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THCB Spotlights: Lightbeam Health Solutions

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By ZOYA KHAN

Today, THCB is spotlighting Lightbeam Health Solutions. Lightbeam is an end-to-end population health management solution, which means they build everything from the ground up (i.e. no acquisitions or 3rd party interfaces are used). “Interface to innovation” as Jorge Miranda, CRO of Lightbeam, states, allows Lightbeam to build a health system’s value-based contracts relatively quickly. Their main focus is to generate data insights for ACOs and other provider systems, to engage care teams in the coordination of patient care. This is Lightbeam’s 6th year in the health care field, and with 100 customers and over 20 million patients in their enterprise data warehouse (EDW), they have no signs of slowing down.

Lightbeam has 4 main focuses: data ingestion, data insights, the engagement of the team with the data gathered, and the patient outcomes that result from that data. Lightbeam seeks to use their insights to empower care teams by giving the information back to the caregivers, physicians, and patients. According to them, this creates more transparency in the entire process as well as allows the patient and caregivers to play an active role in their health care process.

The ultimate value that clients (health systems or providers) receive from Lightbeam’s system is cutting costs and improving quality. Lightbeam does this by monitoring engagement numbers and patient outcomes based on the data and insights they gathered, ensuring costs savings for clients as well as an effective approach to cutting the high cost of care today. Lightbeam’s ultimate goal is to replace a manual process that is currently being done by multiple people and using multiple resources, to refocus the target on improving care for everyone involved in the health care system.

Zoya Khan is the Editor-in-Chief of THCB as well as an Associate at SMACK.health, a health-tech advisory service for early-stage startups.

Death by 1000 Clicks Redux

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By MARK BRAUNSTEIN, MD

Back in the ‘stone ages’ when I (an MIT grad) was an intern, I was called at 4 AM to see someone else’s gravely ill patient because her IV had infiltrated.  I started a new one and drew some blood work to check on her status.  When the results came back (on paper) I (manually) calculated her anion gap.  This is simple arithmetic but I had been up all night and didn’t do it right.

She died. 

On morning rounds the attending assured me that there was nothing I could have done anyway but, of course, in other circumstances it could have made a difference and an EHR could have easily done this calculation and brought the problematic result to my attention.  My passion for EHRs and FHIR apps to improve them really traces back to this patient episode I will never forget.

My criticism of the recent Kaiser Health News and Fortune article Death by 1000 Clicks is generally not about what it says but what it doesn’t say and its tone.

The article emphasizes the undeniable fact that EHRs cause new sources of medical error that can damage patients. It devotes a lot of ink to documenting some of these in dramatic terms. Yes, with hundreds of vendors out there, the quality of EHR software is highly variable. Among the major weaknesses of some EHRs are awkward user interfaces that can lead to errors. In fact, one of the highlights of my health informatics course is a demonstration of this by a physician whose patient died at least in part as a result of a poor EHR presentation of lab test results.

However, the article fails to pay equal attention to the ways EHRs can, if properly used, help prevent errors. It briefly mentions that around a 60% majority of physicians using EHRs feel that they improve quality. The reasons quality is improved deserved more attention. The article also fails to discuss some of the new, exciting technologies to improve EHR usability through innovative third party apps and he real progress being made in data sharing including patient access to their digital records.

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Changing the Way You Care: The Coming 5G Revolution

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SPONSORED POST

By VERIZON WIRELESS TEAM

You might not know it yet, but there’s a revolution coming to healthcare.

While digitization has driven innovation across the healthcare sector, the advent of 5G is set to spark a fourth industrial revolution.

3G and 4G networks enabled large-scale change and rapid modernization. However, 5G delivers what these networks could not: blazing speeds and ultra-low latencies that permit enormous data transfers between devices in near-real time. That means that technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and augmented reality will be capable of transforming the industry as we know it.

Whether it’s strengthening telemedicine connections, implementing new teaching methods at medical school, or connecting large hospitals and clinics, see how 5G-powered technologies will open the door for innovation in healthcare.

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XX Marks the Spot: Why Did Women Tech Experts Rule at DC Health Data Confab?

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By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

Three government experts on a health tech conference panel discuss the urgency of releasing actionable data; all are women. A more senior official, another woman, gives a TED-style talk making the same case. And a four-person, private-sector panel debates privacy and ethics; three of the four are female.

Health Datapalooza, a conference begun with government sponsorship a decade ago, proclaims its goal as “data liberación” – freeing health data from deep within federal agencies and giving it to patients and entrepreneurs. But in 2019, women’s “liberación” seems to have become an unspoken sub-theme.

Interestingly, while women’s status in tech was the focus of a plenary panel on diversity and inclusion, the panelists seemed oblivious to the robust participation of women in their own meeting.

To put some data behind my subjective impressions, I went back and examined the list of speakers, who came from a wide range of organizations and included individual patient activists. I counted 89 men and 99 women. Liberación, indeed.

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Surveyor Health demystifies clinical pharmacy

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By MATTHEW HOLT

In some interesting news this week, Inland Empire Health plan (IEHP), a major Medicaid health insurer in southern California with about 1.2 million members, and its contractor Preveon Health announced that they were “extending a pilot” with Surveyor Health, for their MedRiskMaps product.

This is interesting for a bunch of reasons. First it’s a good example of how technology is now being applied to help with the almost absurd complexity of modern medicine–complexity that technology has both added to and may yet cure. Secondly, Surveyor Health has been building its technology for several years and (FD) I’ve been advising them off and on since 2009 and know the principals well. Thirdly, and this is mostly for grins, it represents some of the absurd language used to describe our crazy health care system.

What does the tech do? Surveyor Health’s technology is very complex optimization technology that examines the incredible number of symptoms and interactions undergone by patients taking multiple medications. As you know most chronically ill patients are on upwards of half a dozen medications and some are on many more. The more medications, the more the potential for serious and sometimes fatal drug-drug interactions, side effects and more. You only have to think of the litany of celebrity drug deaths (Michael Jackson, Prince, Anna Nicole Smith, Health Ledger, Tom Petty, to name a few) to understand the seriousness of the issue. Erick von Schweber, a real theoretical physicist and CEO of Surveyor Health tells me that when you get above 11 drugs the calculations involved are more complex than what Google has to do to index the web. (And yes, he now is allowing me to call it AI!)

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Innovators Worth Watching: Hennepin Health ACO

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By REBECCA FOGG

As U.S. providers continue their slow but steady march away from fee-for-service reimbursement and toward value-based payments, they’re increasingly seeking means of addressing patients’ health-related social needs. That’s because social determinants of health—life circumstances including socioeconomic status, housing, education, and employment—are estimated to have at least twice the impact on risk of premature death than health care. So addressing them is an important part of value-based strategies aiming to improve health while reducing health care costs.

Hennepin Health, a safety-net Accountable Care Organization (ACO) serving Medicaid patients in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is an encouraging example of the trend. Hennepin Health’s ACO is a partnership between the county’s local Human Services and Public Health Department, a local teaching hospital, a Medicaid managed care health plan, and a Federally Qualified Health Center. Its innovative care model is designed to meet the unique needs of the partners’ shared, “high-risk” members, whose complex combination of issues—such as mental illness, addiction, homelessness and/or other hallmarks of social deprivation—often prevent them from accessing or receiving appropriate care through the traditional health system.

The ACO is staffed by an integrated care team comprised of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, social workers and community health workers. Unlike traditional care processes, which often only involve medical assessment, Hennepin Health’s begins with an assessment of members’ social needs, like housing and food insecurity, or lack of transportation and unemployment, so that its care team can tackle those barriers to health in conjunction with members’ medical problems. And throughout members’ care, the team strives to develop and maintain a trusting relationship with members, many of whom have been let down by traditional health care, so that they can continue to identify and assist with more health and social needs over time.

Results thus far has been impressive—according to a Commonwealth Fund case study, the ACO’s medical costs fell an average of 11% per year between 2012 and 2016. And, between 2012 and 2013, its members’ emergency room visits decreased by approximately 9%, with hospital admissions remaining flat and outpatient visits increased by 3.3%. Assuming its results have continued on the same trajectory (we could not find more recent figures), Hennepin Health’s innovative care model shows significant promise.

But does it have the potential to disrupt America’s traditional, episodic, acute care delivery model? We put it to the test with six questions for identifying a Disruptive Innovation.

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ONC & CMS Proposed Rules – Part 3: Data Requirements

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By DAVE LEVIN, MD

The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) have proposed final rules on interoperability, data blocking and other activities as part of implementing the 21st Century Cures Act. In this series, we will explore the ideas behind the rules, why they are necessary and the expected impact. Given that these are complex and controversial topics open to interpretation, we invite readers to respond with their own ideas, corrections and opinions. In part three of this series, we look at how the new USCDI draft helps foster innovation.  

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The U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) draft is a step forward toward expanding the 21st Century Cures Act. The Cures Act was helpful in moving the needle for interoperability and defining data blocking. The latest draft of the USCDI is meant to further specify what data should be shared freely.

In this article, we’ll look at the data added to the Common Clinical Data Set (CCDS) used for ONC certification. We’ll walk through the proposed plan to add more data over time. And we’ll explore why this is a step in the right direction toward increased data sharing.

New Shared Data

The bulk of the datasets in the USCDI comes from the Common Clinical Data Set (CCDS), which was last updated in 2015. The new USCDI draft adds two types of data:

  • Clinical notes: both structured and unstructured. EHRs store these notes differently, but both are important and helpful in data analysis.
  • Provenance:  an audit trail of the data, showing where it came from. It is metadata, or information about the data, that shows who created it and when.

The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) have created standards around APIs used to access health care data. APIs developed under the FHIR standard aligns with the USCDI to meet the proposed certification rules. The USCDI draft recommends using a FHIR compliant API to access the data.

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Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 76 | Facebook releasing an EMR? Jim Cramer Going to Epic? #AprilFools

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Facebook is releasing an EMR? Jim Cramer is going to work at Epic? April Fools! On today’s actual Health in 2 Point 00 Episode 76, Jess asks me about the follow up from Health Datapalooza, which ended with the government saying they will be changing the world and that everyone should join them in their initiative to innovate digital health. AHRQ & CMMI ran digital health challenges, and CMMI will be doing an AI challenge for $1 million for startups in the space. Speaking of the government, Seema Verma was in the news for her PR spending and as I said “Evil Twin Seema” and “Good Seema” are joined at the hip and they should “not screw around on the PR front”. In other news, MountSinai launched a digital health institute to develop advances in artificial intelligence and other emerging health care technologies spaces. Clover Health laid off a ton of people, and according to me, they are starting to get serious because running a Medicare Advantage plan is hard work — Matthew Holt

Addressing Heresy in Healthcare

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SPONSORED POST

By ANN MOND JOHNSON

I’ve worked in enough start ups to know that creating something from nothing can be hard. It is especially tough when you must create a market and explain to people that what you’re doing isn’t nearly as heretical as it may sound. When my friends and I started Subimo in 2000, people wondered why they’d use our product to learn about hospital performance when (in their words) all they really needed was to have their doctor to tell them which hospital they should use. What people eventually realized was that there is variation in outcomes by hospitals and even by service lines within hospitals.

That’s why the recent spate of articles about the newly emerging direct-to-consumer companies in health care – the ones that are condition-specific like HIMS, Ro and Keeps – fascinate me. These are companies that have leveraged all we know about direct-to-consumer marketing and have identified an unmet market need. In some respects, they’re not dissimilar from companies like Simple Contacts or 1.800 Contacts or Visibly – companies that offer a convenient way for people to get what they need (in this case, good vision). Or companies that offer behavioral health services directly to consumers.

What do these companies have in common? Aside from a strong marketing foundation, they have identified a market need that can be met with a new approach that leverages technology. They are convenient, offer a high level of customer service and may even be easier to work with than traditional players.

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SCOOP: Facebook enters EMR business

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by MATTHEW HOLT

Big news out of Mountain View, California today as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that the social networking giant was going to formally enter the EMR business. Sandberg explained that Facebook already has all Americans and most of the world’s population on its system and that adding a little bit of information about their health would be trivial given that it’s easy with AR to abstract that information from their profiles, not to mention that everyone’s phone is already sending data back to Facebook.

In particular, Sandberg highlighted the fact that Facebook has already captured almost all the personal health information of many people with cancer and plenty of other rare diseases in the thousands of health communities that it has been pushing hard over the past few years. Not only have those individuals not known what Facebook is allowing third parties to do with that data, or which hackers have already stolen it in a SICGRL hack, but they have also found it impossible to extract themselves or their data from those groups. As Sandberg says “We already have the EMR business model down, now we just have to provide the products”

When it was pointed out to Sandberg that Facebook didn’t actually have any professional EMR tools that could be used by clinicians or doctors, a scruffily dressed guy hiding his bad haircut under a hoodie grabbed the mike and shouted “We’ve seen the schlock that Epic, Cerner and the rest put out–my wife has to use it and she spends every evening catching up on her data entry. Shouldn’t be too hard for our engineers to knock that off–just ask those guys at Snapchat.” Sandberg commented that while EMR vendors move slowly and break things, Facebook has shown over the years that it can do that much faster. “Have you seen what we did to American democracy or the EU?”

Later today Cerner stock was trading off 25%. When asked, an Epic spokesperson commented that even if you added their ages together, Sandberg and Zuckerberg were far too young to run a proper EMR company.

Matthew Holt is the Publisher of THCB

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