The Health Care Blog – Page 271 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

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Health for coins, not dollars ;) – The “not so serious” Mapping of Healthcare Cryptocurrencies

Jun 14, 2018• 3

By SOFIJA DRECUN

At this years’ SXSW it was all about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, but it was like that at HIMSS, JPM, CES, etc. as well. Since we wrote already about the first of the two buzzwords – blockchain as a trend in Healthcare, we decided to tackle the idea of cryptocurrencies in healthcare. First, we checked around the office and found out that several devs have been in a couple of Telegram chat rooms as they tried to buy “health coins” in a presale (ICO – initial Coin Offering; Pre-ICO).

Will you be buying your next health plan with ethereum? Or is the new health coin going to solve the problem of fragmented healthcare records?

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 31

Jun 13, 2018

Jessica DaMassa asks me about PlugandPlay’s health day, people talking to bots in health care, the rumors of Softbank dropping a wad of cash on Science37, and we can’t resist some Thernos cracks. This one also has pictures! Sadly the video somehow got corrupted so it’s not your eyes, we are looking like green martians! — Matthew Holt

Can Supportiv fill the mental health peer support gap?

Jun 12, 2018• 1

By MATTHEW HOLT

As promised I’m going to be featuring more interesting companies I’m working with on THCB. Supportiv, which is launching today in beta (App store/Play) is a thoroughly modern answer to the problem of scaling peer support in mental health. It’s aimed in the space between the mediation apps like Headspace & Calm, and the online therapy services like AbleTo or Lantern. The target market is anyone feeling stress or wanting support in a quick and easy format–that’s basically everyone! Using the magic of NLP, those looking for support are steered into a chatroom where a trained moderator (usually a Masters student in psychology) making sure the experience is smooth. In its trials earlier this year of the 48,000 users, 96% reported improvement. The business model? It costs 15 cents a minute, or $4.50 for 30 mins (which is roughly the expected length of a session). There’s lots of science behind the idea that peer support works but to hear more Jessica DaMasssa interviewed the co-founders Pouria Mojabi & Helena Plater-Zyberk.

Announcing the Digital Health Marketplace Summer Matchmaking Event!

Jun 12, 2018

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 30

Jun 11, 2018

Jessica DaMassa asks me about Jonathan Bush’s exit and the future of Athenahealth, celebrity suicide and the future of mental health apps, and who Amazon/Buffet/Chase should choose to be their CEO — Matthew Holt

Apple, Cerner, Microsoft, and Salesforce

Jun 8, 2018

By JACOB REIDER

… all rumored to be in the mix to acquire athenahealth.

Nope.

Why not?

a) Apple doesn’t do “verticals.” It’s that easy. Apple sells products that anyone could buy. A teacher, a doctor, my mom. Sure – they have sold high-end workstations that video editors can use, but so could a hobbyist filmmaker. Likelihood of Apple buying athenahealth? ~ .01%

b) Cerner? Nah. While (yes) they have an aging client-server ambulatory EHR that needs to be replaced by a multi-tenant SaaS product (like the one athenahealth cas built), they have too much on their plate right now with DoD and VA and the (incomplete) integration of Siemens customers. Likelihood of Cerner buying athenahealth? ~ 1%

c) Microsoft. Like Apple, it’s uncommon for MSFT to go “vertical.” They have tried it. (Who remembers the Health Solutions Group?) But the tension between a strong product-focused company that meets the needs of many market segments, and a company that deeply understands the business problems of health (and health care) is too great. The driving force of MSFT, like Apple, is to sell infrastructure to care delivery organizations. Owning a product that competes with their key channel partners would alienate the partners – driving them to AMZN, GOOG and APPL. Likelihood of Microsoft buying athenahealth? ~ 2%

d) Salesforce. I’d love to see this. But it’s still unlikely. athenahealth has built a product, and they (now) have defined a path to pivot the product into a platform. This is the right thing to do. Salesforce “gets” platform better than everyone (aside from, perhaps, Amazon). But Salesforce has struggled with health care. They’ve declared n times in recent years that they are “in” to really disrupt health care, and with the evolution of Health Cloud, and their acquisition of MuleSoft, they have clearly made some investments here, but the EHR is not the “ERP of healthcare” as they think it is. (Salesforce’s success in other markets has been that they dovetail with – rather than replace – the ERP systems to create value and improve efficiencies.) The way that Salesforce interacts with the market is unfamiliar (and uncomfortable) to most care delivery organizations. So if Salesforce “gets” platform, and athenahealth wants to be a platform when it matures, could these two combine? It’s the most likely of the three, but I still see the cultures of the two companies (I know them both well) as very different, and not quite compatible. Likelihood of Salesforce buying athenahealth? ~ 10%

e) IBM. yup. I forgot that one. Many recent acquisitions. This would fit. I don’t think it would work very well, but it could happen. ~6%

Others?Continue reading…

The verdict is in: All three of CMS’s “medical home” demonstrations have failed

Jun 7, 2018• 10

By KIP SULLIVAN

Between September of 2016 and last month, CMS released “final evaluations” of all three of its “medical home” demonstrations. All three demos failed.

This spells bad news not just for the “patient-centered medical home” (PCMH) project, but for MACRA. The PCMH, along with the ACO and the bundled payment (BP), is one of the three main “alternative payment models” (APMs) within which doctors are supposed to be able to find shelter from the financial penalties inflicted by the MIPS (Merit-based Incentive Payment System) program which was recently declared to be unworkable by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Medicare ACOs and virtually all Medicare BP programs are also failing. Thus, we may conclude what some predicted a long time ago – that neither arm of MACRA (the toxic MIPS program and the byzantine APM program) will work.

In this post I describe each of CMS’s three PCMH demos, review the findings of the final evaluations of the three demos, and then explore the reasons why all three demos failed. I’ll conclude that the most fundamental reason is that the PCMH is so poorly defined no one, including the doctors inside the PCMHs, knows what it’s supposed to do. That’s not to say that the hopes and dreams of PCMH proponents were never clear. They have always been clear. PCMH proponents have said over and over the PCMH is supposed to lower costs and improve care. But a clear expression of hopes and dreams is not the same thing as a clear description of what it is you’re dreaming about.Continue reading…

Fighting Hubris in Medicine

Jun 7, 2018• 3

By ANISH KOKA

The weekend started with a tweet about an elderly man with atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation is an arrhythmia of the heart that predisposes those who suffer with it to strokes. The strokes are a result of clots being thrown from the heart into the brain. The typical treatment for this condition in those deemed high enough risk is to thin the blood to help prevent these clots from forming, and thus reducing the risk of stroke.

101 year old with a history of a stroke stops his Pradaxa. Only other history hypertension. https://t.co/Ai5z519rcX
— Anish Koka, MD (@anish_koka) June 3, 2018

The problem with thinning the blood is that the risk of bleeding increases, and it does so especially as one advances in age. It doesn’t help matters that the risk of having a stroke also increases with age.

In a 101 year old deciding on the best course of action is thus a challenging one. It is easiest when patients are adamant about a certain path. Far be it from me to tell a centenarian what to do. In this case, the man who had been alive for two world wars chose to come off the anticoagulant he had been dutifully prescribed.

I queried the audience

Curious how many would advise him this is a good / bad idea?@AndrewFoy82 @drjohnm @f2harrell @stephensenn @ADAlthousePhD @RogueRad @narrowQRS @rdschaller
— Anish Koka, MD (@anish_koka) June 3, 2018

Most leaned towards stopping Pradaxa, and some responded that there wasn’t a wrong answer.

Health in 2 point 00, Episode 29

Jun 6, 2018

It’s Nicer in Nice, which is where Jessica DaMassa is hanging out as she asks me about health tech in Finland, Teladoc’s foreign foray and the trials and tribulations of Athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush in this edition of Health in 2 point 00 — Matthew Holt

Update–I’m indeed a tea leaf reading soothsayer. When I said Jonathan Bush would be gone by the Fall, apparently I meant by the start of summer!

WTF Health | Teladoc’s Gorevic: “We’re feeling A-quisitive”

Jun 5, 2018

By JESSICA DAMASSA

WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of the health industry and how we love to hate WTF is wrong with it right now. Can’t get enough? Check out more interviews at www.wtf.health.

I guess he warned us that Teladoc was feeling ‘A-quisitive’ — the question now is are they done? A few weeks ago I spoke with Jason Gorevic, Teladoc’s CEO at the new HLTH Conference about consolidation in the telehealth space and what’s next for the virtual care giant.

Although he was mum on the company’s $352M mega-buy of Advance Medical, there was a shopping list of other solutions that seem to have caught Teladoc’s eye — everything from tech that turns Alexa into a telemed access point to NLP plug-ins and any number of shiny devices that make remote monitoring easier, less expensive, and more effective.

Perhaps an indicator of where they’ll look next as they continue to sweep up market share? Listen in on some of the details about their CVS partnership (VIRTUAL Minute Clinic, anyone?) and the VERY interesting talks he’s having with the country’s largest payers on redefining benefit designs to push virtual care first.