Not all genetic testing is equal — and neither are the populations that have ready access to them. Anu Acharya founded Mapmygenome in order to fix the inequality in the amount of genetic data available on Indians. Despite being one of the largest populations in the world (20% of the world’s population is Indian), their genomic data only amounts to about 2% of what’s currently being collected and studied. Tune in to find out how this startup plans to scale to become the leading personal genomics company in India.
Filmed at Webit Health in Sofia, Bulgaria, May 2019.
If medical journals are the religious texts that guide me as a physician, the New York Times has become the secular source of illumination for my relationship to my country and the world I live in.
That doesn’t exactly mean that I feel like a citizen of the world. Quite the opposite, particularly now, with just me and my horses sharing our existence on a peaceful plot of land within walking distance of the Canadian border; my physical world seems quite small even though I am aware, sometimes painfully but with an obvious distance, of the calamity of our planet.
Early Sunday morning, drinking coffee in bed as the gray morning light revealed the outline of the trees and pasture outside my window, I read the Times on my iPad as usual and came across an article titled “What makes people charismatic and how you can be too”.
The article claims that charisma can be learned and cultivated, and that thought resonated with me as I think often about how we as physicians have roles to fill in the stories of diseases and transitions in our patients lives. I try to be the kind of doctor each patient needs as I walk into each exam room.
The article mentions three pillars of charisma: Presence, Power and Warmth.
As I think of my current third guiding light in addition to my medical journals and the New York Times, my DVD collection of the Marcus Welby, M.D. shows, which is shorthand for his character and all the other role models I carry mental images and video clips of, Charisma is definitely something we need to consider and cultivate in our careers.
Catalyst is excited to announce the finalists for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Home and Community Based Care and Social Determinants of Health Innovation Challenges! The three finalists from each Challenge will compete in an exciting Live Pitch on September 16th, from 2:30-4:30pm, at this year’s Health 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara. They will demo their technology in front of a captivated audience of health care professionals, investors, provider organizations, and members of the media. The first place winners will be featured on the Conference Main Stage, September 17th at 3:15pm. Winners will be awarded $40,000 for first place, $25,000 for second place, and $10,000 for third place.
If you are attending the Health 2.0 Conference, join us to
see the finalists showcase their innovative solutions.
Home
& Community Based Care Innovation Challenge Finalists
Heal – Heal doctor house calls paired with Heal Hub remote patient monitoring and telemedicine offer a complete connected care solution for patients with chronic conditions.
Ooney – PrehabPal, a home-based web-app for older adults, delivers individualized prehabilitation to accelerate postoperative functional recovery and return to independence after surgery.
Wizeview – A company that uses artificial intelligence to automate and organize information collected during home visits, supporting the management of medically complex populations at the lowest cost per encounter.
Social
Determinants of Health Innovation Challenge Finalists
Community Resource Network – The Social Determinants of Health Client Profile, a part of the Community Resource Network, creates a whole-person picture across physical, behavioral, and social domains to expedite help for those most at risk, fill in the gaps in care, and optimize well-being.
Open City Labs – A company that matches patients with community services and government benefits that address SDoH seamlessly. The platform will integrate with HIEs to automate referrals, eligibility screening & benefits enrollment.
Social Impact AI Lab – New York – A consortium of nonprofit social services agencies and technology providers with artificial intelligence solutions to address social disconnection in child welfare.
How is Walmart leading the convergence of clinical care and retail? With global scale that allows for everyday low prices in every community, Walmart is innovating both the clinical and lifestyle sides of healthcare. From pharmacy, food, sporting goods, and more, Walmart is creating an ecosystem that is homebase for a healthy lifestyle.
As the world’s biggest private health plan—with 1.4 million associates worldwide —Walmart is also expanding its associate wellbeing program by partnering with Fresh Tri, an innovative app that uses neuroscience to change behavior by offering practical suggestions, combating iterative thinking to meet specific goals.
Filmed at AHIP’s Consumer Experience & Digital Health Forum in Nashville, TN, December 2018.
For over a month, Kānaka ‘Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian)
elders and community members have stood in solidarity at Maunakea in Hawai’i.
They seek to protect their land, sovereignty, and culture from those who want
to build the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Maunakea. Maunakea holds both cultural
and spiritual meaning to the Kānaka ‘Ōiwi. Unfortunately, many astrophysicists
and TMT investors see Maunakea primarily as a means to make scientific
discoveries. The frequent narrative where Indigenous people need to defend the
value of their traditional knowledge[1], beliefs and culture to
Western scientists is a very familiar story that is often replicated in
healthcare, both at home in the U.S., and abroad.
Kānaka ‘Ōiwi elders blocking road to prevent TMT construction (Photo: Caleb Jones/AP)
Traditional medicine, as defined by the World Health Organization, is the “knowledge, skills and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures, used in the maintenance of health and in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness”. Looking at this definition, it is clear that traditional medicine practiced by Indigenous people has equivalent goals to modern Western medicine. Therefore, are we harming our patients when we do not incorporate traditional approaches harmoniously to the practice of healing, and instead value Western medicine over traditional medicine?
The arguments for putting TMT on Maunakea follow a similar reflex to reject knowledge that is different from our own. Thankfully, letters and activism rallying against the construction of TMT on Maunakea, from both Indigenous communities and scientists, are highlighting how Indigenous people are not anti-Western science. In fact, they are beginning to envision how collaboration between Traditional Knowledge and Western science is possible, and potentially even synergistic. Similarly, Western healthcare, too, must foster an approach that centers Traditional Knowledge for Indigenous communities.
How can current and future healthcare providers
promote the value of both Traditional Knowledge and Western science, and thus
promote trust and collaboration between providers and patients?
Softbank Vision Fund is a $100 billion technology-focused fund with an eagle eye on the tech that is poised to disrupt large markets, including healthcare. From hyperscaling to detailed advice on pitching, VP Sakshi Chhabra Mittal goes deep on what they’re looking for from startups, especially those that have closed their Series A and are looking for a B.
Filmed at the Frontiers Health Conference in Berlin, Germany, November 2018.
The impending closure of
Hahnemann University Hospital is a local tragedy. Eliminating a 170-year
old institution is certain to exaggerate the daily travails of the economically
disadvantaged inner-city population that Hahnemann serves as a safety-net
hospital. The closure is also a national tragedy. Hospitals are the
towering, visible monuments of our healthcare system, and closings imply that
something insidious ails that very system—that all is not well.
Hospitals are complex
entities with varied financial drivers, and the solution is never simple.
And the moment is too rich for politicians who see Hahnemann’s failure as the
culmination of their dystopian predictions. Bernie Sanders, most
prominently, stood on the hospital’s doorstep and pitched his deceptively
simple solution—Medicare for All. Medicare for All, Sanders said, would
ensure that every patient carries the same coverage, hospitals are paid a predictable
rate, and voila, no hospitals need to close. Private insurance would
disappear, and no one would be without coverage.
Even physicians have jumped on the Medicare for All bandwagon. Some
doctors insist that once profit is removed as a motive for hospital bottom
lines, and government bodies decide which hospitals can buy a surgical robot,
build a new wing or offer proton beam treatment cancer treatment centers, then
all hospitals will do better.
But these arguments miss
a fundamental point: why pitch government insurance for all, like Medicare and
Medicaid (a federal and state insurance plan to cover low income adult and
children) as a remedy, when it is precisely government-run insurance that is
killing Hahnemann and other hospitals in distress?
Today on THCB Spotlights, Matthew talks to Jacob Reider. Jacob is the CEO of Alliance for Better Health, one of New York State’s 25 Performing Provider Systems which work to reduce unnecessary or preventable acute care utilization for Medicaid members by improving the health of communities. Alliance for Better Health has a new approach to this—they’ve created an Independent Practice Association (IPA) called Healthy Alliance IPA to pull together community based organizations focused on improving health and addressing the social and behavioral aspects of health. Their approach helps the 29 organizations within the IPA negotiate funding and creates an infrastructure for integrating social determinants of health into health care. Watch the interview to find out how this is going to work in practice.
This post is part of the series “The Health Data Goldilocks Dilemma: Privacy? Sharing? Both?”
Introduction
In our previous post, we described the “Wild West of Unprotected Health Data.” Will the cavalry arrive to protect the vast quantities of your personal health data that are broadly unprotected from sharing and use by third parties?
Congress is seriously considering legislation to better
protect the privacy of consumers’ personal data, given the patchwork of
existing privacy protections. For the most part, the bills, while they may
cover some health data, are not focused just on health data – with one
exception: the “Protecting Personal Health Data Act” (S.1842), introduced by
Senators Klobuchar and Murkowski.
In this series, we committed to looking across all of the
various privacy bills pending in Congress and identifying trends,
commonalities, and differences in their approaches. But we think this bill,
because of its exclusive health focus, deserves its own post. Concerns about
health privacy outside of HIPAA are receiving increased attention in light of
the push for interoperability, which makes this bill both timely and
potentially worth of your attention.
For example, greater interoperability with patients means that even more medical and claims data will flow outside of HIPAA to the “Wild West.” The American Medical Association noted:
“If patients access their health
data—some of which could contain family history and could be sensitive—through
a smartphone, they must have a clear understanding of the potential uses of
that data by app developers. Most patients will not be aware of who has access
to their medical information, how and why they received it, and how it is being
used (for example, an app may collect or use information for its own purposes,
such as an insurer using health information to limit/exclude coverage for
certain services, or may sell information to clients such as to an employer or
a landlord). The downstream consequences of data being used in this way may
ultimately erode a patient’s privacy and willingness to disclose information to
his or her physician.”
In 1807, in an effort to spite the British and French for shipping interference (and forced recruitment of American citizens into military service), the United States Congress passed an Embargo Act, effectively shutting down trade with these two countries. Britain and France quickly found other trading partners; the US, then limited in our capacity to sell products outside our borders, was left with a devastated economy and a gaping hole in our face. It took only weeks before Congress passed a loophole; they repealed the act within 15 months of its passing. It was a great lesson in unintended consequences.
Today, ignoring history, both Republicans and Democrats seem to spar continuously around healthcare: whether the message is about tearing down the Affordable Care Act or about some version of Medicare (For-All, For Whoever Wants It, For America, or For Better or Worse), both parties are terribly wrong.
Assuming the social imperative for healthcare is to eliminate preventable morbidity and disability (and associated costs) and improve (or sustain) quality of health of all our citizens (in order to help as many of them as possible remain productive, contributing members of society), another approach to ‘universal care” would be to flip the figure/ground relationship for our current efforts: instead of developing better payment systems, let’s develop and commit to a universal clinical operating framework that ensures that every member of society has the same opportunity to optimize their health status.
“Centralizing” the methodology around a universal model for how we plan for care, and allocate resources to ensure care plan goal achievement, would be far more valuable to society than centralizing the sources of funds to pay for care, because then we’d know what we’re paying for.
