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COVID-19 is Bringing Data Privacy into the Spotlight – This is How Healthcare Companies Should Respond

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By DAN LINTON

Privacy concerns across the country continue to increase, and consumers expect their healthcare information to be private. Headline-making data sales, skepticism of Silicon Valley privacy practices, and COVID-19 contact tracing concerns compounded with a general lack of consumer awareness have continued to generate an ongoing storm ofnegative press and political scrutiny.

With COVID-19 continuing to rampage throughout the country, there is a need for the contact tracing and other technology applications to assess public health. At the same time, changing HHS rules are giving Americans more access and control over their own health data. Both availability and the promise of positive impact of data on people’s lives has never been greater.

Despite the critical need and incredible potential, there is still a great deal of confusion, lack of awareness and heightened concern among consumers. Studies show that the vast majority of Americans think the potential risks of data collection outweighs the potential benefits.

Clamping down on data privacy stifles innovation, and moving forward as we’ve been doing presents a potential privacy minefield. So, what should the healthcare industry do about it?

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THCB Gang Episode 23 8/27

Episode 23 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Thursday, August 27th! Watch it below!

Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) was joined by some of our regulars: health futurist Ian Morrison (@seccurve), WTF Health Host Jessica DaMassa (@jessdamassa), health care consultant Daniel O’Neill (@dp_oneill). The conversation revolved around how providers should reshape some of their practices amid the pandemic, what the large Teladoc-Livongo merger brings to the marketplace, and how there are still lots of potential ways start-ups can fit their models into care practices in the industry.

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

Meaningful U’s

By HANS DUVEFELT

Meaningful Use was a vision for EMRs that in many ways turned out to be a joke. Consider my list of Meaningful U’s for medical providers instead.

When electronic medical records became mandatory, Federal monies were showered over the companies that make them by way of inexperienced, ill-prepared practices rushing to pick their system before the looming deadline for the subsidies.

The Fed tried to impose some minimum standards for what EMRs should be able to do and for what practices needed to use them for.

The collection of requirements was called Meaningful Use, and by many of us nicknamed “Meaningless Use”. Well-meaning bureaucrats with little understanding of medical practice wildly overestimated what software vendors, many of them startups, could deliver to such a well established sector as healthcare.

For example, the Fed thought these startups could produce or incorporate high quality patient information that we could generate via the EMR, when we have all built our own repositories over many years of practice from Harvard, the Mayo Clinic and the like or purchased expensive subscriptions like Uptodate for. As I have described before, I would print the hokey EMR handouts for the Meaningful Use credit and throw them in the trash and give my patients the real stuff from Uptodate, for example.

I’d like to introduce an alternative set of standards, borrowing the hackneyed phrase, with a twist. MEANINGFUL U’S for medical providers:

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Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 146 | Can We Call it Digital Health Anymore?

Can we call this digital health anymore? What do we call it? On Episode 146 of Health in 2 Point 00, Jessica DaMassa asks me about Amwell filing for their S1, Lyra Health getting $110M to develop their mental health platform, PatientPop raising $50M to improve SEO for doctors and patients (they also brought Johnathan Bush on their board!), Brightline closing $20M for their behavioral health platform for kids, and Science 37 getting $40M for their site-less clinical trials — Matthew Holt

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The Bayer Deal: One Drop’s CEO on New $98M & How Data Science Will Fix Chronic Condition Care

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

One Drop just landed a $98.7M deal with Bayer — and we got the details from CEO Jeff Dachis. The timing of this deal is nothing short of impeccable: less than a year after the life sciences giant led One Drop’s Series B with a $40M investment, and amidst a veritable funding frenzy aimed at growing digital health companies focused on chronic condition management. So, how is One Drop planning to use this investment (part Series C/part development fees) to expand their data science platform known for diabetes and hypertension into some of Bayer’s biggest areas of focus — cardiology, oncology, and women’s health? And how does this even-closer relationship with such a consumer health brand help One Drop further evolve the retail side of its go-to-market strategy? Don’t forget — One Drop is sold direct-to-consumer via CVS, Walmart, and Amazon in addition to the more traditional routes via employers and payers. It’s a full breakdown of the deal and a walk through the key points of differentiation Jeff sees as integral to shaping One Drop’s move for greater global market share.

Slow Walking to Value Based Care: Why Fee for Service Still Rules

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By KEN TERRY

(This is the second 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.)

In January 2015, then Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced lofty goals for the government’s value-based payment program. By the end of 2016, she said, 85% of all payments in the traditional Medicare program would be tied to quality or value, and 90% would be value-based by the end of 2018.

The government planned to tie 30% of Medicare payments to alternative payment models by 2017, according to Burwell, and hoped to reach the 50% mark by 2018. In March 2016, HHS said it had reached the 30% goal a year ahead of schedule, mainly because of the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP).

More recent data on the value-based-care movement comes from the Health Care Payment & Learning Action Network (LAN), a public-private partnership launched in 2015 by the Department of Health and Human Services. The LAN reported in October 2018 that public and private payers covering 226 million lives, or 77% of insured Americans, had tied 34% of their payments to value-based care. According to the organization, only 23% of total payments had been value-based in 2016.A deeper analysis of the LAN data, however, shows that the vast majority of value-based payments—both in Medicare and in the larger healthcare system—were still limited to pay for performance, upside-only shared savings, and care management fees paid to patient-centered medical homes.

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Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 145 | Amwell, OneDrop, Outset Medical & Podimetrics

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess asks me about the big news that Google Cloud has entered into a partnership with Amwell and invested $100 million into the company—looks like their IPO is really a thing! OneDrop gets $98.7 million in a partnership with Bayer, following at $40 million partnership last November, in a funding and development agreement. Outset Medical files their S1 and is going to go public, looking for $100 million for their portable dialysis system, and finally Podimetrics raises another $8 million for their foot ulcer detection platform for diabetics. —Matthew Holt

Thriving in COVID Times

By KIM BELLARD

These are, no question, hard times, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  In the U.S., we’re closing in on 180,000 deaths in the U.S.  Some 40 million workers lost their jobs, and over 30 million are still receiving unemployment benefits.  Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of small businesses are believed to have closed, and many big companies are declaring bankruptcy.  Malls, retailers, and restaurants have been among the hardest hit. 

Yes, these are hard times.  But not for everyone. 

Last week Target announced what CNBC called a “monster quarter.”  Sales for online and stores open at least a year jumped 24% for the quarter ending August 1 – peak COVID-19 days – and profits were up an astonishing 80%.  Its CEO specifically referenced the pandemic, as shoppers sought safe and convenient shopping options.

It is not just Target doing well.  No one should be surprised that Amazon is doing well, as more turn to online shopping and Amazon’s quick delivery, but The Wall Street Journal reports that Bog Box stores generally are doing well, including not just Target but also Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Costco, and Best Buy.  The efforts they were taking to compete with Amazon, such as increased online sales and curbside pickup, served to help them survive the pandemic’s effects. 

Similarly, if you’re a streaming service like Netflix or Disney+, the pandemic has been great for business.  Video conferencing services like Zoom are booming.  Car dealers are struggling, but not online car sales. 

And, of course, if you’re a cloud computing service supporting all these shifts to online, the world has become even more dependent on you.  “Many customers are scaling beyond their wildest projections,” Carrie Thorp of Google Cloud told WSJ. 

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Change Healthcare’s CEO on Payers, Providers & The New Healthcare Economy

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

From his vantage point at the helm of one of healthcare’s biggest IT infrastructure companies, Change Healthcare’s President & CEO, Neil de Crescenzo, has an unrivaled perspective at how covid19 has impacted hospital systems and payers. His business builds the “connective tissue” that not only supports the administrative management and patient engagement aspects of “Big Healthcare,” but it also literally helps those organizations make money, processing about $1.5 Trillion in claims each year. So, what’s he seen so far in 2020? And what’s ahead for 2021? Neil stops by to talk about current challenges facing healthcare provider orgs and payers — and what’s ahead in the “new” healthcare economy where “change” is the only constant. From HHS’s new interoperability rules to telehealth and the more dispersed healthcare system it will inevitably create, we dive into all things future of health including the details behind Change’s two recent health tech acquisitions (each over $200M), what Neil thinks about the Teladoc-Livongo merger, and how digital health startups have an unprecedented opportunity to help expand the healthcare system beyond its traditional footprint.

Physicians Should Lead on Healthcare Reform

By KEN TERRY

(This is the first 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.)

Even before COVID-19, healthcare reform seemed to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, but there is a rational way forward. This approach, which I call “physician-led healthcare reform,” would engage doctors in building a healthcare system that was safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable, to use the Institute of Medicine’s set of foundational goals in its landmark book, Crossing the Quality Chasm: a New Health System for the 21st Century.Primary care physicians, rather than hospitals, would be in charge of the system, and they’d work closely with specialists and other healthcare professionals to produce the best patient outcomes at the lowest cost.

It would take a decade or more to restructure the healthcare system so that this goal could be achieved. Similarly, the transition to a single-payer insurance system needs to be accomplished gradually—although the pandemic might accelerate that timetable. Most people are not yet ready to abandon employer-sponsored insurance, and there’s still a lot of distrust of the government. Providers are more likely to accept changes in how they’re paid over time than all of a sudden. Additional benefits can also be brought online slowly. Ideally, we could transform healthcare financing over a 10-year period while rebuilding the care delivery system at the same time.

That is why implementing Medicare for America—a reform plan devised by the Center for American Progress and embodied in a current House bill–makes more sense than going directly to Medicare for All: it changes the system incrementally while achieving universal coverage fairly quickly. Medicare for America would do this by enrolling the uninsured, people who purchase individual insurance, and those now in Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). People would also be enrolled automatically at birth. Companies could enroll their employees in Medicare for America, and employees could opt out of employer-sponsored plans and enroll in the public plan.

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