?) IPOing, DTx Platform for Schizophrenia, & more

Sep 15, 2020

We are forgetting about health tech, and celebrating Chicago-oo! Just kidding, today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess asks me about Truepill getting a 75M Series C after just closing their B, Sana Benefits getting $20.8M, and Decent getting $10M, both of which are in the space of health benefits & insurance for small business have raised funding, MDLive closing a $50M round for their Virtual Primary Care (but weren’t they going public?), Owl Insights getting $15M from Ascension and Blue Ventures, and Boehringer Ingelheim & Click Therapeutics working on a $500M deal together on a DTx platform for Schizophrenia patients. –Matthew Holt

Healthcare Can Learn From Chess

Sep 15, 2020

By KIM BELLARD

Oh, gosh, two of my favorite things are in the news together: Twitch and chess.

Just kidding. I barely know what Twitch is, and the last time I played chess was, well, not in this century (and, even then, not well). But I’m not kidding about their convergence. Chess has become a big hit on Twitch, especially in these COVID times.

I figure, if two such seemingly divergent things are meshing, there must be some lessons there, even for healthcare.

For those of you over, say, fifty, Twitch is an online service that facilitates livestreaming, particularly of gaming. That is, people watch other people playing games, such Fortnite or League of Legends.

E-sports, as this is known, have become a big thing; colleges are even giving out scholarships for e-sports. Major news outlets, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, reported on Twitch re-signing video game star Tyler Blevins, a.k.a “Ninja,” much as they might have reported an NFL team signing a star player.

As I write, 2.7 million people are livingstreaming on Twitch. Its all-time concurrent viewers peak is just over 6 million. There were 1.6 billion hours watched in August, with over 11 billion year-to-date. It draws more viewers than network television hits. There are 93,000 live channels at this moment.

Will COVID-19 Force The South To Finally Confront Structural Racism Within Their Medicaid Programs?

Sep 14, 2020• 3

By MIKE MAGEE

If you would like to visit the meeting place of America’s two great contemporary pandemics –COVID-19 and structural racism – you need only visit America’s Nursing Homes.

This should come as no surprise to Medical Historians familiar with our Medicaid program. Prejudice and bias were baked in well before the signing of Medicaid and Medicare on July 30, 1965.

President Kennedy’s efforting on behalf of health coverage expansion met stiff resistance from the American Medical Association and Southern states in 1960. Part of their strategic pushback was the endorsement of a state-run and voluntary offering for the poor and disadvantaged called Kerr-Mills. Predictably, Southern states feigned support, and enrollment was largely non-existent. Only 3.3% of participants nationwide came from the 10-state Deep South “Black Belt.”

Based on this experience, when President Johnson resurrected health care as a “martyr’s cause” after the Kennedy assassination, he carefully built into Medicaid “comprehensive care and services to substantially all individuals who meet the plan’s eligibility standards” by 1977. But by 1972, after seven years of skirmishes, the provision disappeared.

Patient Identity and Patient Record Matching

Sep 11, 2020

By ADRIAN GROPPER and DEBORAH C. PEEL

September 4, 2020

Thank you, ONC for the opportunity you gave me to speak in June. Also, thank you for the format of your August meeting where the Zoom chat feature offered a wonderful venue for an inclusive commentary and discussion as the talks were happening. Beats lining up at the microphone any day.

Here is a brief recap of my suggestions, in no particular order:

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 150 | Sesquicentennial anniversary edition!

Sep 10, 2020

It’s Health in 2 Point 00’s 150th Episode or Sesquicentennial anniversary! On this episode, we have the return of Softbank money—$100M goes to Biofourmis platform for AI & Clinical Trials. Next, Amwell prices their IPO at $14-16 a share, and Grand Rounds raises $175 million led by the Carlyle Group. Finally, we have real foul play to report – former Zocdoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi filed a lawsuit accusing his fellow cofounders and CFO of foul play, so Jess asks me to dish the dirty details. —Matthew Holt

THCB Gang Episode 24!

Sep 10, 2020

Episode 24 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Thursday, September 10th! Watch it below!

Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) were some of our regulars: WTF Health Host Jessica DaMassa (@jessdamassa), patient & entrepreneur Robin Farmanfarmaian (@Robinff3), writer Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard), policy & tech expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis), and guest Mike Magee, a medical historian & health economist (@drmikemagee). The conversation was incredibly wide-ranging and one of the best we’ve had in a while–not the least because Mike Magee gave us a great base with how our non -health system somehow did actually act as a cohesive force in society before tech, then COVID19 broke it up!

If you’d rather listen to the episode, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels — Zoya Khan

The Medical AI Floodgates Open, at a Cost of $1000 per Patient

Sep 10, 2020• 4

By LUKE OAKDEN-RAYNER

In surprising news this week, CMS (the Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services) in the USA approved the first reimbursement for AI augmented medical care. Viz.ai have a deep learning model which identifies signs of stroke on brain CT and automatically contacts the neurointerventionalist, bypassing the first read normally performed by a general radiologist.

From their press material:

Viz.ai demonstrated to CMS a significant reduction in time to treatment and improved clinical outcomes in patients suffering a stroke. Viz LVO has been granted a New Technology Add on Payment of up to $1,040 per use in patients with suspected strokes.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vizai-granted-medicare-new-technology-add-on-payment-301123603.html

This is enormous news, and marks the start of a totally new era in medical AI.

Especially that pricetag!

Doing it tough

It is widely known in the medical AI community that it has been a troubled marketplace for AI developers. The majority of companies have developed putatively useful AI models, but have been unable to sell them to anyone. This has lead to many predictions that we are going to see a crash amongst medical AI startups, as capital runs out and revenue can’t take over. There have even been suggestions that a medical “AI winter” might be coming.