There’s a fairly new Thai restaurant near Union Square in San Francisco that’s my favorite. They run a special promotion with a punch card that lets you get one free buffet bowl for every 10 you buy. I was the second person in the restaurant’s history to get a free bowl because I’m there all the time. I’ve definitely visited more than five times in the past 60 days, which is the amount the current Foursquare mayor of the restaurant has been.
So why aren’t I the mayor of my favorite Thai restaurant? Because I don’t use Foursquare.
Foursquare depicts an incomplete picture of traffic for a couple of reasons:
- Not everyone participates.
- The check-in requires the manual act of checking in.
This is unlike Placeme, a free mobile app that doesn’t require check-ins. It’s continually running, continually tracking the places you visit. It’s an app that’s always capturing data without the user having to lift a finger.
That’s the direction healthcare apps are headed. Technology is getting so advanced and automated that the barrier to collecting certain types of data is becoming lower and lower.
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Maybe you’ve never heard CEO of athenahealth Jonathan Bush speak about what he does before. And anyone in the audience at Health 2.0 Spring Fling who hadn’t must have been surprised.
Bush often describes himself and his company by doing impersonations of various caricatures. He turned into Scrappy-Doo to explain his personal style of running the company. Bush was asked by an audience member if he’s always been so energetic, from the beginning of athena.
“You need to get attention any way you can. If you break a leg or piss someone off, it doesn’t matter,” Bush said. “And getting out in front, taking all the intellectual and emotional energy of your company, stealing it, driving it into you [allow five seconds to morph into Scrappy] … that’s really good.”
Athenahealth creates cloud-based business services for physicians. Bush co-founded the company with U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park in 1997. Now, though the company is ever proactively looking for partners, it’s in the position to be approached instead of just doing the approaching.
Bush described three maxims for small startups as they look to parter:
1. Don’t bite off more than you can chew
2. You need your partner’s “id” as well as its signature
3. Culture trumps capability
On the last point, Bush described how clicking with the actual people behind the partnership makes a huge difference when making sure the joint effort is successful. He talked about one instance when he felt the click through a partnership with the Ohio State Medical Association.
“It was just hugs! Somebody who sees me for who I am. In fact, I think it’s that they see athena for who she is more than me in particular. But that feeling makes you share so much more with that person. Go so much further out of your way to make things work for them,” Bush said.
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The law book is only symbolic. The truth is, there isn’t a health information technology law manual. Many health tech companies are trying things that have never been done before and, therefore, will run into legal issues the field hasn’t seen before. That said, members of the law panel at Health 2.0 Spring Fling explained what they do know about HIT law based on their experiences as well as what is currently in writing. Here’s a few of their key take aways.
Karie Rego, Sheppard Mullin
On practicing medicine across state lines
Rego talked about her daughter who has a rare disease called kawasaki’s. She said there are only two doctors in the country who treat this disease regularly ― one in San Diego, CA, in the state where Rego lives, and one in Boston, MA. When her daughter was being treated for her disease, Rego often talked on the phone with the Boston doctor. Practicing telemedicine across state lines can raise some issues.
“The first thing whenever I work with a company is deciding is there a chance that what we’re doing here is medical care? And if it is, then where does it fall into that state rubric? And oftentimes that involves taking a look at different states where you’re operating.
It might, in some cases, involve limiting your business plan to certain types of states, at least initially, so you can get a handle on it. So you’re not running into problems with respect to the practice of medicine in different states. The boards of medicine can be extremely aggressive.”
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On the Health 2.0 Show we announced our lineup for the Launch! session in Boston on May 15th. Launch! is a series of rapid-fire, back-to-back, 3.5 minute demos from new buzz-worthy companies. The audience will vote to determine which company gets invited to demo on the main stage during the Health 2.0 Fall Conference in San Francisco. This session is a crowd favorite and we’re happy to bring it to our Spring Fling.
Here are our 10 Launch! participants:
Cobalt Therapeutics has a portfolio of online cognitive behavioral health programs.
HealthSouk is an online marketplace and bazaar, of sorts, for health care services.
Kinergy Health is a private health care network for patients and caregivers to manage their communication with health care team members and facilities.
RealMealz is web and mobile application focused on teaching new and occasional cooks the skills, recipes and telling them what ingredients they need to make healthy and delicious meals.
BetterDoctor is a new doctor search tool that helps users find the best doctor for their needs in their area.
function Medicine is a wellness program based on easy to use, but complex weekly baseline health assessments.
Novi Medicine is an online dermatology service with diagnosis and treatment for skin conditions.
Thryve is an online and mobile food tracker and coach.
eTherpi is a comprehensive online behavioral health portal, video chat service, and practice management solution for therapists.
OnPulse is a secure, online platform for healthcare providers and patients to share information with each other and patients.
Editor’s Note: This post first ran May 1. After each company launched this afternoon at Health 2.0 Matchpoint Boston, audience members voted on their favorite startup. Thryve came in first place with about 20% of the votes. Congratulations!
Boston was a beautiful 80 degreess today, but inside athenahealth’s headquarters, developers kept their heads cool while the competition heated up. Health 2.0′s Boston Code-a-thon is a coding competition designed around using big data to build exciting new applications and tools to improve health care. Health 2.0 partnered with athenahealth, AT&T, and MIT’s H@cking Medicine to throw the event. Developers had access to AT&T’s mHealth API, as well as athenahealth’s API and data. You’ll find a slideshow of the event and a list of the great ideas and big winners below.
1st - $4,000
And an invite to Health 2.0′s Spring Fling: Matchpoint Boston and athenahealth’s More Disruption Please conference.
No Sleep Kills: Poor sleep health from conditions like sleep apnea leads to increased risk of car crashes and other dangerous accidents. Almost two million drivers crash because of fatigue each year. The No Sleep Kills app creates a portal where patients/professionals can review and access data regarding sleep risks by state and compare to national averages. The application uses big data to compare sleep-related car crashes with rates of sleep apnea and related conditions like obesity. The team’s next step is to compare sleep-related accident data with sleep apnea testing expenditures on a state by state basis. No Sleep Kills showed us an application of big data to a little publicized issue that is actually a serious problem.
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In another sign of how strong the Boston health-tech and developer communities are, more than 70 participants shirked the perfect weather and blue bird skies to huddle inside to improve health care. They came together to generate and implement innovative ideas on how to use big data in health at Health 2.0′s Boston Big Data Code-A-Thon. Participants included developers, designers, MD’s, entrepreneurs and a range of others, including speakers from Blueprint Health, athenahealth and AT&T. The participants also represented a wide-array of organizations, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Aetna, athenahealth, among others.
Despite the fact that more than $10,000 in cash and prizes are to be given out for the day, the money was not the primary motivator for many.
“I’m mostly interested in seeing what’s out there and what I can learn about data analysis,” said Bobby Cahill, a developer who specializes in PHP programming in a non-health care industry.
Brad Weinberg, MD, co-founder of Blueprint Health, a health incubator based in NYC, spoke about how “entrepreneurs commonly make two mistakes: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 mistakes are the mistakes you realize you make, while type 2 are the opportunities that you miss.”
Without doubt, the folks at the code-a-thon have become true risk takers and opportunists simply by showing up and are unlikely to make type 2 mistakes.
Code-a-thon winners are expected to be announced around 7pm EST and will be posted on Health 2.0 News later in the evening.
MedHelp hosts hundreds of forums for medical questions online. The company’s CEO John de Souza will join us for a fireside chat at Spring Fling: Matchpoint Boston.
Indu Subaiya: You said you can’t decide if you like something until you’re good at it. I’ve used the other side of that statement in my own life which is if you love something a lot, you have to love it enough to be bad at it for a while. I like this idea of being brave enough to suck at something.
John de Souza: That’ll be right. To me, a good example is being a parent. There’s something I knew I love from the day you see the kids, but being bad is a good example. I need to learn how to be a good parent and that’s the time to go through it and trying to figure out what it means — what does it mean to do it well. And so there are some things where you naturally know that you’ll love it and you want to go through and invest as much time as it takes to get good at it, and for me that was a good experience. Education is another thing, how to invest in it.
And then there are things that for whatever reason you want to try until you’re good at it you’re not going to do. You’re not going to know what it is like to really enjoy it. And we live — often in the generation we live in, too may things I think, treatment is to have a very short attention, it’s a very good example. When the kids started playing golf, a bunch of other people started playing golf as well and they all dropped out very quickly because when you play golf you get good in a matter of hours. But in reality, it takes years to get good at.
So a lot of what we live in right now, people want that quick gratification, and if you don’t get good very quickly, people lose interest, and then I think you need that above these, I can pursue it for a long time and eventually I’ll get good.
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You might not have heard of the Choosing Wisely campaign yet, but there’s been more talk about it in the blogosphere and in the news since the movement launched last year. Especially since one of the groups behind the campaign, the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation, recently released a list of 45 medical tests or procedures that they say are overused and sometimes unhelpful.
The campaign aims to reduce health spending and patient harm by encouraging both doctors and patients to carefully think about what makes a test or procedure necessary.
The ABIM Foundation and Consumer Reports put together an impressive list of partner medical organizations in addition to collaborators participating on behalf of patients. Alliance Health Networks officially joined that group today. The organization operates more than 50 condition-specific social networks made up of 1.5 million patients.
Alliance Health is going to start leveraging that reach by launching topic pages that open up the health care spending conversation within online communities. The pages will feature articles, videos and discussion boards.
Choosing Wisely argues against physicians giving patients routine tests like X-rays, stress tests and CT scans in certain situations, even though many patients are comfortable with the exams; patients feel they’re taking preventative measures just in case something might be wrong. But the problem, professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice H. Gilbert Welch explained in a recent op-ed, is that these test can lead to more and unnecessary tests and even treatments.
“‘Routine’ chest X-rays, for example, have a way of unearthing multiple abnormalities. This raises questions in physicians’ minds ― triggering CT scans, needle biopsies, bronchoscopies and even surgery in an effort to answer them,” Welch wrote.
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Matthew Holt:
I’m really excited that I’m interviewing Roys Laux, who is the GM of Health & Wellness at Angie’s List.
So let’s start off with, many people probably noticed that your folks have been at Health 2.0 a couple of times and that Angie’s List, which started off doing work for contractors, plumbers, restaurants, has now goten into rating doctors and hospitals a few years back. But just give us a sense about the role of health care within your business?
Roys Laux:
Yeah, absolutely! This is a vertical that’s growing within Angie’s List, and it’s obviously very important to us, and we continue to invest there at a very high level. Of course Angie’s List’s mission is connecting consumers with the best service providers that they need for a given service at any point in time.
And so, as you say, that started with home contractors, plumbers, roofers, handymen…because these were high cost-to-failure service providers that homeowners needed to find and didn’t have good referral sources for.
It’s interesting that those kind of same member consumers also want to shop for their doctors and don’t always have a great place to get recommendations for doctors unless they are seeking a specialist and are getting a referral from another doctor.
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Karl Zachar is VP of Business Development at athenahealth and is in charge of mergers and acquisitions and strategic partnerships. Zachar will participate in a fireside chat: The Anatomy of a Successful Partnership at Spring Fling: Matchpoint Boston. Read other interviews from the series here .
Matthew Holt: You guys have actually created a couple of new products in part by acquisition. So I want you to talk a little bit about what the product line is now and how it came to be.
Karl Zachar: I think you were referring to athenaCoordinator which was something we had on the drawing board for several years here at athena and was launched with our acquisition of ProxsysathenaCoordinator allows a real, economically sustainable model for patient referrals connecting hospitals with non-employed, affliated providers in the community.
So, we’re excited about athenaCoordinator because it’s a working example of Health Information Exchange. Think of it as a “real” HIE – one with a sustainable business model. Coordinator helps facilitate the coordination of care between “sending” providers and “receiving” providers – using athena’s terminology. Finally, we’ve created a unique model to be able to exchange information and make that information flow seamlessly and more efficiently in the transfer of a patient data from primary care physician to specialist or hospital.
Matthew Holt: And that also contributes to the bottom line, but also the physician and the hospital in terms of not only making efficiency but also some revenue transfer there as well.
Karl Zachar: So that was at the core of our thought process which ultimately led to this acquisition. The strategic problem athena wanted to solve was: how does athena create an economically sustainable model where the sending physician (in this case, the primary care physician), the receiving physician (the specialist or the hospital), the payer, and the patient all benefit from better care coordination? This is driving the strategy behind athenaCoordinator.
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