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
Will Medical Facial Recognition Technology (mFRT) Reawaken Eugenics?
By MIKE MAGEE
How comfortable is the FDA and Medical Ethics community with a new super-charged medical Facial Recognition Technology (mFRT) that claims it can “identify the early stages of autism in infants as young as 12 months?” That test already has a name -the RightEye GeoPref Autism Test. Its’ UC San Diego designer says it was 86% accurate in testing 400 infants and toddlers.
Or how about Face2Gene which claims its’ mFRT tool already has linked half of the known human genetic syndromes to “facial patterns?”
Or how about employers using mFRT facial and speech patterns to identify employees likely t...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 4, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Andy Chu, Providence
Andy Chu is the SVP of Product and Technology at Providence’s innovation unit. They have launched four companies in recent years (Wildlfower, Xealth, Dexcare and just this week Praia). Andy talked a little about Praia, and more about both how Providence comes up with solutions and gets them through their process, and also the inverse, how his group helps new companies get into Providence (not easy!). I also asked him about how big the impact of those hospital innovation groups actually is. And how AI will roll out. Also not easy!–Matthew Holt (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 3, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Amazon Andy Chu DexCare Praia Providence Tech innovation Wildflower xealth Source Type: blogs
Where ’s Our Infrastructure Plan B?
By KMI BELLARD
I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure. In particular, what to do when it fails.
There was, of course, the tragic collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. Watching the video – and, honestly, what were the odds there’d be video? — is like watching a disaster movie, the bridge crumbling slowly but unstoppably. The bridge had been around for almost fifty years, withstanding over 11 million vehicles crossing it each year. All it took to knock it down was one container ship.
Container ships passed under it every day of its existence; the Port of Baltimore is one of the busie...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 3, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Bridges Change Healthcare GPS Infrastructure Internet Cables Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
Optum: Testing Time for an Invisible Empire
By Jeff Goldsmith
Years ago, the largest living thing in the world was thought to be the blue whale. Then someone discovered that the largest living thing in the world was actually the 106 acre, 47 thousand tree Pando aspen grove in central Utah, which genetic testing revealed to be a single organism. With its enormous network of underground roots and symbiotic relationship with a vast ecosystem of fungi, that aspen grove is a great metaphor for UnitedHealth Group. United, whose revenues amount to more than 8% of the US health system, is the largest healthcare enterprise in the world. The root system of UHG is...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 2, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Health Tech Jeff Goldsmith Optum PBMs United HealthGroup Source Type: blogs
Bevey Miner, Consensus Cloud Solutions
Bevey Miner runs health care for Consensus Cloud Solutions. I’ve known Bevey since she was at Allscripts in the 2000s where she was one of the first building online prescribing. She’s been at lots of places and is now at Consensus which is taking unstructured data via cloud fax and assessing it, structuring it and delivering it–especially to places like skilled nursing facilities. Bevey calls that data at the “outer circles” and we were talking at a time when a lot of electronic communication was down because of the Change Healthcare hack when a lot of it wasn’t flowing. Bevey tells us a...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 1, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Bevey Miner Cloud faxinfg Consensus Cloud Solutions TEFCA Unstrcutured Health Data Source Type: blogs
The Long and Tortured History of Alpha-Synuclein and Parkinson ’s Disease
This study tracks the decades-long journey to harness alpha-synuclein as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Steven Zecola an activist who tracks Parkinson’s research and was on THCB last month discussing it, offers three key changes needed to overcome the underlying challenges.
A Quick Start for Alpha-Synuclein R&D
In the mid-1990’s, Parkinson’s patient advocacy groups had become impatient by the absence of any major therapeutic advances in the 25 years since L-dopa had been approved for Parkinson’s disease (PD).
The Director of National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) se...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 29, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Medical Practice Parkinson's Disease Steven Zecola Source Type: blogs
Ami Parekh, Included Health
Ami Parekh is the to Chief Health Officer of Included Health. It provides navigation services & expert medical opinions (the original Grand Rounds) and virtual care (the old Doctors on Demand) and it then bought a smaller company called Included Health. Ami explains why navigation exists (clue: health plans have been terrible at it) and how it works, and what money it saves on trend (about 2%). They’re also reaching out asking about people’s “Healthy days” and are tracking that metric, and giving people more healthy days–Matthew Holt (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 28, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Matthew Holt THCB Quickbites Ami Parekh Included Health Navigation virtual care Source Type: blogs
