Nvidia ’s AI Bot Outperforms Nurses: Here’s What It Means for You
By ROBBIE PEARL
Soon after Apple released the original iPhone, my father, an unlikely early adopter, purchased one. His plan? “I’ll keep it in the trunk for emergencies,” he told me. He couldn’t foresee that this device would eventually replace maps, radar detectors, traffic reports on AM radio, CD players, and even coin-operated parking meters—not to mention the entire taxi industry.
His was a typical response to revolutionary technology. We view innovations through the lens of what already exists, fitting the new into the familiar context of the old.
Generative AI is on a similar trajectory.
As I pl...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 2, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech AI chatbot IBM-Watson iPhone Robbie Pearl Source Type: blogs
What Walmart said & What Walmart Did: Not the same thing
Walmart surprised us all and changed its mind about primary care yesterday. It’s out.Because so few people have seen it I want to show what Walmart‘s head of health care said just 18 months ago (Nov 2022). Today they are finally killing off the 6th different strategy they’ve had (maybe it was 4). I guess (unlike CVS & Walgreens) they don’t have to write down investment in Oak Street or VillageCare, but they never worked out that primary care is only profitable if it’s 1) very low overhead 2) a loss leader for more expensive services (as most hospitals run it) or 3) getting a cut of the $$...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 1, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Matthew Holt The Business of Health Care Cambia CareMore Cheryl Pegus HLTH Medicare Advantage Merck HHS primary care Sachin Jain Scan Health Plan Walmart Source Type: blogs
What ’s behind all these assessments of digital health?
By MATTHEW HOLT
A decent amount of time in recent weeks has been spent hashing out the conflict over data. Who can access it? Who can use it for what? What do the new AI tools and analytics capabilities allow us to do? Of course the idea is that this is all about using data to improve patient care. Anyone who is anybody, from John Halamka at the Mayo Clinic down to the two guys with a dog in a garage building clinical workflows on ChatGPT, thinks they can improve the patient experience and improve outcomes at lower cost using AI.
But if we look at the recent changes to patient care, especially those brought on by dig...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 29, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Health Tech Matthew Holt cost-effectiveness Diabetes digital health digital therapeutics Livongo MSK Peterson Health Technology Institute Source Type: blogs
The Past, Present & Future of Health Care
I’m off to Finland next month which reminded me of a talk I gave one time I was there in the late 2010s, and I thought you might enjoy it!–Matthew Holt (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 26, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Matthew Holt Health care history Source Type: blogs
Ready for Robots?
By KIM BELLARD
When I was young, robots were Robby the Robot (Forbidden Planet, etc.), the unnamed robot in Lost in Space, or The Jetsons’ Rosey the Robot. Gen X and Millennials might think instead of the more malevolent Terminators (which, of course, are actually cyborgs). But Gen Z is likely to think of the running, jumping, back-flipping Atlas from Boston Dynamics, whose videos have entertained millions.
Alas, last week Boston Dynamics announced it was discontinuing Atlas. “For almost a decade, Atlas has sparked our imagination, inspired the next generations of roboticists and leapt over technical barriers in ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 24, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech AI Kim Bellard robots Source Type: blogs
Jeff Gartland, Relatient
Relatient focuses on intelligent scheduling, specifically for the larger specialty groups. They touch over 50m patients and 45,000 providers a year, and are now a significant player in the key part of patient experience–converting a patient looking into an actual appointment with the provider. I spoke with CEO Jeff Gartland at HIMSS in March 2024.–Matthew Holt (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 23, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech THCB Quickbites Jeff Gartland Patient Experience Relatient Scheduling Source Type: blogs
Aasim Saeed, CEO of Amenities
Aasim Saeed is the CEO of Amenities. He’s a doc, ex-McKinsey Consultant and spent a lot of time building a version of his tool for Baylor Scott & White. We had a wide ranging conversation about how health systems treat patients (not well), whether health systems know the value of their customers (no!), and how to bump up “in network” utilization. Amenities is a front door tool that essentially replaces those sh*tty MyChart portals, and eventually will lead to creating a loyalty membership experience. He gave me a tour of the new-ish tool that is live at MemorialCare in southern California, and coming ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 22, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Aasim Saeed Amenities Baylor Scott & White Mckinsey Patient Lifetime Value Source Type: blogs
Harnessing Digital Innovation to Unlock Cancer Discoveries
By DOUG MIRSKY & BRIAN GONZALEZ
What if digital innovations could be the key to reducing the burden of cancer? CancerX was founded in 2023 as part of the Cancer Moonshot to achieve this goal. By uniting leading minds across industries such as technology, healthcare, science, and government, we are breaking down silos and leveraging digital innovation in the fight against cancer. With ambitious goals to cut the death rate from cancer by at least 50% and to improve the experience of people who are affected by cancer, digital innovation is critical.
As a public-private partnership co-hosted by Moffitt Cancer Center ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 19, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Health Tech Brian Gonzalez CancerX Digital Medicine Society Doug Mirsky Moffitt Cancer Center Source Type: blogs
Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trigger Universal Health Care in America? What do expert Academics say?
By MIKE MAGEE
In his book, “The Age of Diminished Expectations” (MIT Press/1994), Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, famously wrote, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.”
A year earlier, psychologist Karl E. Weich from the University of Michigan penned the term “sensemaking” based on his belief that the human mind was in fact the engine of productivity, and functioned like a biological computer which “receives input, processes the information, and delivers an output.”
But comparing the human brain to a computer was not exactly a complemen...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 18, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Bob Wachter Erik Brynjolfsson Karl E. Weich Medical AI Mike Magee Paul Krugman productivity Source Type: blogs
And Now For Something Completely Different
By KIM BELLARD
The most interesting story I read in the past week doesn’t come from the more usual worlds of health and/or technology, but from sports. It’s not even really news, since it was announced last fall; it’s just that it wasn’t until last week that a U.S. publication (The New York Times) reported on it. In a nutshell, a Paris football (a.k.a. soccer) club is not charging its fans admission during the current season.
Since last week I wrote about medical debt in the U.S. healthcare system, you might guess where this is going. The club is Paris FC. Last November it announced:
For the first time in ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 16, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy co-pays Kim Bellard Out of pocket costs Sports User Fees Source Type: blogs
If data is the new oil, there ’ s going to be war over it
By MATTHEW HOLT
I am dipping into two rumbling controversies that probably only data nerds and chronic care management nerds care about, but as ever they reveal quite a bit about who has power and how the truth can get obfuscated in American health care.
This piece is about the data nerds but hopefully will help non-nerds understand why this matters. (You’ll have to wait for the one about diabetes & chronic care).
Think about data as a precious resource that drives economies, and then you’ll understand why there’s conflict.
A little history. Back in 1996 a law was passed that was supposed to ma...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 15, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Health Tech The Business of Health Care 21st Century Cures Act Carequality Data Epic HIPAA Integritort Joe Biden Judy Faulkner MDPortals Novellia Particle Health Reveleer TEFCA Source Type: blogs
Tim O ’ Connell, CEO, emtelligent
Tim O’Connell discusses emtelligent’s capability to take unstructured clinical data and using NLP, match it to clinical ontologies and figure out what disease patients have, and enable payers and providers to do something about it–rather than payment coding which is what NLP has usually been used for. I spoke to him at HIMSS in March where he was launching emtelligent own new large language model (LLM). Anyone with a health data set is a potential client, but Tim thinks we can use all this data and his company’s technology to radically improve our understanding of clinical care, and improve it–...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 12, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech THCB Quickbites Coding emtelligent LLMs NLP Tim O'Connell Source Type: blogs
Health Care ’s Debt Problem
By KIM BELLARD
Among the many things that infuriate me about the U.S. healthcare system, health systems sending their patients to collections – or even suing them – is pretty high on the list (especially when they are “non-profit” and./or faith-based organizations, which we should expect to behave better).
There’s no doubt medical debt in the U.S. is a huge problem. Studies have found that more than 100 million people have medical debt, many of whom don’t think they’ll ever be able to pay it off. Kaiser Family Foundation estimates Americans owe some $220b in medical debt, with 3 million people owing mor...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 10, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Bankruptcy Kim Bellard medical debt Medical Debt RIP Source Type: blogs
David Lareau, CEO, Medicomp
Medicomp provides a medical database within an EMR and which delivers all the diagnoses and other information directly to the clinician. It represents the note to the physician as a SMART on FHIR app so that they can quickly find the information they need within their workflow. I had a quick catch up with CEO Dave Lareau, and asked him not only what Medicomp does but how all that generative AI has started to change this. He thinks that the output of LLMs and ambient AI will actually make a greater demand for their tools–from a company that’s coming up on its 50th birthday! (Well 46th….)–Matthew Holt...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 9, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Dave Lareau Generative AI MEDICOMP Source Type: blogs
An Urgent Call to Raise Awareness of Heart Disease in Women
By KELLY CARROLL
There is a dire need to raise awareness about heart disease in women. It is the number one killer of American women, and key data points reveal a lack of cognizance among doctors and women.
An assessment of primary care physicians published in 2019 revealed that only 22% felt extremely well prepared to evaluate cardiovascular disease risks in female patients. A 2019 survey of American women showed that just 44% recognized heart disease as the number one cause of death in women. Ten years earlier, in 2009, the same survey found that 65% of American women recognized heart disease as the leading cause o...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 5, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Medical Practice heart disease Kelly Carroll Life Essential 8 prevention Womens health Source Type: blogs
