The Health Care Blog – Page 166 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

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Is Covid-19 the Argument Health Data Interoperability Needed? | WTF Health

May 7, 2020

By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

“This pandemic highlights why we need that free flow of healthcare data. So that we can make better decisions sooner.”

In the way that Covid-19 has proven the utility of telehealth as a means for health systems to reach their patients, has the pandemic also become the final argument for healthcare data interoperability? Has this pandemic been the worst case scenario we needed to make our best ‘case-in-point’ for why U.S. healthcare needs a national health data infrastructure that makes it possible for hospitals to share information with one another and government health organizations?

Interoperability advocates have been clamoring for this for years, but Dan Burton, CEO of data-and-analytics health tech company, Health Catalyst, says this public health crisis has likely created an inflection point in the interoperability argument.

THCB Spotlights: David Smith, Medicaid Transformation Project at Avia

May 7, 2020

By ZOYA KHAN

Matthew Holt talks to David Smith who is working on the Medicaid Transformation Project at Avia, which is looking at how hospitals & health plans can improve health outcomes and in turn, lose less money on Medicaid programs. David talks about the tremendous amount of capital being poured into Medicaid, and how the problem is only getting worse. So the focus of the project is trying to reduce healthcare delivery organizations’ spend on these services. At Avia, they are trying to take the best of model science and the best of digital capabilities to help create more efficient care models for their clients as well as reduce costs.

Zoya Khan is the Editor-in-Chief of THCB and a Strategy Manager at SMACK.health

Can AI and radiographs help in resource-poor areas for the fight against COVID-19?

May 7, 2020

By POOJA RAO, TARUN RAJ, BHARGAVA REDDY, MANOJ TLD, and PREETHAM SRINIVAS

In March 2020, we re-purposed our chest X-ray AI tool, qXR, to detect signs of COVID-19. We validated it on a test set of 11479 CXRs with 515 PCR-confirmed COVID-19 positives. The algorithm performs at an AUC of 0.9 (95% CI : 0.88 – 0.92) on this test set. At our most common operating threshold for this version, sensitivity is 0.912 (95% CI : 0.88 – 0.93) and specificity is 0.775 (95% CI : 0.77 – 0.78). qXR for COVID-19 is used at over 28 sites across the world to triage suspected patients with COVID-19 and to monitor the progress of infection in patients admitted to hospital

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has already caused a great deal of disruption around the world. Healthcare systems are overwhelmed as we speak, in the face of WHO guidance to ‘test, test, test’ [1]. Many countries are facing a severe shortage of Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests. There has been a lot of debate around the role of radiology — both chest X-rays (CXRs) and chest CT scans — as an alternative or supplement to RT-PCR in triage and diagnosis. Opinions on the subject range from ‘Radiology is fundamental in this process’ [2] to ‘framing CT as pivotal for COVID-19 diagnosis is a distraction during a pandemic, and possibly dangerous’ [3].

THCB Gang: Episode 8 LIVE 1PM PT/4PM ET, 5/7

May 7, 2020

Episode 8 of “The THCB Gang” was live-streamed on Thursday, May 7th at 1pm PT- 4pm ET! You can see it below.

Joining me were our regulars: patient advocate Grace Cordovano (@GraceCordovano), data privacy lawyer Deven McGraw (@HealthPrivacy), policy expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis), radiologist Saurabh Jha (@RogueRad) (who snuck in late), and writer Kim Bellard (@Kimbbellard). We had a great conversation including a lot of detail around access to patient records, and some fun about infectious disease epidemiologists behaving badly! If you’d rather listen, the “audio only” version is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels from Friday— Matthew Holt

THCB Spotlights: Stan Kachnowski, Director of the Digital Health Program at Columbia Business School

May 6, 2020

By ZOYA KHAN

Stan Kachnowski, Director of the Digital Health Program at Columbia Business School, joins Matthew to talk about the Virtual Executive Education in Digital Health Strategy Program they have coming up from May 12-14th. The program is built around health care executives understanding and implementing digital health strategies at their organizations almost immediately after the course. For 3 days, attendees will participate in workshops, lectures, and discussions which will help them identify the key players in health tech along with which methodologies will work at their specific organizations. Matthew will also be a guest lecturer for the program where he will speak about his “Flipping the Stack” model for health technology’s future.

For more information, visit:

https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/execed/program-pages/details/2489/DHS

Or email Stan at sw***@**********ia.edu

Zoya Khan is the Editor-in-Chief of THCB & a Strategy Manager at SMACK.health

Healthcare Starts to Zoom Along

May 6, 2020

By KIM BELLARD

A year ago, if you’d used or even heard about Zoom, you were probably in the tech industry. Today, if you haven’t used Zoom, your friends or colleagues must not like you very much. COVID-19 has made most of us homebound most of the time, and video services like Zoom are helping make that more bearable.

And, thankfully, healthcare is finally paying attention.

Zoom was founded in 2011, poking along under the radar for several years, overshadowed by competitors like Skype or WebEx. For the entire month of May 2013 it only had a million meeting participants. Even by December 2019 it could boast “only” 10 million daily users.

Then — boom — COVID-19 hits and people start staying at home. Daily users skyrocketed to 200 million in March and as many as 300 million in April (well, not quite). Daily downloads went from 56,000 in January 2020 to over 2 million in April. Zoom is now used by businesses and families alike, drawn by its simplicity and ease of use.

By all rights, we should be using WebEx for business video calls and Skype for personal ones. Both had been around longer, offered credible services, and still exist. But both were acquired along the way, WebEx by Cisco, and Skype ultimately by Microsoft. As with its acquisition of Nokia, once acquired Microsoft didn’t quite seem to know what to do with it. Each left openings that Zoom plunged through when the pandemic hit.

The Problem With “Herd Immunity” as a COVID-19 Strategy

May 5, 2020• 10

By e-PATIENT DAVE DEBRONKART

Caution: This post is not a prediction. It’s just a tutorial about the concept of herd immunity, with an eye to why it’s probably not an approach the US wants to take in solving the complex problems we’ve gotten ourselves into with COVID-19.

Click this graphic to go see a six second animation of these images, created in 2017 by Reddit user TheOtherEdmund. You many need to watch a few times. Get a feel for the differences in what happens in the different blocks, and come back to discuss:

This weekend I’ve labored to understand this concept, which first came to my ears regarding coronavirus in March, when British prime minister Boris Johnson proposed it as a possible approach for Britain to take: let the virus take its course, and they’d end up with “herd immunity,” and that would be the end of that.

In my unsophisticated knowledge “herd immunity” meant “you let the weak cows die, and the rest of the herd will be fine.” And in fact in April a Tennessee protestor held up a sign saying “Sacrifice the Weak – Reopen TN.” (It’s not clear whether the sign was mocking or real (Snopes), but it illustrates the point.)

Deep-Dive on GuideWell’s Covid19 Innovation Collaborative for Health Tech Startups | WTF Health

May 5, 2020

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

“I think that the baseline platform of telehealth adoption created a whole springboard opportunity for the plethora of digital health companies that are out there eager to get into the space and grow their businesses. I think the industry as a whole now is a whole lot more receptive to looking at things like that then they were eight weeks ago.”

Among those in the industry very open to digital health, digital therapeutics, precision medicine, and virtual care solutions in this time of covid19 is GuideWell, which counts Florida Blue and four other healthcare businesses among its subsidiaries.

The national healthcare company is looking to bring together health tech startups around five different kinds of healthcare challenges created by the coronavirus pandemic via its Covid-19 Innovation Collaborative. With the application deadline set for Friday, May 8, we caught up with GuideWell Innovation’s Executive Director, Kirstie McCool, about the details behind the unique model for the Collaborative, its non-dilutive funding awards, and what happens to the startups that are selected to participate. (Hello, other Blues plans!)

If the Collaborative’s areas of focus aren’t enough to clue you in on where the healthcare giant is interested in rounding out its own array of services as a payer, provider, and innovator, we asked Kirstie point-blank to tell us what she thinks is next in terms of supporting the traditional healthcare system with outside-in innovation. Tune in around the 15:20 mark for that part of the conversation, and a final word-to-the-wise for any startup looking to work with a large healthcare enterprise.

Predicting the Future by Listening to the Experts

May 4, 2020• 1

By STEPHANIE KUKU, MD and HUGH HARVEY, MBBS

The ability to predict in healthcare is the utopia promised by every artificial intelligence for healthcare built, funded and tested in the last decade. Yet very few doctors, technologists, or investors would have imagined they would live to witness a pandemic of the scale we are currently experiencing. We are still getting our heads round the lives lost, the lives of the frontline workers at risk, the disruption and self-isolation, the less fortunate who will suffer the most, the companies in survival mode, and a battered global economy. It is a good time to reflect on what the future of health will look like after we recover. We need to get better at acting on the predictions that truly matter. In a booming health-tech market saturated with promises of predictions and diagnostic insights, it’s a shame we didn’t listen to the scientists who predicted this violent wave of viral disruption.

The future of healthcare investing needs to change

With the first case of the virus last December, everything changed, and there is so much more change to come, in healthcare, technology and in the way we all work. Like with policy and public health, the majority of players on the healthcare stage remain so far removed from the frontline. The perceived ‘market’ rarely truly represents the real one, and true intelligence is lacking the collective intelligence that should prioritise the needs of the healthcare systems and the populations they serve. Our values, motives and how we create the pitch-perfect melting pot of skills, expertise, and mindset needs readjustment. Somewhere between evidence- based decision making and patience; clinical impact aligned with economic impact should be the goal. More focus is needed on validation and less on valuations that are largely built on assumptions and unproven hypotheses. Given the amount of investment that has drowned the healthtech/biotech domains in the last decade, we must praise the advancements that have been made. We must also examine the failures, the wasted resources, and whether technology really is moving healthcare forward at a pace that matches the investment.