The opioid crisis has devastated countless families and individuals across the United States and abroad. What once started as a quiet concern has become a full-blown epidemic, requiring the full support and attention of the healthcare and tech communities to address it.
“I am asking for your help to solve an urgent health crisis facing America: the opioid epidemic. Everywhere I travel, I see communities devastated by opioid overdoses. I meet families too ashamed to seek treatment for addiction. And I will never forget my own patient whose opioid use disorder began with a course of morphine after a routine procedure.”
I remember when visiting a city required paper maps and often actual guidebooks. Today, I tap on a map app on my phone, enter my destination, and review options for getting from point A to point B. In recent years, these applications have expanded to integrate ride-sharing, bike-sharing, and public transit information. Map apps provide two key real-time data points to help me compare the different options: the time it will take to get to my destination and the cost.
Behind those data points are elegant algorithms that analyze traffic patterns and conditions, as well as the real-time data exchange between multiple apps through modern, REpresentational State Transfer (RESTful) application programming interfaces (APIs). What makes our smartphones so powerful is the multitude of apps and software programs that use open and accessible APIs for delivering new products to consumers and businesses, creating new market entrants and opportunities. There is nothing analogous to this app ecosystem in healthcare.
ONC’s interoperability efforts focus on improving individuals’ ability to control their health information so they can shop for and coordinate their own care. While many patients can access their medical information through multiple provider portals, the current ecosystem is frustrating and cumbersome. The more providers they have, the more portals they need to visit, the more usernames and passwords they need to remember. In the end, these steps make it hard for patients to aggregate their information across care settings and prevent them from being empowered consumers.Continue reading…
Walmart (WMT) is in talks with Humana (HUM) about a relationship enhancement, possibly an acquisition. The two already know how to work together in alliances (narrow pharmacy network, marketing collaborations, points programs). If a new structure is needed, WMT and HUM must be considering a major expansion of scope or a set of operating models where contributions are difficult to attribute and reward (e.g. joint asset builds). What is on their minds? Beyond any interim incremental moves, what could be the endgame?
Catching convergence fever
Horizontal combinations among the top five health plans have arguably reached the regulatory “permissible envelope.” But provider combinations continue apace, enhancing ability to execute on value-based care to be sure, but also increasing negotiation leverage relative to payers. Further, Amazon’s (AMZN) interest in healthcare is gaining momentum but the specific goals are still mysterious, leaving many incumbents to imagine red laser dots are on their foreheads.
Accordingly, health plans are seeking defensible terrain in convergence combinations: CS & Aetna (CVS-AET), Cigna & Express Scripts (CI-ESRX), Anthem’s PBM insourcing and growing attention to CareMore (United Healthgroup [UNH] has been ahead of the curve as usual: but their recent SCA and DaVita medical group acquisitions have clarified for the market the scope of its ambitions for OptumCare). Of course, each of these moves just contributes to the uncertainty about the new competitive paradigm, driving more land grabs in response. I view the WMT-HUM discussions as part of these developments.
Jessica DaMassa asks me as much as she can about health & technology in just 2 minutes. In this episode there’s a lot of things not happening including, Amazon not supplying hospitals, and women CEOs not getting funded–Matthew Holt
WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of health 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.
Lots of chatter lately about the disparity between men and women in health tech – both in and out of the the start-up space. I’m pulling together new interviews for a WTF Health ‘Special Report’ on women in health tech (stay tuned) but had a chance to have two great conversations on the topic while at #HIMSS18.
VEDA Data Solutions CEO Meghan Gaffney Buck talks about what it’s like to be a female founder in AI – raising millions and pushing new tech in a space usually dominated by guys. Find out what a ‘Mike Fest’ is and be sure to listen until the end for the good news about a trend she’s seeing in female-run investment funds.
Then, listen to Susan Williams, founder and CEO of Agency Other, on how women in our industry are starting to come together for world domination through orgs like Healthtech Women, a non-profit dedicated to such doings. Susan just launched the group’s newest chapter in one of the most eclectic healthcare markets in the country, Los Angeles, and also weighs in on what the health tech scene is like in Hollywood.
Jessica DaMassa asks me all about health & technology, in just 2 minutes, featuring venture rounds for Kyruus, Parsley Health, Livongo buying RetroFit, the RWJF AI challenge from Catalyst @ Health 2.0 and a ridiculously long explanation of where the @boltyboy twitter name came from…–Matthew Holt
WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of health 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.
They just raised another $10M and you should find out why….
I met up with Kyruus co-founder and chief product officer Julie Yoo at #HIMSS18 to hear about the #AI magic behind their ‘intelligent routing engine.’ Apparently, it does such an incredible job driving business into health systems by better matching patients to docs that some more funding is in order to help them expand!
So, where does Kyruus fit into the ‘big picture’ of health’s ‘big data’ movement? Julie’s beat on how AI implementation in healthcare is going gives you a pretty good idea.
This past October CMS Administrator Seema Verma announced the agency’s “Meaningful Measures” initiative.[1] Ms. Verma launched the initiative because, she admitted, the agency’s current quality measurement programming, widely criticized for years by MedPAC and others, ran the risk of outweighing the benefits. Under “Meaningful Measures,” CMS will, Ms. Verma stated, put “patients first” by aligning a smaller number of outcome-based quality measures meaningful to patients across Medicare’s programs. Since “the primary focus of a patient visit,” Ms. Verma said, “must be the patient,” the primary focus of the initiative will be “to focus health care quality efforts on what is really important to patients.”[2] As an indication of this commitment, immediately after Meaningful Measures was announced the National Quality Forum’s (NQF’s) Measures Application Partnership (MAP) began work reviewing a record number of CMS-recommended Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs).[3]
There appears to be an ever increasing interest in PROMS in the US. For example, last year The NewEngland Journal of Medicine published three PROMs-related “Perspective” essays that moreover described initial success by a few early US PROMs adopters. One of these essays also noted that England and Scotland had “extensive experience” in the use of these measures.[4] Though possibly overstated, we believe providers in the US can benefit from, for example, our experience in the United Kingdom (UK) developing and implementing My Clinical Outcomes (MCO) (at: www.myclinicaloutcomes.com), a digital patient reported outcomes measurement and analytics platform that is now used in the treatment of several chronic conditions in a variety of clinical settings across the UK.
MCO was initially developed in collaboration with orthopedic surgeons working in the National Health Service (NHS). These surgeons were seeking a way to systematically follow-up with their patients after joint replacement surgery largely in order to better economize on their use of clinical resources or more appropriately or efficiently identify those patients in need of follow up face-to-face consultations. The web-based platform was developed to work flexibly around existing clinical work flows.
When it comes to navigating healthcare and making decisions about your health, and the health of loved ones, there is no yellow brick road. Even the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), a leading national healthcare nonprofit, could only analyze 1,000 of over 1,400 private healthcare policy options with myriads more in the public arena. Navigating a health care plan, or not, is just the beginning of your healthcare journey.
Let’s say you find a health plan you like, and you get sick. You have to locate the right doctor that works for you, struggle through complicated referrals, tabulate the exact bottom line of these costs, find a pharmacy, perhaps grab a second opinion, and repeat this process every time you get sick.
WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of health 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.
One of the new faces – and mega tech companies – to be at #HIMSS18, I caught up with Uber Health’s head of strategy Lauren Steingold just after the launch of their HIPAA compliant ride share service for patients.
Lauren talks about the year-long approach Uber took to get into #healthtech, what they’re looking to do next, and her first impressions of HIMSS.
What advice does the tech company have for healthcare? HINT: uber’s ‘on-demand’ ethos extends to the way providers can sign up for their service. It’s a self-service sign-up (no cumbersome contract negotiations with procurement, whaaaat?) with next day implementation. The bar is set, Health Tech.
