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Expanding Real World Datasets

How are you working to advance research and improve patient outcomes? Are you precisely matching records across disparate datasets? Find out at a Webinar TODAY Feb 1st 1pm ET Sponsored by LexisNexis Risk Solutions Health Care

Healthcare’s fragmented data silos and strict but necessary privacy restrictions make it difficult to link real-world datasets. Legacy tokenization technology has helped link records across disparate data sources, but it lacks the accuracy required to uncover actionable insights that can truly improve patient outcomes. Next-generation tokenization technology leveraging a Referential Data Layer is needed to match de-identified records with precision. Hear from Solis Mammography’s CMO on how they are leveraging referential tokenization technology to link their longitudinal imaging data with complementary clinical and genomics data, enabling in-depth breast cancer research to champion women’s long-term health and wellness.

If you care about healthcare improvement, and want to continue to make an impact, join us to learn more about:
• What is referential tokenization and why it matters in healthcare
• Challenges and limitations of legacy tokenization technology
• The power of linking real-world data sets through a network of curated partners
• How Solis Mammography is leveraging referential tokenization to advance women’s health
• Actionable use cases demonstrating referential tokenization further empowering your organization to improve patient outcomes.

Join Us | February 1 @ 1pm ET/10am PT | Register Today

Speakers are: Camille Cook, MPH, Sr. Director, Healthcare Strategy, RWD @LexisNexis® Risk Solutions

Camille has 15 years of experience in healthcare with a focus on leveraging big-data to improve clinical care outcomes. Throughout her career, Camille successfully implemented innovative practices for healthcare IT, healthcare organizations, and life sciences companies utilizing health informatics, big-data, epidemiology, and human behavior patterns to create actionable insights that guide healthcare policy and meaningful use practices. Camille has spent the last 7 years evaluating syndromic infectious disease trends, healthcare operations, health economic outcomes research, and social determinants of health.

Matt Veatch, Real World Data Consultant, Founder and Managing Director @Revesight Consulting

Leveraging over 25 years of experience in biopharmaceutical product and medical device development, Matt advises life science companies on global RWD access and RWE strategic planning, execution, and M&A investments. Prior to establishing Revesight Consulting in 2017, Matt served in various corporate leadership positions, most recently as Vice-president of Strategic Operations at Syneos Health, leading initiatives in RWD access and decentralized study management. Prior to Syneos, Matt rose through various levels to become the Global Head of RWD-Driven Research for Quintiles, founding and leading the landscape-changing strategic collaboration with IMS Health in 2015, directly seeding the $19 billion merger of the firms in 2016 to form IQVIA. Additionally, Matt is a Founding Board Member of the Decentralized Trials & Research Alliance.

Chirag Parghi, MD, MBA, Chief Medical Officer @Solis Mammography

Dr. Chirag Parghi is a board-certified radiologist with fellowship (subspecialty) training in breast imaging and the Chief Medical Officer of Solis Mammography where he oversees clinical quality across more than 100 breast centers. As CMO, he also leads the clinical research endeavors where he is the principal investigator on several trials and manages relationships with the various radiologist practices.  Dr Parghi is still a practicing radiologist with an academic appointment at Albert Einstein medical center in Philadelphia.  Dr. Parghi’s clinical interests are rooted in the use of emerging technologies (including AI) to facilitate the early diagnosis, individualized risk modeling, and treatment of breast cancer.

MedEd in an AI Era

BY KIM BELLARD

I’ve been thinking a lot about medical education lately, for two unrelated reasons.  The first is the kerfuffle between US News and World Report and some of the nation’s top – or, at least, best known – medical schools over the USN&WR medical school rankings.  The second is an announcement by the University of Texas at Austin that it is planning to offer an online Masters program in Artificial Intelligence.

As the old mathematician joke goes, the connection is obvious, right?  OK, it may need a little explaining.

USN&WR has made an industry out of its rankings, including for colleges, hospitals, business schools, and, of course, medical schools. The rankings have never been without controversy, as the organizations being ranked don’t always agree with the methodology, and some worry that their competitors may fudge the data.   Last year it was law schools protesting; this year it is medical schools.

Harvard Medical School started the most recent push against the medical school rankings, based on:

…the principled belief that rankings cannot meaningfully reflect the high aspirations for educational excellence, graduate preparedness, and compassionate and equitable patient care that we strive to foster in our medical education programs…Ultimately, the suitability of any particular medical school for any given student is too complex, nuanced, and individualized to be served by a rigid ranked list, no matter the methodology.

Several other leading medical schools have now also announced their withdrawals, including Columbia, Mt. Sinai, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania.  

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Matthew’s health care tidbits: How do you tell the price of a drug?

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Each time I send out the THCB Reader, our newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB (Sign up here!) I include a brief tidbits section. Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt

As the average THCB reader is probably all too well aware I live in Marin County, California and therefore my kids are on amphetamine-based medication for ADHD. This is annoying as all get out because, as a controlled substance, this medication needs to be re-prescribed every month (no automatic refills allowed). In addition no 90 day supplies are allowed, and the kids must have checkups with their prescribing physician every 3 months (which are not cheap).

It’s not just prescribing which is complicated. Supply is an issue too and frequently pharmacies run out. This is furtherly frustrating because if one pharmacy is out it can’t move the Rx to another, even in the same chain like Walgreens or CVS. The new pharmacy requires a whole new prescription. I discovered last year that Alto Pharmacy, a VC backed home delivery pharmacy, will deliver controlled medications. This has saved me 12-24 visits to CVS in the past year.

But with a new year there are new problems. The “allowed” price, i.e. the price my insurer Blue Cross of Massachusetts had agreed with Alto Pharmacy (and other pharmacies) for the specific generic for one of my kids somehow went from $29 a month to $107. That’s the amount I actually pay until we hit our $4,500 family deductible. Incidentally because it’s a medication we still pay $10 a month after we hit the deductible.

Alto kept telling me that the cash price was around $50. But of course if we pay the lower cash price (either there or elsewhere using GoodRx) that doesn’t count against the deductible. So if we hit the deductible we are out the $50 (which works out to roughly $1200 per year for 2 kids). I kept asking Alto what had changed that made the cost go up? They kept not telling me an answer, other than it cost $107. I asked the good people at Health Tech Nerds slack group if they could guess what was going on. Their consensus was that the formulary tier had been changed. “But it’s a generic”, (I foolishly thought).

Finally I called the pharmacy number on BCBS Massachusetts website, and ended up talking to someone at CVS Caremark– their PBM. In the course of the 30 minute call they ran a dummy claim with several other pharmacies. All came back at the $107 number. They then looked up the formulary to see if it had changed. Meanwhile I looked at the formulary on the BCBS Mass website while this was going on. The medication was still tier 1. So why has the cost to me and perhaps to the Blues plan gone up from $29 a month to $107? (Yes that’s more than a factor of 3!)

While she was talking to me the Caremark rep was also able to Slack with several other colleagues–relatively advanced for an old world PBM I thought. Eventually the answer came back. The med was indeed tier one. But until we spent our deductible the med was tier 2. In other words if we were paying for the drug the price is $107. As soon as BCBS Massachusetts starts paying for it the price goes back to $29 (of which they only pay $19) as we have a $10 copay.

Why this has happened is beyond me? Is Caremark or BCBS Massachusetts suggesting another cheaper drug? I haven’t heard from them. Are they trying to discourage patients from getting to their deductibles? My cynical conclusion is that Caremark is trying to increase the revenue for CVS– its corporate pharmacy–which that accounts for 1/3 of all outpatient Rx.

Otherwise this pricing strategy makes no sense to me. Of course this is just another example of a completely opaque process. And that appears typical for American health care.

The “Antebellum Paradox”: What is it and why it matters.

BY MIKE MAGEE

I recently made the case that “Health is foundational to a functioning democracy. But health must be shared and be broadly accessible to be an effective enabler of good government.” I also suggested that the pursuit of good health is implied and imbedded in the aspirational and idealistic wording of our U.S. Constitution, and that the active pursuit of health as a nation is essential if we wish to rise to Hamilton’s challenge in Federalist #1 and prove that we are “capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” So why are native white males lagging behind in health?

Our progress as a nation toward health was severely hampered from the start. The reality of self-government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” applied only to 6% of inhabitants, all white male land owners at the time. Health was never voiced as a priority, though modern day critics insist it is clearly implied in the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But what was that promise worth in the late 18th century, in a nation that allowed slavery, disenfranchised women, and slaughtered and dislocated its indigenous brothers and sisters?

In those earliest years of the birth of this nation, in the first half of the 19th century, what was the state of health for enfranchised native born white citizens of this nation? Most may presume (as I did) that the general health and standard of living over the next two hundred years, as reflected in lifespan, was a straight (if gradual) upward slope. But what I learned from a bit of digging is that uncovering the facts on mortality, fertility, migration, and population growth during those early years of our nation is a complex venture at best.

Our federal government did conduct a census every ten years, but one hundred years passed before we reliably collected vital statistics including comprehensive birth and death registration. Beginning in 1850, age, sex, race, marital status, occupation and cause of death were supposed to be collected. But an audit in those years disclosed that mortality (for example) was 40% underreported.

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Return to McAllen: A Father-Son Interview

By IAN ROBERTSON KIBBE

You are going to hear a little more about McAllen, TX on THCB Shortly. And before we dive into what’s happened there lately, I thought those of you who weren’t here back in the day might want to read an article on THCB from July 2009. Where then THCB editor Ian Kibbe interviewed his dad David Kibbe about what he was doing as a primary care doc in McAllen–Matthew Holt

By now, Dr. Atul Gawande’s article on McAllen’s high cost of health care has been widely read.  The article spawned a number of responses and catalyzed a national discussion on cost controls and the business of medicine.  It even made it’s way into the President’s address to the AMA.

Almost overnight, McAllen and the Rio Grande Valley were thrust into the national health care spotlight – the once sleepy border town became, not a beacon on a hill, but a balefire in the valley, representing much of what is wrong with the current medical culture.

But, McAllen wasn’t always like something from an old Western, where doctors run wild and hospital CEO’s compete like town bosses.  I remember McAllen quite differently.  I remember it, because as it turns out, it was where I was born.

It’s also where my father, Dr. David Kibbe, practiced medicine from 1980 to 1990. In order to find out how McAllen earned the dubious reputation it now has, I sat down with my Dad, and asked him what he remembers about that little border town on the Rio Grande.

Ian Kibbe: So Dad, what was your first reaction to reading Atul Gawande’s article?

David Kibbe: Well, Ian, it was sort of “oh-my-gosh, he nailed it.”   And, of course, a flood of memories, good and bad, came back to me about our time there.  My medical career began there, you and your sisters were born there, small town 4th of July parades, etc.  But I left after great disappointment and frustration.

IK: What were you doing in McAllen practicing medicine anyway?

DK: The National Health Service Corps sent me there to work in a clinic for migrant farm workers.  The NHSC had provided me three years of medical school scholarship, and so I owed three years of service in an under-doctored area of the country.  I speak Spanish, and so working as a family doctor in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, which is the home of many of the country’s Hispanic migrant farm workers, was a good fit.  Hidalgo County, where McAllen is located, was the poorest county in the country, and there was a real physician shortage there in 1980.

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Cardiology update: Should mRNA vaccine myocarditis be a contraindication to future COVID-19 vaccinations ?

BY ANISH KOKA

Myopericarditis is a now a well reported complication associated with Sars-Cov-2 (COVID-19) vaccinations. This has been particularly common with the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines (BNT162b2 and mrna-1273), with a particular predilection for young males.

Current guidance by the Australian government “technical advisory groups” as well as the Australian Cardiology Society suggest patients who have experienced myocarditis after an mRNA vaccine may consider a non-mRNA vaccine once “symptom free for at least 6 weeks”.

A just published report of 2 cases from Australia that document myopericarditis after use of the non-mRNA Novavax vaccine in patients that had recovered from mRNA vaccine myocarditis suggests this is a very bad idea.

The case reports

Case 1 involves a 26 year old man who developed pericarditis after the Pfizer vaccine. Pericarditis, an inflammation of the sac the heart lives in, developed about 7 days after the Pfizer vaccine. The diagnosis was made based on classic findings of inflammation on an electrocardiogram associated with acute chest pain. The symptoms lasted 3 months, and a total of 6 months after the first episode of pericarditis, he received a booster vaccination with the Novovax (NVX-CoV2373) vaccine. 2-3 days after this he developed the same sharp chest pain and shortness of breath with elevated inflammatory markers (CRP) as well as typical findings of pericarditis seen on ECG. To add insult to injury, he contracted COVID 2 months after the second episode of pericarditis, but had no recurrence of the symptoms of pericarditis.

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Ultrasound is Ultra-Cool

BY KIM BELLARD

AI continues to amaze – ChatGPT is now passing Wharton Business School exams, Microsoft and Google are doubling down in their AI efforts – and I’m as big a fan as anyone, but I want to talk about a technology that has been more under the radar, so to speak: ultrasound.  

Yes, ultrasound.  Most of us have probably had an ultrasound at some point (especially if you’ve been pregnant) and Dr. Eric Topol continues his years-long quest to replace the ancient stethoscope technology with ultrasound, but if you think ultrasound is just another nifty tool in the imaging toolbox, you’ve missed a lot. 

Let’s start with the coolest use I’ve seen: ultrasound can be used for 3D printing.  Inside the body.  

This news on this dates back to last April, when researchers from Concordia University published their findings in Nature (I found out about it last week).  Instead of the more common “Additive Manufacturing” (AM) approach to 3D printing, these researchers use Direct Sound Printing (DSP).  

The paper summarizes their results: “To show unique future potentials of DSP, applications such as RDP [Remote Distance Printing] for inside body bioprinting and direct nanoparticle synthesizing and pattering by DSP for integrating localized surface plasmon resonance with microfluidics chip are experimentally demonstrated.”

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Matthew’s health care tidbits: My retina & what it tells us about primary care

Each time I send out the THCB Reader, our newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB (Sign up here!) I include a brief tidbits section. Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt

I had a little scare the other night. I was driving home from a weekend in the mountains and I asked my wife if she saw that flashing light. No it wasn’t the cops, and no she hadn’t seen it. Turns out that I had a bright flash if I moved my eye a certain way. Oh, well I assumed I was tired and a good night’s sleep would fix it.

Next morning the flash was still there when I looked quickly to the left and a few weird floaters had appeared. I headed to the Mayo Clinic website and it looked to me like I had a detaching retina. I got on the urgent visit video with One Medical. The NP who answered said it sounded like I might have retina problems and I should get it checked by my ophthalmologist. But my eyesight has always been great (other than me needing reading glasses in my old age) and I haven’t got one. So who, I asked, do you recommend?

Here we fall into the crux of the problem. One Medical is an excellent primary care service. So good that Amazon bought it for $3bn. But it’s not a multi-specialty group nor is it a system like Kaiser. The answer was, “we don’t really recommend anyone–that’s not how it works.” The NP ended up looking up ophthalmologists near me & sent me a name as a referral in their app. But that’s not a link to anything and it wasn’t one chosen through some analytical process of seeking quality excellence.

I looked up MarinHealth (my local hospital)’s website and searched ophthalmology. That referred name was on it. I called. The doctor was out this week. They gave me another name. That doctor’s office gave me another name and that third office could see me that same day. I felt some pressure to see them right away as in the case of a detached retina Mayo says “ Contacting an eye specialist (ophthalmologist) right away can help save your vision”. The good news is having spent a couple of hours at the ophthalmologist’s my retina needs watchful waiting not surgery.

But the bad news is that for me, like 90% of Americans, there’s no easy way to get referred into a trustworthy system for specialty care. This can be even worse. My friend Sarah McDonald explains in her book The Cancer Channel how, after being diagnosed with a rare incurable cancer by a head & neck surgeon, the all encompassing support she received was to be given the number of a specialist at UCSF who couldn’t even talk to her for 3 weeks.

Mike Magee talks about the role of the health care system being to reduce patients’ “fear and worry”. Our lack of a specialty care referral system, especially when potentially serious and urgent care is on the line, is a big reason why there is so much fear and worry. I wish I had a concierge advocacy system like Included Health or Transcarent which could get me to the right place and work with me through the experience. But like most Americans at the time I need reassurance the most I’m calling a list of phone numbers hoping someone can see me.

We have primary care, we have specialty care. But we don’t have a system that cares.

Can Missouri Pass The Muster

BY MIKE MAGEE

A case has been made that a logical approach to reforming America’s violent and racist leanings would be to adopt the values and practices of Health Care for All. These include a commitment to compassion, understanding, and partnership; extending the linkages between individual, family, community and society; addressing fear and worry for individuals and populations; and promoting an optimistic and equitable future for all Americans. 

Nurses and doctors and pharmacists and other health professionals pledge oaths and spend years training to exhibit and practice these values in the course of providing preventive and interventional care to select Americans. Imagine the effect of delivering these many benefits in an equitable way, in all communities, with the intent of making not only Americans, but also the American culture healthy.

Or we could simply continue to accept the values exhibited by the Missouri State Legislature, where misogyny and brass knuckles have risen to the top of their legislative calendar.

In June, 2021, a Missouri News-Press editorial commented that “one vote last week might strike some as a sign that Missouri’s lawmakers could use some help with time management and prioritization.” The Republican led body had soundly passed HB 1462 which included Section 571.020 and 571.107 which read “This act repeals prohibitions on the possession and selling of brass knuckles, firearm silencers, and switchblade knives.” The same act addressed the taxpayer burden for possession of their weaponry by providing “that all sales of firearms and ammunition made in this state shall be exempt from state and local sales taxes.”

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