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The Health Information Economy – Better With Patients

“Consumers expect to have their data available and shareable.” Two essays in two issues in the past two weeks of The New England Journal of Medicine point to the importance of patients – people, caregivers, consumers, all — in the morphing “health information economy,” a phrase used in the title of one of the published pieces. In Time for a Patient-Driven Health Information Economy, Dr. Ken Mandl and Dr. Isaac Kohane, who are both affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard, discuss peoples’ growing interest in engaging with their personal health information, noting frustrating barriers to doing so:

 

Diagnosis: Acute Health Care Angst In America

There’s an overall feeling of angst about healthcare in America among both health care consumers and the people who provide care — physicians and administrators. On one thing most healthcare consumers and providers (can agree: that the U.S. health care system is on the wrong track.  Another area of commonality between consumers and providers regards privacy and security of health information: while healthcare providers will continue to increase investments in digital health tools and electronic health records systems, both providers and consumers are concerned about the security of personal health information. In How We View Healthcare in America: Consumer and Provider Perspectives,

 

In 2016 Reaching For The Triple Aim Will Drive Health IT Spending

Adoption of telehealth, remote health monitoring, patient engagement platforms, mobile and digital health applications, and the emergence of the Internet of Things in health care will all be bolstered in 2016 based on health care providers’ having to do more with less (money, labor, resources). The value-based healthcare world — the migration of payment “from volume to value” — requires greater investment in information and communications technology that moves care to lower-cost sites, with lower-priced labor (as appropriate), and shifting greater clinical self-care and financial skin-in-the-game to patients. My annual health IT forecast was published yesterday in iHealthBeat, 2016: Technology

 

Retail Health Landscape Expanding Through Clinic Growth, Accenture Forecasts

The Old School retail clinic is going beyond checking your child’s ear infection and sore throat, giving immunizations and filling out back-to-school forms just-in-time over LaborDay  weekend. The new-new retail clinic is supporting patients’ chronic disease management, partnering with academic medical centers, and bolstering medication management. Accenture’s bullish forecast is titled “US Retail Health Clinics Expected to Surge by 2017,” making the case that these brick-and-mortar providers are shifting from a relatively limited retail scope to a broader and deeper clinical focus. The so-called surge in the number of retail clinics is projected to be nearly 50% growth between 2014 and 2017,

 

Getting to Connected Health Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint

Consumers may demand connected experiences in daily living, but there have been many barriers to health care industry stakeholders delivering on that expectation: among them, privacy and security concerns, and provider resistance. This demand-and-supply chasm is noted in Deloitte’s Center for Health Solutions’ latest look into the healthcare landscape, Accelerating the adoption of connected health. The objectives of connected health, or cHealth, are: To improve digital connectivity among consumers, providers, health plans and life sciences companies To facilitate self-managed care in a secure environment that protects privacy To deliver care outside of traditional institutional settings To enable chronic care management

 

The Telephone Is As Digital As It Gets in Mainstream U.S. Health Care

The phone continues to be the platform technology used in this digital age of health care, according to Better Together: High Tech and High Touch, a survey report sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Council of Accountable Physician Practices. Nielsen’s Strategy Health Perspectives project polled 5,014 U.S. adults in June and July 2015 for this study. According to the study sponsors, this is the largest consumer population studied conducted to-date on the topic of digital health use and demand. The first chart illustrates the reality of digital health in the U.S. 2015: that notwithstanding the availability of telehealth,

 

More consumers expect a connected health experience

When most patients in the U.S. visit their doctors, they find their medical history missing or incomplete. 1 in 2 American patients say their doctors do not have a complete list of their medications. But the new health consumer expects a connected health experience the likes of which, as consumers, they expect and generally find in their everyday lives. One-half of consumers would prefer to get lab test results, access their medical records, and fill out paperwork from a doctor’s office ahead of a visit online versus via phone or in person. Surescripts conducted a survey with Kelton Global in

 

The Internet Of Things, Privacy and Women

A Congressional hearing on the Internet of Things was held on July 29, 2015. “As we talk about your home, your lighting, your messaging, your voice, and, of course, your health and your actual biological function, issues like privacy and data security for these interoperable technologies become not just something to talk about but an area in which we in Congress play a large and potentially destructive — if we’re not careful — role in the development of these technologies,” cautioned the Honorable Bob Goodlatte, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, U.S. House of Representatives. Pictured with Chairman Goodlatte are the other witnesses

 

IoT in Healthcare, Take 2: Goldman Sachs weighs in

In this week’s posts on Health Populi, we’re diving into three big reports focused on digital health and the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare: from the McKinsey Global Institute, Goldman Sachs, and Accenture. In this post, we dig into Goldman Sachs’ analysis, The Digital Revolution comes to US Healthcare, the investment firm’s fifth volume in their Internet of Things report series. Goldman Sachs’ definition of the Healthcare IoT is, “a device that is connected via the Internet and informs clinical decision making,” which bridges digital and physical worlds “to change physician and patient behavior.” The firm identifies three IoT

 

People-powered health/care – celebrating Patient Independence & Empowerment

In the growing shared economy, one centerpiece is people-powered health – co-creating, shared decision-making, and a greater appreciation for the impact of social on health. As we approach the mid-point of 2015, there are several signposts pointing to people-powered health/care. FasterCures launched the Science of Patient Input Project, with the objective of getting the patient’s voice into clinical discovery and decision-making. This video describes the intent of the program and its potential for people-powered health and user/patient-centered drug design, beyond the pure clinical efficacy of therapies. Another example of people-powered health comes from The Wall Street Journal dated 29 June 2015, which

 

How digital ‘everything’ and consumer expectations are re-shaping health care

Two forces are converging to shape a new era of “living services,” Accenture posits: the digitization of “everything” and consumers’ “liquid” expectations — which are demands for personalized, engaging and adaptable experiences. Accenture’s report on this phenomenon, The Era of Living Services, spans the broad range of consumers’ daily lives where these services will impact: homes, families, transportation, shopping, leisure time, jobs, finances, education, cities, and above all for Health Populi readers, “our bodies.” Living services are physically close to us, as Accenture sees them, “wrapping themselves around the everyday things we do.” They are digital services that are aware

 

The 3 tectonic forces shaping patients – it’s BIO week

Patients in the U.S. are transforming into health care consumers, and in 2015 there are 3 underlying forces shaping that new consumer. This week kicks off the annual BIO conference in Philadelphia, and today Klick Health, the digital communications firm, convenes a group of thought leaders in healthcare to brainstorm markets, financing, and the state of pharmaceutical and life science innovation. An underlying theme throughout this meet-up is patient’s role in health/care. Patients are people, consumers, caregivers, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends, neighbors, community members, taxpayers, all. We’re old, we’re young, we’re mobile and not-so-much, we’re amputees, we’re migraneurs, we’re cancer

 

Musings with Mary Meeker on the Digital/Health Nexus

People in the U.S. spend over five-and-a-half hours a day with digital media in 2015, with time on mobile devices exceeding use of laptop and desktop computers. The growth of mobile means people are using and seeking more just-in-time services in daily living, and this has big implications for health/care, based on the annual mega-report on Internet Trends from Mary Meeker, KPCB’s internet analyst. “People” in health/care are patients, consumers and caregivers; people in health/care are also health plan administrators, employer benefits managers, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, financial managers in hospitals, pharmacists, and the entire range of humans who

 

It’s a retail health world: consumers at the helm of health/care

Retail health v1.0 encompassed the pharmacy, then embraced urgent care and retail health clinics co-located in brick-and-mortar pharmacy chain stores. In v2.0, retail health encompasses all health/care, really, because people, patients and consumers are essentially self-insured up to the point when their health plan kicks in some cash. The high-deductible health plan era is ushering in the retail health era, broadly writ. Hospitals & Health Networks magazine (HHN) ran a story titled Think Like a Retailer to Engage Patients, covering founder of WEGO Health Jack Barrette‘s and my panel presentation at the 2015 HIMSS conference in Chicago last week. Writer

 

Hillary and George at HIMSS15

  George Bush was the keynote speaker yesterday at HIMSS in Chicago at McCormick Place. As expected and appropriate, the Secret Service detail was at-the-ready to ensure the President’s safety and security.  In the morning, members of the press were told by HIMSS’s communications staff that we would be able to watch the speech, live streamed, in the press room, able to cover the event in detail: words have meaning, and many of us were keen to hear how this President, who ushered in the early era of electronic health records, viewed healthcare and information technology then, and now. A fascinating

 

Health is where we live, work, and shop…at Walgreens

Alex Gourley, President of The Walgreen Company, addressed the capacity crowd at HIMSS15 in Chicago on 13th April 2015, saying his company’s goal is to “make good health easier.” Remember that HIMSS is the “Health Information and Management Systems Society” — in short, the mammoth health IT conference that this year has attracted over 41,000 health computerfolk from around the world. So what’s a nice pharmacy like you, Walgreens, doing in a Place like McCormick amidst 1,200+ health/tech vendors?  If you believe that health is a product of lifstyle behaviors at least as much as health “care” services (what our

 

“What If 1 Million Americans Asked for Medical Records on the Same Day?”

This was not a theoretical question Dr. Farzad Mostashari, former head of the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT in the Department of Health and Human Services, asked yesterday at the closing keynote of Day 1 of the Patient Engagement Forum. Dr. Mostashari issued a challenged to the community of mischief-makers in health/tech patient advocacy: tell everyone you know to contact their doctors — by phone, email, patient portal, or in-person, on one designated day which he called a “Day of Action.” Health IT journalist Neil Versel (disclosure: also a long-time friend in the field) covered this news

 

Consumers trust retailers to manage health as much as health providers

40% of U.S. consumers trust Big Retail to manage their health; 39% of U.S. consumers trust healthcare providers to manage their health. What’s wrong with this picture? The first chart shows the neck-and-neck tie in the horse race for consumer trust in personal health management. The Walmart primary care clinic vs. your doctor. The grocery pharmacy vis-a-vis the hospital or chain pharmacy. Costco compared to the chiropractor. Or Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung or UnderArmour, because “digitally-enabled companies” are virtually tied with health providers and large retailers as responsible health care managers. Welcome to The Birth of the Healthcare Consumer according

 

Doctors who write right: Gawande, Topol and Wachter put people at the center of health/care

There’s a trifecta of books written by three brilliant doctors that, together, provide a roadmap for the 21st century continuum of health care: The Patient Will See You Now by Eric Topol, MD; The Digital Doctor from Robert Wachter, MD; and, Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande. Each book’s take provides a lens, through the eyes of a hands-on healthcare provider, on healthcare delivery today (the good, the warts and all) and solutions based on their unique points-of-view. This triple-review will move, purposefully, from the digitally, technology optimistic “Gutenberg moment” for democratizing medicine per Dr. Topol, to the end-game importance of

 

The Affordable Care Act As New-Business Creator

While there’s little evidence that the short-term impact of the Affordable Care Act has limited job growth or driven most employers to drop health insurance plans, the ACA has spawned a “cottage industry” of health companies since 2010, according to PwC. As the ACA turned five years of age, the PwC Health Research Institute led by Ceci Connolly identified at least 90 newcos addressing opportunities inspired by the ACA: Supporting telehealth platforms between patients and providers, such as Vivre Health Educating consumers, such as the transparency provider HealthSparq does Streamlining operations to enhance efficiency, the business of Cureate among others

 

Health is a growth industry at SXSW

Health is the hot topic at SXSW. While edgy new movies and hot music are the foundational elements of the annual South-by-Southwest festival, health and health care are the fast-growing themes at the meet-up, where the new-new, month-old beautiful JW Marriott Hotel by the Convention Center hosted most of the digital health track sessions. Digital health today goes well beyond mobile apps and genomic futures. Philips was a major presence this year at SXSW with its vision, shared by me, THINK-Health, and the HeathcareDIY team, of connected health where we live, work, play, pray and learn. In the case of

 

The Internet of Things in health care – technology for good in HuffPo

As sensors begin to proliferate our “Things,” from refrigerators to cars, toasters to t-shirt, our health could benefit mightily. Approaching this weekend’s South-by-Southwest Interactive meet-up in Austin, several authors have crowdsourced views on using technology for good in ImpactX, a special section in the Huffington Post sponsored by Cisco. I was asked to develop a view on using technology for good — for health and health care. Here’s my offering: How the Internet of Things Can Bolster Health. The promise of sensor-laden stuff in our lives can work for personal and public health in myriad ways — from perceiving impending epidemics

 

The blurring landscape of digital health: the Health 2.0 team puts it in focus

They’re the team that built a brand with the phrase “Health 2.0” before the world barely recognized v 1.0 in healthcare. This week, those folks that brought you the Health 2.0 Conference unveiled the Market Intel database of over 3,000 companies, trying to make sense out of a very blurry and fast-morphing market landscape. I spoke with Matthew Holt and Kim Krueger of Health 2.0 earlier this week to discuss just what’s in this mine of information, and what they intend to do with it. In full disclosure, I have been a colleague and friend of Matthew Holt since his

 

Digital health love – older people who use tech like health-tech, too

As people take on self-service across all aspects of daily living, self-care in health is growing beyond the use of vitamins/minerals/supplements, over-the-counter meds, and trying out the blood-pressure cuff in the pharmacy waiting for a prescription to be filled. Today, health consumers the world over have begun to engage in self-care using digital technologies. And this isn’t just a phenomenon among people in the Millennial generation. Most seniors who regularly use technology (e.g., using computers and mobile phones) are also active in digitally tracking their weight, for example, learned in a survey by Accenture. Older people who use technology in daily

 

She’s just not that into connecting with you (yet), doctor

Just 1 in 5 health-insured people with a primary care provider use the web to look at their health data, and fewer than 1 in 10 people use digital means to book appointments. Welcome to the 2015 State of the Connected Patient, a survey report from Salesforce conducted by Harris Poll among 2,095 adults in January 2015. Perhaps the title of the analysis should more appropriately be the “2015 State of the Unconnected Patient.” While most patients polled are satisfied with their PCPs and most believe doctors are sharing their health records, people lack digital engagement with their primary care providers.

 

More from the 2015 CES – Shelly Palmer’s 3 Laws of the Digital World and What They Mean for Health Care

Three laws that shape the digital world have kicked into high gear, changing our lives in ways we cannot yet imagine. Those three forces are Metcalfe’s Law (in brief, the increasing value of networks), Moore’s Law (that processing power doubles every 18 months, or even faster), and the Law of Accelerating Returns (the fast pace of technological change). The guy who told me about that at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (#CES2015) was Shelly Palmer, something of a Renaissance Man in the evolving digital world, advising communications companies, composing music, patenting TV technology, investing in ventures, hosting shows on digital living,

 

People don’t know much about patient portals: Xerox’s 5th EHR study

The Field of Dreams works in nostalgic plotlines about baseball, but as I’ve pointed out since the advent of consumer-facing health technologies, there’s no Field of Dreams effect in health care when it comes to consumer health engagement. U.S. health consumers aren’t using the patient portals that health care providers have built as part of their efforts to bolster health engagement via EHRs and health IT, Xerox found in the company’s 5th annual survey on electronic health records. I spoke with Tamara St. Claire to discuss the implications of the consumer poll, which was conducted among 2,017 U.S. adults in

 

Health IT Forecast for 2015 – Consumers Pushing for Healthcare Transformation

Doctors and hospitals live and work in a parallel universe than the consumers, patients and caregivers they serve, a prominent Chief Medical Information Officer told me last week. In one world, clinicians and health care providers continue to implement the electronic health records systems they’ve adopted over the past several years, respond to financial incentives for Meaningful Use, and re-engineering workflows to manage the business of healthcare under constrained reimbursement (read: lower payments from payors). In the other world, illustrated here by the graphic artist Sean Kane for the American Academy of Family Practice, people — patients, healthy consumers, newly insured folks,

 

Irrational exuberance in mobile health? Live from the mHealth Summit 2014

Mobile and digital technologies will bend the health care cost curve, drive individual and population health, and solve the nagging challenge of health disparities. Mobile and digital technologies will increase costs to health providers, disrupt work flows and lower clinicians’ productivity, and hit a market bubble. Depending on your lens into mHealth, and what product categories and user segments you’re looking at, all of the above can be true. The plenary session of the 2014 mHeath Summit kicked off with Dr. Harry Leider, Chief Medical Information Officer of Walgreens, who spoke of the pharmacy’s evolving role across the entire continuum of care,

 

Live from the 11th annual Connected Health Symposium – Keeping Telehealth Real

Dr. Joseph Kvedar has led the Center for Connected Health for as long as I’ve used the word “telehealth” in my work – over 20 years. After two decades, the Center and other pioneers in connected health have evidence proving the benefits, ROI (“hard” in terms of dollars, and “soft” in terms of patient and physician satisfaction), and technology efficacy for connecting health. The 11th Annual Connected Health Symposium is taking place as I write this post at the Seaport Hotel in Boston, bringing health providers, payers, plans and researchers together to share best practices, learnings and evidence supporting the

 

Dr Eric Topol on the digital democratization of health care

Moore’s Law is coming to medicine. And it will look and feel a lot like Uber: with rich technology underpinning,  consumer-service oriented and friendly, and shaking up the professionals at the front line of the business (from taxi drivers to physicians). Eric Topol, physician and editor-in-chief at Medscape, told a standing-room-only audience at the kickoff of the 8th annual Health 2.0 Conference that the democratization of health care is coming based on consumers’ use of eight drivers: sensors, labs, imaging, physical exams, access to medical records, transparency of costs, and digital pills. Dr. Topol referred to the cover ot TIME

 

Health info disconnect: most people view accessing online records important, but don’t perceive the need to do so

There’s a health information disconnect among U.S. adults: most people believe online access to their personal health information is important, but three-quarters of people who were offered access to their health data and didn’t do so didn’t perceive the need to. The first two graphs illustrate each of these points. When people do access their online health records, they use their information for a variety of reasons, including monitoring their health (73%), sharing their information with family or care providers (44%), or downloading the data to a mobile device or computer (39%). In this context, note that 1 in 3

 

Health on the 2014 Gartner Hype Cycle

Remote health monitoring is in the Trough of Disillusionment. Wearables are at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, with Big Data leapfrogging wearables from the 2013 forecast — both descending toward the Disillusionment Trough. Mobile (remote) health monitoring, however, has fallen into that Trough of Disillusionment as RHM has been undergoing reality checks in the health care system especially for monitoring and patient self-management of heart disease (most notably heart failure) and diabetes. Welcome to the 2014 edition of the Gartner Hype Cycle, one of my most-trusted data sources for doing health industry forecasts in my advisory work. Compared with last year’s

 

Novel concept: people + health pricing information = market competition

In the post-Recession American economy, people shop for value in all things. And that includes health care services like MRIs — when patients are informed of pricing differences among imaging facilities and given free rein to pick-and-choose among them. In addition to lowering imaging costs in a community, price transparency also generated competition between providers. Health Affairs published this research detailed in Price Transparency for MRIs Increased Use of Less Costly Providers And Triggered Provider Competition in August 2014. An Economics 101 course teaches us that a well-oiled (perfect) market depends on lots of sellers of a product and lots of

 

Do EHRs “chill” patient disclosures to clinicians?

Patients are concerned about private risks of personal health data, resulting in some patients not disclosing certain information to health providers to protect their perceived EHR privacy and security risks. Peoples’ mixed feelings about sharing personal health information with their providers and EHRs is explored in The double-edged sword of electronic health records: implications for patient disclosure, published in the July 2014 issue of JAMIA, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). “The perception of the [EHR] technology may elicit non-disclosure as a privacy-protecting behavior,” the authors warn. Celeste Campos-Castillo and Denise Anthony, the paper’s researchers who work in

 

Hyperconnected Healthcare – The Need for Cyber-Resilience

The growth of data, small and Big, in health care motivates the industry’s stakeholders to adopt technologies that help store, manage and analyze data to drive knowledge and, ultimately, individual and public health. Healthcare is embracing cloud technology, mobile platforms, social networks, e-commerce, robotics, and the Internet of Things (IoT), among a growing list of tech innovations. Each of these innovations, which enable productivity and economic growth, also present cybersecurity risks. The value of these risks is estimated to be as much as $3 trillion to the global economy, according to McKinsey’s calculations in the report Risk and Responsibility in

 

Big Data Come to Health Care…With Big Challenges – Health Affairs July 2014

“For Big Data, Big Questions Remain,” an article by Dawn Falk in the July 2014 issue of Health Affairs, captures the theme of the entire journal this month. That’s because, for every opportunity described in each expert’s view, there are also obstacles, challenges, and wild cards that impede the universal scaling of Big Data in the current U.S. healthcare and policy landscape. What is Big Data, anyway? It’s a moving target, Falk says: computing power is getting increasingly powerful (a la Moore’s Law), simpler and cheaper. At the same time, the amount of information applicable to health and health care

 

Homo informaticus – the global digital consumer

Consumers around the world are feeling more knowledgeable, self-confident and realistic, enabled by mobile platforms, the democratic power of social “choruses,” and a more sharing economy featuring collaborative consumption. As peoples’ phones get smarter and smarter, they carry more powerful multichannel information devices in their hands which empower Homo Informaticus – the new global digital consumer, described in EY’s report, How to copilot the multichannel journal. EY polled 29,943 consumers in the Consumers on Board survey living in 34 countries: across the Americas, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, India and Africa. Homo informaticus is the rational consumer smartly using technology to filter information.

 

Online is to go-to place for health insurance info, but lots of uninsured people live offline

A vast majority of people shopping for a health plan on a Health Insurance Exchange for coverage in 2014 obtained information online via websites. One-half of these shoppers used only online information, and 29% combined both websites and other sources like direct assistance, informal assistance, and via (offline) media. In the Health Reform Monitoring Survey from the Urban Institute Health Policy Center, a research team, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Ford Foundation, looked into data collected from the Health Reform Monitoring Survey in March 2014 at the end of the 2014 open enrollment period for the

 

Practice Fusion joins the open health data community with Insight

Open data is a growing trend in health care. Analyzing data sets across lots and lots of people can help researchers identify medical cures, anticipate epidemics, and solve knotty problems where social and behavioral issues complicate clinical questions and solutions. Joining the open health data community is the health IT company Practice Fusion, which is sharing with the public aggregated data on some 81 million patients collected through over 100,000 active users every month recording patient data in the company’s cloud-based electronic health records system. Insight, the searchable database, is freely available to people, researchers, policymakers, and anyone who wants to look at top line

 

Privatizing health privacy in the US?

8 in 10 people in the U.S. believe that total privacy in the digital world is history, based on a survey from Accenture conducted online in March and April 2014 and published in the succinctly-titled report, Eighty Percent of Consumers Believe Total Data Privacy No Longer Exists. 84% of U.S. consumers say they’re aware what tracking personal behavior can enable – receiving customized offers and content that match one’s interests. At the same time, 63% of people in the U.S. also say they have a concern over tracking behavior. Only 14% of people in the U.S. believe there are adequate safeguards

 

Health care at an inflection point: digital trends via Mary Meeker

When Mary Meeker talks, the digerati listen. Meeker is the digital industry analyst who’s a partner at KPCB, a venture capital company, in Silicon Valley. Each year she publishes a report on the state of the digital marketplace. Her 2014 paper, Internet Trends 2014 – Code Conference (dated May 28 2014)  is online, and as usual, it’s full of data points on both digital technology segments along with some vertical industry findings – in education, financial services, and health, among other segments. I’ve combed through the 164 pages of the PDF to trend-weave the health implications. When it comes to health, the

 

The Season of Healthcare Transparency – Consumer Payments and Tools, Part 4

“The surge in HDHP enrollment is causing patients to become consumers of healthcare,” begins a report documenting the rise of patients making more payments to health providers. Patients’ payments to providers have increased 72% since 2011. And, 78% of providers mail paper statements to patients to collect what they’re owed. “HDHPs” are high-deductible health plans, the growing thing in health insurance for consumers now faced with paying for health care first out-of-pocket before their health plan coverage kicks in. And those health consumers’ expectations for convenience in payment methods is causing dissatisfaction, negatively affecting these individuals and their health providers’

 

The Season of Healthcare Transparency – HFMA’s Price Transparency Manifesto – Part 1

As Big Payors continue to shift more costs onto health consumers in the U.S., the importance of and need for transparency grows. 39% of large employers offered consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) in 2013, and by 2016, 64% of large employers plan to offer CDHPs.  These plans require members to pay first-dollar, out-of-pocket, to reach the agreed deductible, and at the same time manage a health savings account (HSA). In the past several weeks, many reports have published on the subject and several tools to promote consumer engagement in health finance have made announcements. This week of posts provides an update on

 

The retailization of digital health: Consumer Electronics Association mainstreams health

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has formed a new Health and Fitness Technology Division, signalling the growing-up and mainstreaming of digital health in everyday life. The CEA represents companies that design, manufacture and market goods for people who pay for stuff that plugs into electric sockets and operate on batteries — like TVs, phones, music playing and listening, kitchen appliances, electronic games, and quite prominent at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show, e-cigarettes (rebranding “safe smoking” as “vaping” technology). In its press release announcing this news, CEA President and CEO Gary Shapiro says, “Technology innovations now offer unprecedented opportunities for consumers to

 

Your health score: on beyond FICO

Over one dozen scores assessing our personal health are being mashed up, many using our digital data exhaust left on conversations scraped from Facebook and Twitter, via our digital tracking devices from Fitbit and Jawbone, retail shopping receipts, geo-location data created by our mobile phones, and publicly available data bases, along with any number of bits and pieces about ‘us’ we (passively) generate going about our days. Welcome to The Scoring of America: How Secret Consumer Scores Threaten Your Privacy and Your Future. Pam Dixon and Robert Gellman wrote this well-documented report, published April 2, 2014 by The World Privacy Forum.

 

Doctors and mHealth apps: chaos, evidence, creation

Over one year ago, an eClinicalWorks survey found that 9 in 10 physicians would be interested in prescribing a mobile health app to a patient. That’s a big number. That’s “interest,” but that demand hasn’t yet been expressed in the current go-go app-happy environment.  An opinion piece in this week’s Online First edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) demonstrates the fork-in-the-road facing clinicians and the disruption/opportunity that is mobile health. In “In Search of a Few Good Apps,” a Boston-based trio of writers (two physicians and one PhD) talk about “the bewildering diversity of apps available

 

People want to DIY with pharma

In our increasingly-DIY society, most consumers expect high levels of access and customer service from the organizations with whom we engage. With more consumers reaching into their pockets to pay for health services and products, the health industry is increasingly a retail-facing environment. So expect quality service levels from their healthcare touch points. The pharmaceutical and prescription drug touch point is not exempt from this expectation, as learned by an Accenture survey analyzed in Great Expectations: Why Pharma Companies Can’t Ignore Patient Services. As the first picture shows, 70% of patients think pharma companies are responsible for bundling information and services

 

Why a grocery chain supports health data liquidity

The CEO of a family-owned grocery store chain wrote a letter to New York State lawmakers to support $65 million worth of spending on a computer system for health information in the state. That grocer is Danny Wegman, and that project is the Statewide Health Information Network, aka SHIN-NY. In his letter beginning, “Dear New York Legislator,” Wegman identifies several benefits he expects would flow out of the health IT project: 1. Improve health care for all New Yorkers 2. Lower health care costs, through reducing hospital readmission rates and reducing duplicate testing. 3. Lead to health data “liquidity” (my

 

The four futures of health care: simple, guru, ecosystem, self-care

In the not-too-distant future, will our health care be universally available to all, standardized with limited choices? Or, will we be in self-care mode, able to “buy up” if we can afford it like luxury goods? Will health care delivery be totally tech- and information-driven? Or, will care be driven by insurers’ health plans with artful designs that (almost) predetermine our choices? Welcome to four futures of health care, brought to us by PA Consulting whose report, How Can We Stop Healthcare From Bankrupting Our Children? speaks to scenarios based on 2 uncertainties, whether: Health care will be a personal

 

Pharma warming up to the cloud to drive efficiencies and support analytics

Over the next few years, large global pharma companies will need to wring out an additional $35 billion worth of efficiencies in order to drive profitability. While the industry has most of the patent cliff challenge behind it, companies face price constraints with respect to health reform, static national economies, and access demands. As the pharmaceutical industry enters the value-based health care era, the industry must catch up with other vertical markets in adopting information technology. In particular, pharma has been slower to migrate to the cloud than other businesses, with concerns about security and health care particular needs. Today, the

 

The digital health bubble – is it about to burst? #SXSW

That’s a useful and timely question, given the news that Castlight Health will launch its IPO with valuations north of $1 billion. Yes, “billions,” and according to a  MarketWatch analysis, “it’s a bargain at $1 billion.” So then – do we anticipate a bubble? asked Marc Monseau of the Mint Collective, the convener of our panel who brought together Robert Stern, a successful health-tech entrepreneur whose latest venture, @PointofCare, focuses on patient engagement; Marco Smit of Next Innovation Health Partners (parting from the Health 2.0 Conference family where he led Health 2.0 Advisors for several years); and me. Some key

 

Health data data everywhere – let’s human-scale it / Report from #SXSW #SXSH

Health data is everywhere, but not much useful to drink. Is #bigdata in health care at the top of the Hype Cycle? And how do we humanize it, make it relevant and useful for our everyday life? In other words, can this data help us hack our lives and health for the better? That question has been on my mind for the past couple of years since the convergence of big data and data analytics and health has emerged. Yesterday at the 2014 South-by-Southwest happening, I attended a panel discussion called Hacking Your Life For Better Health (#hacklife on Twitter).

 

Risk-shift: employers continue to push more risk to employees and families for health costs

With health costs increase increasing at 4.4% in 2014, a slightly higher rate of growth than the 4.1% seen in 2013. While this is lower than the double-digit increases U.S. employers faced in 2001-2004, it’s still twice the rate of general consumer price inflation. That’s what the first graph shows, based on the The 19th Annual Towers Watson/National Business Group on Health Employer Survey on Purchasing Value in Health Care.  Employers generally want to continue to provide health insurance…for the time being. 92% of companies expect to make changes in health plan provisions in 2014, with 1 in 2 anticipating “significant

 

HIMSS14 Monday Morning Quarterback – The Key Takeaways

Returning to terra firma following last week’s convening of the 2014 annual HIMSS conference…taking some time off for family, a funeral, the Oscars, and dealing with yet another snowstorm…I now take a fresh look back at #HIMSS14 at key messages. In random order, the syntheses are: Healthcare in America has entered an era of doing more, with less...and health information technology is a strategic investment for doing so. The operational beacon going forward is moving toward The Triple Aim: building population health, enhancing the patient’s experience, and lowering costs per patient. The CEO of Aetna, Mark Bertolini, spoke of the

 

Hillary Clinton wows the HIMSS14 crowd

  At last year’s annual HIMSS conference, I had the pleasure of experiencing Bill Clinton’s keynote speech in New Orleans, which I wrote about here. As a long-time member of HIMSS, this was a great moment in my many years attending HIMSS conferences. Another special moment in HIMSS conference history happened today, as, I had the honor of attending Hillary Clinton’s keynote speech at HIMSS 2014 in Orlando today. I am blessed with fast-typing fingers thanks to my mother’s genes, and took constant notes during Hillary’s talk. My favorite paragraphs are quoted below, indicating “Applause” pauses where Hillary was lauded.

 

Patient engagement and mobile health – design and timing matter

Thinking about personal health information technology – the wearable devices, remote health monitors, digital weight scales, and Bluetooth-enabled medical equipment scaled for the home – there are two glasses. One is half-full and the other, half-empty. The half-full glass is the proliferation of consumer-facing devices like Fitbit, Jawbone and Nike, which comprise the lion’s market share in the health wearables segment; the mass adoption of mobile phones and tablets; consumers’ multi-screen media behavior (as tracked by Nielsen); and consumers’ growing share of medical spending, now about 40% of annual spending (or something north of $8,000 for a family of four

 

Patients play a starring role at #HIMSS14 – Best In Show

Even before stepping into the Orlando Convention Center on Sunday 23 February 2014, my clairvoyant powers know the forecast of the Best in Show: the growing role of patients in health care, reflected in both the education session at the annual 2014 meeting of HIMSS as well as the product/service mix being proffered on the convention show floor. As a member of HIMSS Connected Patient Committee, I know first-hand the conscious effort and energy that the organization has committed to getting real about patients’-peoples’-caregivers’ central role in health care. The organization was built on providers and technology. When I first

 

Where’s TripAdvisor for health care? JAMA on physician ratings sites

As more U.S. health citizens enroll in high-deductible health plans – now representing about 30% of health-insured people in America – health plan members are being called on to play the role of consumer. Among the most important choices the health consumer makes is for a physician. Ratings sites and health care report cards ranking doctors by various characteristics have been in the market for over a decade. However, little has been known on the public’s knowledge about the availability of these information sources, nor of peoples’ use of physician rating sites. This question is addressed in Public Awareness, Perception, and

 

The value of health IT – driving ROI takes a village

This is my second post for the #HIMSS14 Blog Carnival, written to coincide with the annual 2014 HIMSS Conference convening health IT leaders in Orlando, FL, 23-28 February 2014. I am gratified to be one of a dozen+ Social Media Ambassadors to the Conference. The first post, on why health IT ‘should’ matter to consumers, can be found here.  Investments in the digital health space reached nearly $2 billion in 2013, based on Rock Health’s look back at venture funding in the market. These financings covered $245 mm that went toward electronic health records and clinical workflow; $161 toward analytics

 

Watson goes wellness

IBM’s data analytics engine Watson, having cut its teeth on complex health care conditions like cancer, is now entering an even more challenging space: wellness. Why is wellness more challenging? Because understanding a person’s wellness goes beyond mining data from health care claims silos in hospitals, pharmacies, and physicians’ electronic health records. Wellness happens where we live, work, play and pray. Wellness is nurtured through choices made every day at home, in the workplace, and at moments-of-truth in the grocery store and restaurant where slick marketing messages planted in our subconscious compete with our more rational minds that tell us to

 

Why Health IT (Should) Matter to Consumers

This is the first of four posts that are written for the HIMSS 2014 Blog Carnival. The theme, provided by HIMSS (the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society): “Why Health IT Matters to Consumers.” You’ll note the title here has been purposefully changed. Health IT “should” matter to consumers. Since George Bush declared in 2004 that within 10 years’ time, U.S. health citizens would each have an electronic medical record, there’s been as more bipartisan support inside the Beltway for EHRs than possibly for any other issue in Congress. The American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), aka the

 

Connected Health – the technology is ready, providers on the cusp

The convergence of technology developments – such as the internet, mobile phone adoption, cloud computing, sensors, electronic health records – with societal evolution including consumerism, demand for transparency, and “flatter” organizations – enable the phenomenon of Connected Health. Connected Health by definition includes mobile health (mHealth), telehealth and telemedicine, as presented in the February 2014 issue of Health Affairs which is dedicated to this theme. Why Connected Health’s time is Now relates to those factors cited above, and the underlying challenge of managing health care costs. While all nations in the developed world are facing difficult health economies, the U.S. spends so

 

4 in 5 doctors in America use an EHR, but most not ready for Stage 2

The number of physicians using electronic health record systems (EHRs) rose by 50% since 2010, from 51% to 78% of office-based doctors. That equates to about 4 in 5 U.S. physicians now using any EHR system. This growing adoption of EHRs is evident in the first chart, published in Use and Characteristics of Electronic Health Record Systems Among Office-based Physician Practices: United States, 2001-2013. This survey was published by the National Center for Health Statistics in the NCHS Data Brief Series in January 2014. (The NCHS is part of the Centers for Disease Control, aka the CDC). This growth rate hasn’t

 

mHealth will join the health ecosystem – prelude to the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show

The rise of digital health at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show signals the hockey-stick growth of consumer-facing health devices for fitness and, increasingly, more medical applications in the hands of people, patients, and caregivers. This year at #CES2014, while the 40% growth of the CES digital health footprint will get the headlines, the underlying story will go beyond wristbands and step-tracking generating data from an N of 1 to tools that generate data to bolster shared-decision making between people and the health system, and eventually support population health. For example: – Aetna is partnering with J&J to deploy their Care4Today

 

Don’t over-forecast mobile health in the short-run

The 2013 Mobile Health Summit was hosted by HIMSS at The Gaylord Resort in suburban Washington DC, taking place over 4 days during the mid-atlantic region’s iciest conditions in years. But inside the cocoon of this convention space, 5,000 conveners took in demonstrations of innovations using mobile platforms and standards that extend health services, knowledge and self-help tools to people and providers. Several themes emerged out of the meeting… Lots of apps, too few business models.  There are too many apps and not enough companies, Esther Dyson noted in a keynote session during which she dialogued with two Steve’s: Steven

 

Data altruism: people more likely to share personal health data for the sake of others and to save money

While about 53% of people globally are willing to share various types of personal data overall, the kind of data willing-to-be-shared varies by type of information — and what country we’re from. When asked how likely they would be to anonymously share information if it could lead to improvements or innovations in that technology, Americans are less likely to be willing to share any type of personal data — except for gender. When it comes to sharing several specific types of health information, fewer Americans are likely to want to share it as Intel found in their survey published in the company’s Healthcare

 

Investing in technology that lowers health costs – the growing role of mobile

At the Venture+ Forum at the 2013 Mobile Health Summit yesterday, Lisa Suennen, Managing Director of Psilos Ventures was asked what she and her venture capital fund look for in choosing new investments for their health care portfolio. She succinctly said, “technologies that lower costs.” With nearly $1 in $5 of the U.S. economy attributable to health spending, Lisa’s got a point. Technology in U.S. health care has been mostly additive and expense-inducing, not reducing: fax machines and printers, for example, continue to proliferate in health care settings as part of “networking,” and once you add a new clinical technology

 

Self-service health – how consumers can help solve the primary care shortage

Self-service – people DIYing health care — can help solve the primary care shortage in America, based on the findings of 23 studies published this week. If health information technologies (health IT) were “fully implemented” in 30% of doctors’ offices, demand for physicians would fall by 4 to 9%, according to The Impact of Health Information Technology and e-Health On the Future Demand for Physician Services, published in the November 2013 issue of Health Affairs. Weiner, Yeh and Blumenthal did a meta-analysis of the literature on health IT and its potential to improve productivity and extend physician services and found

 

Mobile health apps – opportunity for patients and doctors to co-create the evidence

There are thousands of downloadable apps that people can use that touch on health. But among the 40,000+ mobile health apps available in iTunes, which most effectively drive health and efficient care? To answer that question, the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics analyzed 43,689 health, fitness and medical apps in the Apple iTunes store as of June 2013. These split into what IMS categorized as 23,682 “genuine” health care apps, and 20,007 falling into miscellaneous categories such as product-specific apps, fashion and beauty, fertility, veterinary, and apps with “gimmicks” (IMS’s word) with no obvious health benefit. Among the 23,682 so-called

 

For Medtech, Design is the New Plastics (advice to The Graduate)

Return on innovation in medical technology is on the decline. Med tech needed a GPS for its role in the health ecosystem, and lost its way as it focused on a few wrong priorities. In a $349 billion market, there has been much to lose…and will be to gain. The new world for medical technology and how the industry can turn around is the subject of P2C’s report, Medtech companies prepare for an innovation makeover, published in October 2013 by the PwC Health Research Institute (HRI). The problem has been an addiction to incremental improvements on existing products: think about the analog in

 

Health care and survey taking at the Big Box Store

Where can you shop the health and beauty aisles, pick up some groceries and a prescription, get a flu vaccine, and weigh in on Obamacare and what digital health tools you like? Why, at one of several thousand retail stores where you can find a SoloHealth kiosk. As of yesterday afternoon, over 32 million encounters were recorded on SoloHealth kiosks, based on an app I saw on the company CEO Bart Foster’s smartphone. Kiosks are locatted around the United States in retailers including Walmart and Sam’s Clubs, along with major grocery chains like Schnuck’s and Publix, and the CVS pharmacy

 

The FDA Has Spoken, and It Will Regulate “Some” mHealth Apps

The FDA has spoken: there are 2 statutory definitions for a mobile health tool as a “medical device” that the Agency says it has regulatory oversight: To be used as an accessory to a regulated medical device, or To transform a mobile platform into a regulated medical device. On page 8 of the Guidance for Industry and Food and Drug Administration Staff, you can read the FDA’s expanded definition of a mobile health app as being: “…intended for use in performing a medical device function (i.e. for diagnosis of disease or other conditions, or the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention

 

Healing the Patient-Doctor Relationship with Health IT

A cadre of pioneering Americans has been meaningfully using personal health information technology (PHIT), largely outside of the U.S. health care system. These applications include self-tracking and wearable health technologies, mobile health apps, and digital medical tracking devices like glucometers that streamline tracking and recording blood glucose levels. In the meantime, only 21% of doctors surveyed by Accenture currently allow patients to have online access to their medical summary or patient chart – very basic components of the electronic health record. We know what’s primarily driving health providers’ adoption of health IT: namely, the HITECH Act’s provisions for incentives. But

 

Defining Mobile Health – the blur between health and health care

Mobilising Healthcare, a new report from Juniper Research, segments the mobile health sector into “healthcare” and “health & fitness” segments. The research summary notes that fitness is a relatively new market compared with health “care,” which has been around for eons. Fitness, the analysts say, “is exempt from government intervention.” Mobile healthcare (“mHealth”) applications explored include SMS health messaging, remote health provision such as cardiac monitoring, electronic health records and personal health records. In mFitness, Juniper looks into mobile tech for athletes and fitness conscious people, and activity tracking including heart function, distance, respiration, and perspiration, among other parameters. mHealth

 

Health information search online, an hour a week. Time with a doctor? An hour a year.

In game-scoring unit terms, 52 is the number of hours an average American spends seeking health information online each year. The 1 (hour) is roughly equivalent to the approximate total time a patient spends with a physician (an average of 3 visits, with an average time per vision of 20 minutes). Thus, 52:1. This means that the average U.S. health consumer spends much more time DIYing her health using digital information resources than speaking face-to-face with their physician in the doctor’s office. Still, the physician continues to be a go-to source for health information, according to Makovsky, a health communications

 

People with doctors interested in EMRs, but where’s the easy button?

1 in two people who are insured and have a regular doctor are interested in trying out an electronic medical record. But they need a doctor or nurse to suggest this, and they need it to be easy to use. The EMR Impact survey was conducted by Aeffect and 88 Brand Partners to assess 1,000 U.S. online consumers’ views on electronic medical records (EMRs): specifically, how do insured American adults (age 25 to 55 who have seen their regular physician in the past 3 years) view accessing their personal health information via EMRs? Among this population segment, 1 in 4 people (24%)

 

Needing a new kind of tracker to track #mhealth investments in 2013

The news this week that Fitbit attracted $42 million investment capital follows Withings’ announcement of $30 million (including Euro11 million from BPIFrance, the French national investment fund), Jawbone’s recent acquisition of Bodymedia for $100 million in April 2013, and MyFitnessPal raising $13 million earlier this month. The quick arithmetic for these four companies alone adds to roughly $200 mm in a few months going to these brands, which are feverishly competing for the heartbeats and footsteps of people who are keen to track their steps and stay healthy. Can you keep up? You need a new kind of activity tracker to track

 

Americans’ health insurance illiteracy epidemic – simpler is better

Consumers misunderstand health insurance, according to new research published in the Journal of Health Economics this week. The study was done by a multidisciplinary, diverse team of researchers led by one of my favorite health economists, George Loewenstein from Carnegie Mellon, complemented by colleagues from Humana, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Yale, among other research institutions. Most people do not understand how traditional health plans work: the kind that have been available on the market for over a decade. See the chart, which summarizes top-line findings: nearly all consumers believe they understand what maximum out-of-pocket costs are, but only one-half do.

 

Driving innovation in health through the use of open data: Health Datapalooza, Year 4

In the $3 trillion economy that is American health care, the role of information technology is central to transforming this huge piece of U.S. fiscal activity. This week convened the fourth annual Health Datapalooza (HDP) in Washington DC, with the underlying theme, “health engagement is the blockbuster drug of the 21st century” (quoting Leonard Kish). This meeting of over 2,000 registrants – huge growth from the first year’s 400 attendees — is organized by the Health Data Consortium (HDC) , whose CEO Dwayne Spradlin kicked off remarks on Day 2 of HDP4. He described the HDC, a public-private collaboration led

 

The role of internet technologies in reducing health care costs: Meeker inspirations

Tablets, wearables, smartphones, video and QR codes: these are fast-growing platforms moving data around the global economy. They’re also fast=growing platforms for health care where we live, work, play and pray. Mary Meeker’s annual presentation on Internet Trends at the D11 Conference, is fresh off the virtual press in its shiny new 2013 version. Meeker has been with the investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers (KPCB) since 2011, and was with Morgan Stanley from 1991 to 2010. She’s a veteran who’s watched the Internet basically from The Beginning. Of the 117 slides in her informative, gargantuan deck (a Meeker hallmark every

 

The physician-consumer health IT chasm: most doctors lagging in online patient support tools

In the long-run, health information technology (HIT) will improve the quality of health care, according to 73% of U.S. physicians. However, about the same number (7 in 10 physicians) believe that the ROI on health IT is inflated and that implementing EHRs will cost more, not less. Still, market forces from health insurance plans, payers and consumers are driving health IT adoption, according to Deloitte’s survey report, Physician adoption of health information technology: implications for medical practice leaders and business partners. Electronic health records (EHR) adoption and meeting meaningful use (MU) Stage 1 criteria appears strongly related to the size

 

The Slow Economy Has Slowed Health Spending

Why has health cost growth in the U.S. slowed in the past few years? It’s mostly due to the economy, argues the Kaiser Family Foundation in Assessing the Effects of the Economy on the Recent Slowdown of Health Spending. The answer to this question is important because, as the American economy recovers, it begs the next question: will costs increase faster once again as they did in previous go-go U.S. economies, further exacerbating the budget deficit problems in the long-term? KFF worked with Altarum to develop an economic model to answer these questions. The chart illustrates the predicted vs. actual

 

Bending the cost-curve: a proposal from some Old School bipartisans

Strange political bedfellows have come together to draft a formula for dealing with spiraling health care costs in the U.S. iin A Bipartisan Rx for Patient-Centered Care and System-Wide Cost Containment from the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC). The BPC was founded by Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole, and George Mitchell. This report also involved Bill Frist, Pete Domenici, and former White House and Congressional Budget Office Director Dr. Alice Rivlin who together work with the Health Care Cost Containment Initiative at the BPC. The essence of the 132-page report is that the U.S. health system is

 

The value of big data in health care = $450 billion

  Exploiting Big Data in industry is Big News these days, and nowhere is the potential for leveraging the concept greater than in health care. McKinsey & Company estimates that harnessing big data across five dimensions of health care could yield nearly one-half trillion dollars’ worth of value in The ‘big data’ revolution in healthcare. The chart summarizes McKinsey’s calculations on the value of Big Data in health care at its maximum. Before digging into the value potential, just what is Big Data in health care? Statistics and information are generated in the health care system about patients: say, during visits

 

Do doctors want patients to have full access their own medical information? It depends.

Only one-third of U.S. physicians believe that patients should have “full access” to their electronic health records, according to Patient Access to Electronic Health Records What Does the Doctor Order?, a survey conducted by Accenture, released at HIMSS13 in March 2013. Two-thirds of doctors in the U.S. are open to patients having “limited access” to their EHRs. However, the extent to which doctors believe in full EHR access for patients depends on the type of health information contained in the record. Accenture surveyed 3,700 physicians in eight countries: Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Singapore, Spain and the United States, and found the doctors’

 

Health at SXSW13 vs. HIMSS13: the Yin, the Yang, and the Blur

I endured what very few people could (or would) do in the past ten days: I traveled to New Orleans to the annual conference of HIMSS, the Health Information Management Systems Society, which features hundreds of suppliers to the health care information technology industry. I returned home to kiss my family hello and goodbye, and a day later flew to Austin for the annual South-by-Southwest conference for music, movie and digital folks. The health track at SXSW has grown over the past five years, and provides a start contrast to “health care” as embodied at HIMSS, and “health” translated through

 

Bill Clinton’s public health, cost-bending message thrills health IT folks at HIMSS

In 2010, the folks who supported health care reform were massacred by the polls, Bill Clinton told a rapt audience of thousands at HIMSS13 yesterday. In 2012, the folks who were against health care reform were similarly rejected. President Clinton gave the keynote speech at the annual HIMSS conference on March 6, 2013, and by the spillover, standing-room-only crowd in the largest hall at the New Orleans Convention Center, Clinton was a rock star. Proof: with still nearly an hour to go before his 1 pm speech, the auditorium was already full with only a few seats left in the

 

Eric Topol creatively destroys medicine at #HIMSS13

Wearing his Walking Gallery jacket painted by (im)patient advocate, Regina Holliday, Dr. Eric Topol evangelized the benefits of digital medicine and consumer empowerment in health care, largely summarizing his epic (pun intended – wait for Hot Point, below) book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine. A founder of the West Wireless Health Institute (now known as West Health), Dr. Topol is a physician and researcher at Scripps and was recently named as editor at Medscape. A new piece of Topol Trivia for me is that GQ magazine called him a rock star of science. Dr. Topol is one of the more

 

A health economics lesson from Jonathan Bush, at the helm of athenahealth

At HIMSS13 there are the equivalent of rock stars. Some of these are health system CIOs and health IT gurus who are driving significant and positive changes in their organizations, like Blackford Middleton, Keith Boone, Brian Ahier, and John Halamka. Others are C-level execs at health IT companies. In this latter group, many avoid the paparazzi (read: health trade reporters) and stay cocooned behind closed doors in two-story pieces of posh real estate on the exhibition floor. A few walk the floor, shake hands with folks, and take in the vibe of the event. We’ll call them open-source personalities. The

 

Patients globally would embrace Jetsons-style health care…but will health providers?

Patients are getting comfortable with remote health care – that is, receiving care from a health provider at a distance via, say, telehealth or via a Skype-type of set-up. Furthermore, 70% of people globally saying they would trust an automated device to provide a diagnosis that would help them determine whether or note they needed to see a doctor. Based on the findings from Cisco‘s survey summarized in the Cisco Connected Customer Experience Report – Healthcare, published March 4, 2013, just-in-time for the annual 2013 HIMSS conference, a majority patients the world over are embracing health care delivered via communications

 

The future of sensors in health care – passive, designed, integrated

Here’s Ann R., who is a patient in the not-too-distance-future, when passive sensors will be embedded in her everyday life. The infographic illustrates a disruption in health care for people, where data are collected on us (with our permission) that can help us improve our own self-care, and help our clinicians know more about us outside of their offices, exam rooms and institutions. In Making Sense of Sensors: How New Technologies Can Change Patient Care, my paper for the California HealthCare Foundation, I set out to organize the many types of sensors proliferating the health care landscape, and identify key

 

Digital health investment: greenhousing innovation and the accelerator

Traditional venture capital in health care is so 2010: welcome to The Greenhouse Effect: How Accelerators Are Seeding Digital Health Innovation, explained in a new report from California HealthCare Foundation written by Aaron Apodaca. Aaron clearly explains the growing interest in and influence of health accelerators, which grew out of the first era of the Internet (read: dot-com bust v 1.0) and the founding of the Y Combinator, an internet incubator that made relatively small investments in exchange for equity positions in start-ups. Health accelerators emerged around 2011, first with Rock Health in San Francisco, which was quickly followed by

 

The Accountable Care Community opportunity

“ACOs most assuredly will not…deliver the disruptive innovation that the U.S. health-care system urgently needs,” wrote Clay Christensen, godfather of disruptive innovation, et. al., in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal of February18, 2013. In the opinion piece, Christensen and colleagues make the argument that Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) as initially conceived won’t address several key underlying forces that keep the U.S. health care industry in stasis: Physicians’ behavior will have to change to drive cost-reduction. Clinicians will need “re-education,” the authors say, adopting evidence-based medicine and operating in lower-cost milieus. Patients’ behavior will have to change. This requires

 

Physicians like mobile health apps for patient health – eClinicalWorks on transformational path

A vast majority – 9 in 10 physicians – like mobile health (mHealth) apps, especially when tied to electronic health records (EHRs). eClinicalWorks surveyed physicians in January 2013, and found physicians bullish on mobile health apps for patient benefit – not just for their own office productivity and workflow. Specifically, – 93% of physicians say mobile health apps can improve patients’ health outcomes – 89% of physicians would recommend an mHealth app to a patient – 58% of doctors note a key mHealth benefit is providing patients with appointment alerts and reminders – 2 in 3 physicians say mHealth apps

 

Physician workflow: barrier to consumer health engagement?

This week, I had a conversation with a physician whom I consider quite patient-engaged, who uses an EHR, and who works with one of the most wired health organizations in the United States. I complained to her that my user-generated data from my Bodymedia armband, Fitbit, Withings scale, among other #QuantifiedSelf devices, can’t find their way through the cloud to my doctors’ electronic health records or my patient portal. Her reaction was surprising to me. She was not so keen on the idea, saying, “It’s the physician workflow” that’s the problem. The wordle on workflow comes from Dr. Chuck Webster

 

Living paycheck to paycheck: what it means for health

While 50% of Americans feel they have a sound financial position, the other half is living paycheck to paycheck. 8% say they can’t even pay for essentials. The second annual Allstate “Life Tracks” Poll finds American adults split between have’s and have not’s, with even the “have’s” feeling less than financially literate. There is an equal split between people who feel they’re in an “excellent” or “good” financial position compared with those who feel they’re in financially “fair” or “poor” shape. Men feel more financially secure than women; 3 in 4 single parents feel less well-off compared to the average

 

Managing the abundance of mHealth apps in the urban flea market

The proliferation of mobile health (mHealth) apps appears to be an abundant cornucopia of “lite” tools that look simple to access and easy to use. But this growing menu of a la carte choices that promise to keep us healthy, track our numbers, and access useful health information can also, in the words of three Dutch health researchers, “drive us crazy.” Why mobile health app overload drives us crazy, and how to restore the sanity, by Lex van Velsen and colleagues, makes the case that the plethora of mHealth apps available in online app stores is a fragmented, disorganized marketplace

 

The interoperability of consumer mHealth – reflecting on Jawbone + Massive Health + Visere

Consumers want multiple functions on single devices, smooth transitions from one screen to another, and value-laden experiences in the post-recession economy. I wrote about this phenomenon during the week of the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, highlighting Accenture’s survey on consumer attitudes toward technology — the connected home as consumer medical home. In the fast-evolving mobile health (mHealth) era, the consumer-facing suppliers are fast-responding to these customer demands. This is fostering consumer-centered interoperability in mHealth. On the health care system and professional side of health IT, getting to interoperability remains elusive and slow-going, with a customer base (hospitals, physicians) that’s not

 

More consumers want to make health care decisions

U.S. consumers’ desire to take an active role in their health decisions is growing, according to the Altarum Institute Survey of Consumer Health Care Opinions. 61% of people want to make health decisions either on their own (26%) or with input from their doctor (38%). The proportion of people wanting to be “completely in charge of my decisions” rose 4 percentage points in one year, from 2011. This statistic skews younger, with 33% of people 25-34 and 31% of those 35-44 wanting to be “completely in charge.” Only 17% of those 55-64 felt like being totally in charge of their