Biz Stone started his HIMSS12 keynote by telling the audience that he was going to talk about a few personal stories and a few assumptions. Before anyone could silently groan at the thought of the co-founder of Twitter rattling off his assumptions about the health care industry, Stone quickly added that he wouldn’t do that.
“I didn’t actually want to get into the business of telling you what your business is,” he said.
Instead he stuck to what he knows and shared insights spanning from technology to art to community. Stone’s anecdotes describing how he started Twitter translated well to a health care conference because Twitter is fundamentally an altruistic service.
This isn’t obvious on the surface. Similarly, a lot of the products and services at HIMSS don’t have altruistic aims, but they’re made to improve health care — also a fundamentally altruistic service.
Stone explained that he first started believing in Twitter’s potential when he saw it mobilize people right in front of him. He was sitting in the middle of a lecture, and suddenly people got up to leave one by one as if there had been some announcement that told them it was time to move.
“But there had been no such announcement,” he said. “I realized that people were using Twitter on their mobile phones and on their laptops to communicate amongst one another silently that there was a lecture much more interesting happening across the hall.”
In this case, Twitter allowed people to disseminate information, act on it, and temporarily move as one. A similar phenomenon would happen on a much larger and graver scale during the Arab Spring last year when protestors used Twitter to organize demonstrations against oppressive regimes.
“That became sort of the mantra for me. That if Twitter was to be a triumph that it wasn’t to be a triumph of technology. It was to be triumph of humanity,” Stone said. “And that applies to most of technology.”
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The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) announced the five semi-finalists in the Aligning Forces Challenge: AHEAD Research, Flexis, Vitality, iHealth Ventures and Ringful. The announcement coincides with the launch of the Challenge’s second phase, in which teams will further develop their solutions for assessment and evaluation of real-world impact.
The RWJF Aligning Forces Challenge launched on October 28, 2011 and asked competing developers to create applications that provide consumers access to comparative quality care metrics across the country. The applications were required to pool data from Aligning Forces for Quality, the Foundation’s signature effort to improve the quality of health care in 16 targeted communities nationwide. The Boston, Cincinnati, Detroit, Humboldt, Kansas City, Memphis, Minnesota, South Central Pennsylvania and Wisconsin communities made their data available for application integration, utilization and optimization.
“We are very excited about the Phase I results,” said Michael W. Painter, J.D., M.D. and senior program officer at RWJF. “On a small scale, the competing teams participated in seed efforts to transform health care. All of the semi-finalist teams created applications designed to help patients and consumers with their health care decision making. All of these apps attempt to present complicated information in smart ways to guide, assist and enhance that decision making. We look forward to Phase II of the challenge as the teams refine these new interesting tools.”
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Health IT conference HIMSS12 kicks off in Las Vegas today, and attendees had their choice of welcoming parties Monday night. I went to the rooftop cloud party hosted by athenahealth, provider of cloud services as well as electronic medical records and web-based software for medical practices. CEO of anthenahealth Jonathan Bush held still for a quick interview. In this video he talks about athenahealth’s newest service athenaCoordinator, and he rags on Matthew Holt for not showing up to the athena party. Bush will be the keynote speaker at the Health 2.0 Boston Conference in May.
Polyglot Systems, Inc. and CellepathicRx announced a partnership to provide medication adherence services to patients with limited English proficiency. CPRx will use its mobile health platform to bring Polyglot’s Meducation program to smart phone apps and e-mail. Meducation lets physicians and pharmacists communicate medical instructions and educational content in multiple languages.
The GSM Association predicted that the global mobile health market revenue opportunity will reach $23 billion by 2017. Europe is expected to lead that market with revenues of about $6.9 billion, while the North American market could reach $6.5 billion.
Maryland is expected to announced that all state hospitals are using its health information exchange, according to the Maryland Business Journal. This means that the state’s 46 hospitals are able transmit and receive data on admissions, discharges and transfers. However the Maryland information exchange is a fledgling system, and many hospitals can’t communicate much else besides basic data with each other.
A pre-HIMSS12 announcement came from Dell, which will partner with Siemens to share and archive medical images via a secure cloud. According to ESG Research, medical image data in North America is projected to grow more than 35 percent annually to reach nearly 2.6 terabytes by 2014. The alliance with Siemens will significantly extend Dell’s Unified Clinical Archive, which includes radiology, cardiology, neurosurgery, endoscopy, pathology and patient records data.
Telehealth provider Teladoc will launch its new program for physicians at HIMSS12. The service, called TeladocConnect, allows physicians to communicate with patients 24/7 via phone or secure online video. Practices, distribution partners and health plans can sign up for TeladocConnect, and physicians can be reimbursed for consults.
Electronic health records can lead to physician information overload, according to a recent study published in the archives of internal medicine. The study was conducted in the outpatient clinics of a large, tertiary-care Department of Veterans Affairs facility. The EHRs physicians used at the facility included an inbox for “additional signature request” — or notes that require an electronic signature. More than half of the alerts were classified as high value, or harmful if missed, but they required physicians to read through large amounts of extraneous text to find important information, according to an article in Medscape Today.
AT&T announced it will launch a beta version of the AT&T Developer Center For Health practice. The goal is to allow developers to use the open set of tools to help better integrate disparate health systems. Developers can sign up now to use the beta version of the Center and can attend codeathons, hackathons and developer boot camps held by several mobile health developer communities including HIMSS, Rock Health, StartUp Health and Health 2.0.
President Barak Obama’s proposed budget for 2013 calls for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to receive $66 million for the year — $5 million more than budgeted for ONC in 2012, according to Government Health IT. The increase would help to fund the nationwide health IT infrastructure and meaningful use incentive payments.
Ninety-one percent of small health care organizations of 250 or fewer employees experienced a data breach in the last year, according to a Ponemon Institute study sponsored by managed data provider MegaPath. The study concluded that the biggest threats to data security are negligent employees and organizations’ inability to meet compliance requirements.
Most of us don’t clip coupons or scour the Internet for the best prices on medications, but GoodRx’s Web and iPhone offerings make bargain shopping for prescriptions as simple as comparing prices for flights or HDTVs. The company participated in the Launch! panel at the Health 2.0 San Francisco 2011 Fall Conference, narrowly missing out to Basis for the best product launch of 2011.
Today the company released some concrete examples of how both the insured and the uninsured can benefit from using the application. The above table shows just a few of the examples, and the savings are apparent. Spending three or four dollars for drugs instead of $40+ out of pocket or a $10 dollar copay means that everybody can save — even those who have insurance. GoodRx advertises typical savings of 20-80%, and looking at this table, that seems like an entirely reasonable claim.
The news here is that GoodRx, performing the data aggregation we have all come to expect from Web 2.0, can have an impact on health care costs and can help bring transparency to the system. GoodRx is not only a cost saving tool, but it gives doctors an easy way to explain drug pricing and the difference between generic and brand name products to patients, when used in the office.
I spoke to GoodRx and the company would very much like to get payors on board by integrating their pricing into the system, but payors’ systems need to become a lot more accessible before that can happen. GoodRx’s offering shows how much promise there is for smart and talented people to transform health care from the outside. Unfortunately, it also highlights how much work needs to be done before we get a truly transparent and patient optimized system.
The Launch! panel is a staple of Health 2.0 conferences and will be part of our next event, Spring Fling: Matchpoint Boston in May. Apply here with your new product!
About Launch!: Launch! is a series of hand-selected, rapid fire, 3.5 minute product demos from new and buzz worthy companies. All companies or products are making their debut at Health 2.0, and will not have been seen anywhere else. At the end of the presentations, the audience votes for a winner, who is awarded an invitation to present at the 2012 Health 2.0 Fall Conference in SF.
The Cellnovo wireless diabetes management system launched this week in the United Kingdom in tandem with a usability trial in 100 patients who have type 1 diabetes. The Cellnovo system includes an insulin pump that wirelessly connects to a touchscreen, cellular-enabled handheld glucose monitoring device.
Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a mobile app called Mobilyze that uses nearly 40 phone sensor values, such as GPS, ambient light and social contacts, to predict the user’s mood. Based on its predictive model, the app prompts patients to take actions designed to stave off depressive episodes. An initial 8 person evaluation published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research showed significant benefit from use of the app.
The Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT launched another app competition challenging software development teams to create an app that makes it easy for disabled people to access the data in electronic health records.
Mobile telemetry provider CardioNet which provides outpatient cardiac monitoring servies announced the acquisition of ECG Scanning & Medical Services, another cardiac monitoring provider, for $5.8 million.
DSS, Inc., a VistA software developer, debuted a new Mental Health Kiosk solution designed to collect clinical information including psychological evaluations directly from patients during check-in. The Kiosk integrates with the existing DSS Mental Health Suite, an EHR module already available at all Veterans Affairs’ Medical Centers.
HIPAA-compliant messaging platform company TigerText has raised $8.2M in a Series A round with participants including Easton Capital and New Science Ventures. The company offers a SaaS-based Web-to-mobile, device-to-device communications similar to that offered by Doximity.
Doximity, a mobile phone-based physician social network and communications platform founded by Epocrates co-founder Jeff Tangney, unveiled its new iRounds platform this week, which allows doctors and medical students to chat in a HIPAA-secure forum in real time about patient cases and new research.
A new study by Deloitte Access Economics finds that using hospital-in-the-home programs in lieu of inpatient care could cut governmental healthcare costs by a third. The study looked closely at programs in Australia already providing acute, sub-acute, and post-acute care in the home. Hospital-in-home care was cheaper for all AR-DRGs examined (cellulitis, venous thrombosis, pulmonary embolus, respiratory infection, inflammation, COPD, and knee replacement) with an estimated cost savings of $108.6M for those conditions alone.
AGNITY Healthcare debuted a new platform bringing disparate health care communications streams. The APTUS platform unifies communications (paging, voice, video, presence, location, alerts and other notifications) with real-time mobile access to clinical information (EMR, CPOE, PACs, etc.) on widely used smart phones and tablet devices.
HealthyCircles has partnered with ICLOPS and will offer the ICLOPS Registry and Analytics portfolio solution as part of its care coordination and management platform. The partnership will layer enhanced analytics capabilities on top of the current HealthyCircles data sharing tools facilitating quality reporting and quality improvement activities.
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced that is has collected genetic information from about 23,000 veterans at 40 health care facilities with an additional 30,000 veterans having agreed to participate in the program. Launched in May 2011, the Million Veteran Program seeks to enroll one million veterans and study their genetic material in tandem with clinical information stored in their electronic health records.
UnitedHealth Group announced that its Optum health-services unit will launch a new cloud-computing platform to facilitate the exchange of electronic health data across multiple devices and locations. The platform will allow health providers and insurers to share data, as well as access health applications from outside developers. Optum is also developing an app market for apps aimed at hospitals, physicians and health plans. Optum plans to charge for data storage, as well as collect fees for putting developers’ apps in the cloud. A beta launch is planned for June 2012.
Lumeris, provider of cloud-based services and software for accountable care delivery, is joining Highmark, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, Independence Blue Cross in buying NaviNet, a healthcare communications network used by physicians, payers and hospitals. The deal would combine Lumeris’ care coordination and integration platform with NaviNet’s network for secure provider communications.
Royal Philips Electronics announced a partnership with eHealth Global Technologies (eHGT), provider of IT solutions for medical record retrieval. eHGT’s services are specifically designed to reduce the time cancer patients spend waiting for their first oncology appointment by gathering diagnostic imaging and other data and presenting it on demand at the oncologist’s point-of-care.
AirStrip Technologies announced a strategic investment from Qualcomm’s recently announced $100M Life Fund. Qualcomm launched its 2net platform at the mHealth Summit last year, where AirStrip was named as one of its partners.
The West Wireless Health Institute, a healthcare technology not-for-profit, announced a newly created wireless framework for hospitals and health systems. The wireless installation standard is intended to ensure reliable and secure transmission of medical data over wireless networks. The reference architecture has already been deployed at six hospitals and health systems.
Apixio, provider of clinical data integration, search and analytics in healthcare, has joined Open Health Tools (OHT). OHT is an open source community that builds standards-based interoperability tools for applications used by patients and their care providers to access vital and reliable medical information.
Acting CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner signaled that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid may re-examine and consider an extension of the ICD-10 implementation timeline. Details on the extension are forthcoming.
WellPoint will use Health Language’s LEAP I-10 tool to facilitate its transition to full ICD-10 compliance.
We were impressed by Mission Bicycle’s story about a creative biker who used a GPS tracking health app to send his Valentine a geo-art heart drawn over the streets of San Francisco.
As you can see from the screen shots, Payam burned about 1,135 calories to complete a 27 mile San Francisco bike ride in the rough shape of a heart. He then sent the results to his long distance girlfriend, Clare, since the weren’t able to spend the holiday together. Payam explained, “I recently moved to San Francisco from Toronto to start a new job, so Clare and I have been doing the long distance thing for the past few months. I wanted to do something a little different to surprise her on Valentine’s Day. I was excited by the possibility of drawing shapes on a map based on the path I ride. We’re both really fascinated by maps and they’ve been a common point of interest throughout our relationship.”
The app used for this stunt was Strava, a GPS tracker and data utility layer that works with Android, iPhone and Garmin. The clean visual platform allows users to share detailed exercise routes with friends and lets them keep track of their favorite trails. Strava also offers competition based features, showing you the other athletes who have covered the same ground so you can see how your own time stacks up.
Geo-Art has been around for a while, hovering in the wings with other nerdy activities like geo-cashing which might become a little more popular with the ubiquity of GPS enabled cell phones. Similar creative location, proxy and augmented reality technologies are slowly but surely making their way into mainstream health and wellness culture; offering people a new way to think about outdoor activity and how their environment might effect their health. Applications like The Eatery, Run Keeper, Coke Zero’s Tron Live Cycles and, one of Health 2.0′s earliest code-a-thon winners, Healthy Commute have all made good use of social geo-location tools. But Payam’s Valentine is a reminder to health app developers that there is still plenty of room for improvement.
At Health 2.0 we’re rapidly gearing up for Spring Fling: Matchpoint Boston, where we’ll be focusing on the transformative partnerships that are shaping the healthcare industry. We’ll be tackling the big questions of what it takes to form a successful collaboration and we’ll be shining the spotlight on the most innovative deals in Health 2.0’s history.
KEYNOTE
athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush will tell us about the journey from a startup to becoming one of the biggest companies delivering health technology services to physicians, and how they had to work with customers and other vendors to get there.
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In 1999 PersonalMD & HealthCompass were some of the new personal health records (PHRs) where you could store health data and share it with others who needed to see it. They were basically vaults, they rarely even had data linked to a drug or condition database–just plain text, and they couldn’t get data out of larger systems. And they were not successful.
Later PHRs tried to overcome these problems by making it easier to import data from other systems (think geting your drug data from Walgreens) and linking to other reference databases (so that when you enter a drug name the right spelling comes up and it can tell you about interactions, etc).
There was (and still is) the problem of how to get paper documents into the record. MyMedicalRecords.com allows you to fax in paper records to make PDFs, and has burned through some $30m in 5 years (and I was pretty cynical about them from the start). Of course even getting much of this right didn’t help many early PHRs like WellMed which went through some $40m before being sold to WebMD for $20m and iMetrikus (now Numera) which spent some $75m (est) of Chiron Founder William Rutter’s money before completely changing models.
CareZone is the product of ex-Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s last two years since the fire-sale to Oracle. It was introduced to an adoring bunch of journalists yesterday including Techcrunch’s Eric Eldon, Robert Scoble, and Xconomy’s Wade Roush. All of them continue to confirm to me that they don’t much understand this market and they fawn over former techies who think that they’ve discovered health care nirvana. I really cannot see what the fuss is about. They’re all fascinated by the fact that this doesnt link to Facebook and somehow keeping instructions to take Johnny to the doctor off the Twitter feed is a huge advance. But none of them see the really basic flaws in CareZone or seem to have any history of what’s happened in this market before.
Given that I make my living promoting new health technology companies, it pains me to have to poke holes, but as far as I can see CareZone–which is marketed as a site that allows a small group of caregivers to manage their family’s care–is basically a 1999 PHR mixed with a to-do list, much like RallyRound (from the UK) or LottsaHelpingHands.
Worse, those advances of recent PHRs–including importing conditions, documents, medical records, drug lists, from other systems–are absent. Continue reading →
We are extremely excited to announce the launch of a new Investing in Innovations mobile app challenge, the “EHR Accessibility Module Challenge.”
Improving Access to Health Records
ONC’s mission includes reducing health disparities, ensuring secure and protected patient health information and reducing health care costs. As such, we are challenging multidisciplinary teams to create and test modules or applications that make it easy for people with disabilities to access their health information stored in electronic health records (EHRs).Individuals with disabilities constitute approximately 19 percent of the non-institutionalized population five years of age or older. Their health expenditures are estimated at $400 billion annually, more than a quarter of the national total (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).
Health information technology (health IT) and EHRs hold great promise in improving the health outcomes and coordination of care for people with disabilities. The accessibility and usability of health IT are matters of serious concern to people with wide ranges of disabilities, including those who suffer visual, auditory, intellectual, manual dexterity, mental health, developmental and other types of disabilities.
Mobile App Challenge Details
Do you think you have a game-changing design idea that can help improve access to health records for people with disabilities?
Now is the time to prove it! Submissions are due by July 23, 2012.
Keep in mind, ease of use will play a significant role in determining the winner as it is an area that desperately needs innovative thinking. Advances that help people with disabilities interact with their electronic health information could also expand into widespread use.
A range of prizes will be awarded to the highest finishers. The winner will receive $60,000 and an opportunity to demo the solution at a future, prominent conference!
Complete details about this challenge are available here.
Wil Yu is the Special Assistant Innovations ONC Office of the Chief Scientist.
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