I met Sarah MacDonald in the early 2000s. She is the ultimate extrovert who sings, cooks, maintains a huge circle of friends, and lives life to the fullest–all at a pace & level most of us can’t imagine. In the early 2010s Sarah was flying high. Newly married, trying to get pregnant, all while being a Silicon valley business exec who had increasingly senior roles at eBay. Then in 2012 she was diagnosed with two completely separate types of cancer. And in her head “The Cancer Channel” started playing nonstop.
That became the title of her book. I just read it and I literally couldn’t stop. It’s practical, it’s heart-wrenching, it’s warm, it’s funny (yes, funny!). And it’s an amazing look at the exact experience of someone going through cancer. Or in this case cancer x 2. I was lucky enough to interview Sarah (so there is a very happy ending). So please watch this and buy & read the book
Imagine a government program where private contractors boost their bottom line by secretly mining participants’ personal information, such as credit reports, shopping habits and even website logins.
It’s called Medicare.
This is open enrollment season, when 64 million elderly and disabled Americans choose between traditional fee-for-service Medicare and private Medicare Advantage (MA) health plans. MA membership is soaring; within a few years it’s expected to encompass the majority of beneficiaries. That popularity is due in no small part to the extra benefits plans can provide to promote good health, ranging from gym membership and eyeglasses to meal delivery and transportation assistance.
There is, however, an unspoken price for these enhancements that’s being paid not in dollars but in privacy. To better target outreach, some plans are routinely accessing sophisticated analytics that draw upon what’s euphemistically labeled “consumer data.” One vendor boasts of having up to 5,000 “certified variables for every adult in America,” including “clinical, social, economic, behavioral and environmental data.”
Yet while companies like Facebook and Google have faced intense scrutiny, health care firms have remained largely under the radar. The ethical issue is obvious. Since none of this sensitive personal information is covered by the privacy and disclosure rules protecting actual medical data, it is being deliberately used without disclosure to, or explicit consent by, consumers. That’s simply wrong.
But a more fundamental concern involves the analyses themselves.
Sylvana Sinha is CEO of Praava Health, a primary & specialty care network based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. While the average American may only think about Bangladesh when there’s some disaster on the news it’s a country of 165m+ people with a GDP per capita exceeding India’s. It lacks excellent health services for its growing middle class, and that’s the gap Praava Health is filling. I learned a lot about Sylvana, Bangladesh, and Praava in this quick interview —Matthew Holt
The synergistic relationship between biotech’s and biopharma’s can dramatically change the way new drugs and vaccines are bought to market – helping advance innovation on BOTH sides in a very mutually beneficial way. I’ve got an inside look at how Pfizer is working with emerging biotech start-ups, thanks to this in-depth chat with Pfizer’s Senior Vice President of Business Innovation, Kathy Fernando.
Kathy is not only responsible for developing relationships with biotech’s on behalf of Pfizer, BUT during the pandemic she led Pfizer’s mRNA scientific strategy, which was integral to its ability to rapidly develop the Covid-19 vaccine. We geek out on the “cool science” that mRNA is – AND the new platforms that biotech’s are bringing to the table – and talk about the impact both are making on the business of Big Pharma, the hot biotech investment space, and, most importantly, patients.
We also get into a bigger conversation about innovation in the Life Sciences industry – with great insights that can be extended to the rest of healthcare quite easily. I ask point blank: Pfizer is a gigantic, global biopharma company…Why wouldn’t it do these types of innovations internally, in-house themselves? Why partner outside?
Kathy explains the magic that is unlocked when a “market force” partners with a “market mover” for the sake of innovation, and the lessons learned are far reaching and applicable no matter where you are in health innovation.
How is Pfizer looking at new models for collaborating with biotech companies? What are the key characteristics of Pfizer’s culture of innovation that have newly emerged or deepened as a result of their work on the Covid vaccine during the pandemic? We dive deep into the biopharma-biotech model and all it brings in terms of new science, breakthrough therapies, and brand-new business opportunities. Watch now!
This Fall, I am teaching a 4-week course on “How Epidemics Have Shaped Our World” at the President’s College at the University of Hartford. It is, of course a timely topic, but also personally unnerving as we complete a third year under the shadow of Covid-19.
Where does one begin on a topic such as this? Yale historian, Frank M. Snowden, in his book “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present”, made his intentions obvious. He would begin with the plaque. Why? His answer, “The word ‘plague’ will always be synonymous with ‘terror’”, and especially references:
Virulence: “It strikes rapidly, causing excruciating and degrading symptoms, and, if untreated, achieves a high case fatality rate (CFR)…of at least 50%.”
Data-juggernaut LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is making a big data play in healthcare, launching a new capability that allows for unprecedented accuracy in the kind of de-identified data that payers, providers, and pharma are clamoring to use for everything from cutting admin expenses to improving patient outcomes and health equity.
Jeff Diamond, President & General Manager of The Health Care Business of LexisNexis® Risk Solutions and Andrea Green, Director of Healthcare Strategy, SDoH, drop in for a chat about all things VERY big data, including this concept of “next-gen tokenization” which leverages LexisNexis’s massive amount of consumer data as a way to connect data “personas” to create a much more accurate, actionable, and longitudinal view of a patient.
The thing to understand is just how much health data LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is working with and who they are working with it for: 90% of commercial payers in the US; 8 of the Top 10 pharma manufacturers; 10 of the Top 10 retail pharmacies; and hundreds of hospital systems.
So, how is this data “turned” into insightful and actionable information that appeals to this top-tier clientele? Jeff and Andrea walk through use case after use case that demonstrate the ‘business of healthcare’ applications of the LexisNexis data processing platform (think patient safety, risk stratification, claims analytics, provider directory, etc.) with special emphasis on how their new analytics suite, focused on Social Determinants of Health data, is helping with such clinical initiatives as improving diversity in clinical trials and providing predictive insights about patients who might need mental healthcare support. The data comes to life in this one. Watch now!
It turns out that I’ve been writing about Generative AI without even realizing there was something called Generative AI, such as articles about the robot artist Ai-Da, the AI image creator DALL-E, or patent protection for AI inventors. Generative AI refers to AI that strives not just to process and synthesize data but to actually be creative. It’s starting to both become more widespread and to attract serious attention from investors.
James Currier of investment firm NFX sees “Generative Tech” as the next big thing: “If crypto hadn’t happened, we’d probably be calling THIS Web3.” He distinguishes Generative AI from Generative Tech as:
Some have called it “Generative AI,” but AI is only half of the equation. AI models are the enabling base layers of the stack. The top layers will be thousands of applications. Generative Tech is about what will actually touch us – what you can do with AI as a partner.
He predicts Generative Tech will generate “trillions of dollars of value.” I’m hoping that healthcare is paying attention.
How is Salesforce thinking about the healthcare consumer? I had the chance to ask Salesforce’s SVP & GM of Health & Life Sciences, Amit Khanna, about it from both a product — and a lexicon – standpoint at Dreamforce 2022.
Words matter. So, Salesforce’s use of “customer” when talking about our usual “patients” or “health plan members” or “clinical trial participants” is a bit jarring at first, in the sense that it forces the issue of “patient centricity” to the extreme… to a “customer is always right” place, at least for me. I ask Amit about that terminology, its intentionality, and how he thinks his clients across the healthcare ecosystem are doing when it comes to embracing this new term and the new way of thinking it requires in order to truly activate it.
On the product side, we dive into Salesforce’s BIG launch this year: Salesforce Genie. This is cool in the Health & Life Sciences biz for a number of reasons, mostly because it is the manifestation of that consumerization idea. Real time data, a holistic “customer profile” (aka longitudinal patient record) – these are the things that consumers are used to across industries, says Amit, and the new product release focuses on integrating these for payers, providers, med tech companies, pharma and more. How could these features drive change in the healthcare ecosystem? Amit gives a glimpse of what Salesforce thinks is the ‘big win,’ specifically when it comes to that “wholistic customer profile” and the idea that an EMR and CRM can co-exist to serve different purposes in healthcare.
According to the old saying, sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you. I’m not sure that still applies in a social media environment that can have real impacts on mental health of both teenagers and adults, but I have to note that healthcare seems to be pretty sensitive about who calls whom what.
I’ll start with a new study from The Mayo Clinic about whether patients addressed their physicians by their first name. It’s a tricky thing to get a gauge on; one could do surveys of both populations, or implant observers in exam rooms, but these researchers had the clever idea of examining how patients addressed their physician when using portal messaging. They looked at over 90,000 messages from nearly 15,000 patients, with about 30,000 messages from 15,000 patients including a physician’s name (first or last).
The researchers don’t seem to have provided an overall percent of patients using the doctors’ first name, but they did report:
Female doctors were twice as likely as male doctors to be called by their first name;
DOs were similarly almost twice as likely as MDs to have their first name used;
Primary care doctors were 50% more likely than specialists;
Female patients were 40% less likely to use first names when addressing their physician.
Gotta love a new name! Well Health, arguably one of the best-funded digital front door and patient communications startups you’ve never heard of (they’ve raised just under $100 million with little to no fanfare) is today announcing their new moniker, Artera.
Founder & CEO Guillaume de Zwirek breaks the news with us and talks about the strategy behind the name change from both a brand and a business standpoint. Artera is in the (still) hot health tech infrastructure space, selling a platform that health systems can easily integrate into their EMR systems, patient portals or other practice management software to easily send text messages, emails, or other communications to patients.
We get into the details about Artera’s business model, 500+ provider org client base (and what Gui is hearing about their current business challenges) and find our way into a big discussion about digital health funding, that whole bubble thing, health tech startup layoffs, and where Gui thinks the market is headed next. Bottom line: Some interesting comments here (starting around 18.30 mark) about how this might actually help healthcare in the long run.
