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The Best Part Of The Health 2.0 Fall Conference Agenda

Aug 16, 2017

There’s still time to secure your ticket before prices increase to this year’s Health 2.0 11th Annual Fall Conference. Whether you’re a Health Provider, Entrepreneur or Investor; the Fall Conference is the place to see the latest health technology, to hear from some of the influential innovators impacting the landscape, and to network with hundreds of health care decision makers. Click here for the full agenda.

Health Providers Agenda Highlights

Provider Symposium: Exchange of ideas between the best minds from leading health care systems in an effort to change the face of health care as we know it.
The Evolution of Care Delivery Session: Top innovators from care delivery platforms address how they’re innovating for diabetes, oncology and more.
The New Consumer World of Tools and Health Models Session: From the fast-evolving world of consumer genomics to the latest in wearables, we’ll feature exciting new technologies.

Entrepreneurs Agenda Highlights

MarketConnect: A live matchmaking event designed to accelerate the health tech buying and selling process by curating meetings between pre-qualified healthcare executives and innovators.
Exhibit Hall: Gain access to 90+ exhibitors, including Startup Alley, is the premier gathering of innovative companies and individuals. The exhibit floor is also home to MarketConnect Live.
Developer Day: Expect your day to be filled with strong technical sessions in relation to interoperability and user testing as well as opportunities to network from others in the industry.
2 CEOs and a President Session: Three top health tech executives sit down for separate intimate interviews with a journalist. They will be dishing on both their personal and company journeys.

Investors Agenda Highlights

Investor Breakfast: Bringing together leaders in the Health 2.0 investment community and our innovative startup network for an exclusive breakfast meeting.
Investing in Health 2.0 Technologies: Panel experts will address what’s in store for the rest of the year and predict the next big bets in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Launch!: Ten brand new companies unveil their products for the very first time and the audience votes on the winner!
Traction!: Annual startup pitch competition that recruits companies ready for Series A in the $2-12M range. Teams will compete in two tracks, consumer-facing, and professional facing technologies.

Click here to register for the Annual Fall Conference! Prices increase after September 4th!

A New Pothole on the Health Interoperability Superhighway

Aug 15, 2017• 10

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

On July 24, the new administration kicked off their version of interoperability work with a public meeting of the incumbent trust brokers. They invited the usual suspects Carequality, CARIN Alliance, CommonWell, Digital Bridge, DirectTrust, eHealth Exchange, NATE, and SHIEC with the goal of driving for an understanding of how these groups will work with each other to solve information blocking and longitudinal health records as mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act.

Of the 8 would-be trust brokers, some go back to 2008 but only one is contemporary to the 21stCC act: The CARIN Alliance. The growing list of trust brokers over our decade of digital health tracks with the growing frustration of physicians, patients, and Congress over information blocking, but is there causation beyond just correlation?

A recent talk by ONC’s Don Rucker reports:

One way to get data to move is open APIs, which the 21st Century Cures Act mandates by tasking EHR vendors to open up patient data “without special effort, through the use of application programming interfaces.”

Sifting Through the Masses to Find Relevant Tech

Aug 14, 2017

By ALYX STERNLICHT

Much of the time, finding the right partner to test your technology can be difficult and time consuming. From an enterprise healthcare organization’s perspective, identifying innovative technology that fits the strategic needs of the organization can be difficult due to the overwhelming number of startups entering the market. From a startup’s perspective, there are a few major roadblocks including:

Finding organizations ready to pilot new health technology
Completing a first pilot/proof of concept (or second, or third…) to gather the much needed data to grow commercial partnerships
Identifying the right individual in an enterprise organization who will champion new technology
Gaining an insider’s perspective about the potential clients’ strategic needs

Enter MarketConnect Enterprise: expediting the matching and vetting process for both the startup and enterprise healthcare organization.
Continue reading…

As Bipartisan Plans for ACA Fixes Emerge, Will Congress Act? Probably Not.

Aug 11, 2017• 12

By STEVEN FINDLAY

A bipartisan group of health policy experts has issued a call to action and well-thought-out consensus plan for insurance market stabilization and incremental reform.

The effort adds to the gathering momentum in Washington for urgent fixes to Obamacare, plus additional reforms that might bring conservatives into the fold and appeal across the partisan divide. What’s still unclear, however, is whether the Trump administration and Republican leadership in Congress will go along. Outward signs suggest they won’t, but this game is still changing by the day.

Fax This to Washington: Hospital Consolidation Threatens Our Healthcare System

Aug 11, 2017• 7

By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

As hospital consolidations sweep the nation, the monopolies being created are having a profound impact on life in small town America. Lee County, in Southern Georgia, is a little place with big dreams; they are resolutely determined to build a 60-bed community hospital and provide local residents with real choices. For years, two competing hospitals served the population of 200,000 spread over six counties: Phoebe-Putney and Palmyra Park. Phoebe-Putney Memorial Hospital put an end to that by securing a 939-bed hospital monopoly and an ample market share.

Their efforts began in 2003, when Phoebe-Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, Georgia successfully opposed a bid for a Certificate of Need (CON) to open an outpatient surgery center. Frustrated from a free-market perspective, accountant Charles Rehberg and a local surgeon, John Bagnato, began sending anonymous faxes to local business and political leaders, criticizing the financial activities of the local hospital. These faxes quickly gained notoriety, becoming known as “Phoebe Factoids.” Concerned about negative publicity, Phoebe Putney executives hired former FBI agents to intimidate these men.

Dear Humans, Diverse Social Networks are the Answer

Aug 10, 2017• 6

By MARTIN SAMUELS, MD

In biology, it is clear that access to more genes leads to greater overall health. This is true because it allows for a greater likelihood that a genetic defect can be compensated by a gene from a different pool. This is the reason that inbreeding leads to more genetic diseases. This same phenomenon exists in social science. Complex social networks are healthier than more narrow (constrained) ones. Dr. Amar Dhand of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Department of Neurology has, for example, shown that people are more likely to get to the emergency room in time to receive a clot busting therapy for stroke if they are part of a more complex, rather than constrained, social network.

The probable reason for this effect is the diversity of ideas that are available in the complex social networks is greater than in the narrow ones. Despite these advantages, human beings tend to resist diversity, depending instead on a competing drive to create cliques and clubs. In Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land, she attempts to understand what she sees as a paradox. Why do people vote in manners that seem to be contrary to their own self interest? In fact this is not a paradox, but rather simply a competition between two deeply ingrained human traits; one biological and the other sociological.

The phenomenon of professional burnout is a case in point. It is generally defined as a sense of cynicism, depersonalization and ineffectiveness. Some believe that we are in the midst of an epidemic of burnout, affecting as many as half of medical doctors, for example. The causes of burnout are protean, but at the core of the problem is the perception of unfairness; that one is the subject of a form of bias or prejudice whereby certain resources are unfairly distributed by a powerful force, such as the employer or the government. Any individual or group may be subject to this perception. Much of the conflict that is being expressed around the world can be understood as an analogue to professional burnout, in other words, caused at its root by a perception of unfairness. So what is perception and from where does it arise?

Why Smart Pill Bottles and Financial Rewards Don’t Improve Medication Adherence

Aug 9, 2017• 10

By HILARY HATCH

A study published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine showed financial rewards and connected pill bottles don’t work. One explanation suggests that “other patient concerns about potential adverse effects of these medications, such as impotence or fatigue, were not targeted by this engagement strategy.”

What?!!!!!??

How can a patient engagement strategy not target the patient’s concerns? Isn’t that the very definition of patient engagement? Impotence and fatigue are a big deal to most people. Would an extra $15 a week compel you to take a medication that made you impotent? $150 a week? Would a pulsating pill bottle in your cabinet get you to swallow a pill that made you feel foggy and tired all day?

We can’t incent or remind someone to do something they never agreed to or intended to do. It would be like Amazon pinging you to buy something you would never consider adding to your cart. Amazon nudges you to buy things that you would put in your cart or things you saved to your cart, but never purchased. Why aren’t we as laser-focused on what matters to patients?

The Next Visionary Entrepreneurs In Health Tech

Aug 8, 2017

For each of the nearly 11,000 health technology companies in the Health 2.0 Source Database, there have been countless more that have failed. Sometimes it’s small companies with good ideas that never quite get off the ground — remember Zeo? — and sometimes it’s big, well-funded experiments that suddenly fall flat, like the recent closing of Qliance. There is no magic formula for success in this industry, and the so-called “graveyard” of health technology companies continues to grow. Yet, somehow, there exists this legion of entrepreneurs that never fails to produce the next passionate CEO willing to reach for those deceptively low-hanging health care fruit.

This year, at Health 2.0’s 11th Annual Fall Conference, the crowd favorite 2 CEOs and a President Panel returns to our main stage. We’ll hear from three visionary entrepreneurs who are tackling three diverse segments of health care: consumer health and wellness, data transparency, and patient education. Saeju Jeong, the CEO of Noom, will share how Noom’s intelligent health coaching apps that focus on fitness and nutrition are staying relevant in a crowded market that includes the likes of tracking giant MyFitnessPal, or the health coaching app Vida. David Vivero, the CEO of Amino, will also appear to discuss how Amino is tackling the long-standing transparency problem in health care by using data to help consumers find better doctors, book appointments, and estimate their costs. Finally, this year’s addition of a president comes in the form of Shradha Agarwal of Outcome Health. The Chicago-based startup has reportedly raised more than $500 million at a valuation of $5 billion, which means we’ll have no shortage of questions for Agarwal about scale, growth, and how Outcome’s patient education technology is actually helping to improve health outcomes.

A Line in the Sand

Aug 7, 2017• 7

By JONATHAN HALVORSON

Eventually, the share of the American economy absorbed by healthcare will stop rising. The question is when, and how much more collective damage will be inflicted in the process. As it turns out, there is a solution under our noses that is nearly ubiquitous in business, personal finance, and government programs worldwide. It can be used to bring manageable, relatively predictable transformation, rather than sudden wrenching change. It is a called a “budget.” It is well past time to embrace the discipline of budgets in healthcare financing.

The basic idea is clear: set a limit on how much money can be spent for healthcare. Almost every wealthy nation disciplines its spending with a budget for healthcare expenditures. The United States does not, still retaining for the most part an open-ended model in which rates for individual services are set, without overall limits on what is spent. The discipline brought by budgets allows other nations to spend roughly half what the United States does per person, despite the fact that life and health are valued in France, The United Kingdom, Israel, and Germany no less than in the United States.

Global healthcare budgets aren’t a policy of the left or the right. The use of budgets has become associated with the political right in America, despite the fact that nearly every socialized universal healthcare system in the world has one. The fact that this isn’t about left or right becomes clearer when considering that even in America both sides have advanced their own versions of capping healthcare expenditures by a budgeting mechanism.

Nixon Went to China. Can Trump Go to Single Payer?

Aug 4, 2017• 55

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

There is an old Vulcan proverb saying that only Nixon could go to China. Only a man who used to work for Joseph McCarthy could set America on a path to better relations with a virulently Communist country. A few years after Nixon went to China, Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister who represented people believing that the state of Israel should start at the Nile and end at the Euphrates, gave Egypt back all the lands conquered in a recent war and made a lasting peace with Israel’s largest enemy. They said back then that only Begin could make peace with the Arabs.

Today, I want to submit to you that only Trump can make single-payer health care happen in this country. Only a billionaire, surrounded by a cabinet of billionaires, representing a party partial to billionaires, can make that hazardous 180 degrees political turn and better the lives of the American people, and perhaps the entire world as a result. Oh, I know it’s too soon to make this observation, but note that both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Begin were deeply resented (to put it mildly) in their times, by the same type of people who find Mr. Trump distasteful today. The liberal intelligentsia back then did not have the bona fides required to cross the political chasm between one nation and its ideological enemies, or as real as death immediate foes. The liberal intelligentsia today lost all credibility in this country when it comes to providing a universal solution to our health care woes.

Free health care (and free college) are not solutions. These are rabble rousing slogans to gin up the vote, slogans that end up in overflowing trashcans left in ballrooms littered with red white and blue balloons after everybody goes home to get some sleep before the next round of calls to solicit funds from wealthy donors for the next campaign. Providing proper medical care to the American people is a monumental enterprise that engages tens of millions of workers from all walks of life, every second of every day, in every square mile of habitable land, littered with the hopes and fears of hundreds of millions of invisible men, women and children who call this great country their home. This is not something that can be made free. Nothing is free in our times, not even sunshine and fresh air.