We look forward to Wednesday, April 4th for the Healthbox Investor Day.
Good Luck CareWire and the Class of 2012
Thank you to our wonderful event sponsors for making this day possible -- ATT, Allscripts, AARP, BloomHealth, Breakthrough Technologies
We are pleased to announce CareWire - patient engagement that pays for itself.
CareWire is a patient engagement solution that utilizes automated patient text messaging to increase billable appointment yield, visualize patient satisfaction in near-real-time and improve provider performance.
CareWire is a new product offering by HHI (Healthy Heartland Inc) and is gearing up for multiple pilots during Q1, 2012.
CareWire has been selected to participate in the HealthBox healthcare business accelerator.
CareWire helps providers generate more revenue from existing patients by guiding patients to and through their appointment using automated text messaging.
Here are just a few of the advantages CareWire delivers for providers and patients:
CareWire's technology partner is SmartBase Solutions.
Watch for more information on CareWire throughout 2012 and beyond.
Our friends at 94 Westbound Consulting (a Chicago-based technology innovation company with whom we partner) referred us to this excellent article which features Marc Andreessen. Andreessen, you'll recall, literally started the commercialization of the web with 1995's Netscape IPO. In the spirit of disclosure: This post is currently being written on FireFox, but Andreessen's contributions and thought are no less important.
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software...
Think about the ways that we communicate with patients, families, and stakeholders. How many of these methods rely on software? Further, how many of these methods rely on software which in turn, relies on other software? Finally, where does all of this software reside?
In short, it's the uquitity, low cost, and combinability of software that can ultimately change the way that we engage with healthcare which is a powerful takeway from Andreessen's thesis.
Market projections say revenues from connected healthcare products could reach upwards of $5 billion in the next few years. Chances of actually hitting these numbers remain contingent upon the market’s ability to develop devices and services that are truly patient-centric.
On Wednesday June 15, David Nichols from Healthy Heartland will moderate the Empowering the Patient panel featuring innovators and entrepreneurs in healthcare who will discuss how they kept the patient at the forefront of their development plans, and how a strategy of empowering the patient can ultimately lead to even greater opportunities as we move ahead.
Panelists include:
2011 Gold Lab Symposium, May 13-14: Progress & Issues in Personalized Medicine
On Saturday May 14, Scott Danielson from Healthy Heartland will be moderating the Healthcare Delivery Panel featuring luminary presenters from Mayo Clinic, University of Michigan, UCSD, University of Texas, and Brandeis University.
This is the second year in a row that Healthy Heartland has been part of this influential symposium.
Can a Better Healthcare Operating System Make Us Healthier?
This was a key question we considered as we developed “Health Transformation 2.0” now available for download.
Our goal with this document is to add to the conversation underway across our healthcare system – not necessarily by inventorying the problems (much has been written about this topic), but by presenting a set of inspiring futures possible through people-centered design, self-health, and connected care.
We hope you’ll take a look, and we look forward to your impressions and comments.
We’re just back from CES 2011 in Las Vegas. The primary purpose of our trip was to explore recent innovations in the world of connected healthcare. More specifically, we were interested to see how technology, particularly body-worn technology, was progressing in support of health and wellness.
Of course, body-worn devices that collect, mine, and display data in meaningful ways are central to many expert systems including the practice of modern medicine, the art of modern warfare and the world of elite sport. In each case, the data displayed requires various degrees of expertise to interpret and provide meaning to the end user (whether practitioner, user, or subject).
Until recently, each variation of sensing device was paired with proprietary software written for each specific application. Without an expert interpreter, these data displays were often no more useful than a seemingly random arrangement of tea leaves at the bottom of a tea cup.
This display showcases a tremendous data capture capability, but for the user, what does this all mean? How should someone respond to this seeming blizzard of data on display?
Over the years, we have worked closely with expert systems to improve usability, portability and cross-applicability of data sources and corresponding displays for years now. What we find particularly exciting these past few years is how the elite world of expert systems, particularly in body-worn devices, is influencing consumer grade devices more and more everyday. This is what we went to Vegas to devour.
One truly exciting innovation in the body-worn and personal device space is ANT+ radio technology which is now owned and promoted by GARMIN, the renowned maker of GPS tech. ANT provides a low-power transmitting technology and standard that can be used by a wide range of devices including those pictured in the graphic below:
ANT, along with better-known consumer technology Bluetooth, provides easy and inexpensive ways to move sensor data from sensors to hubs through a growing assortment of aggregating and display devices including smart watches and phones. At this year’s Digital Health Pavilion, where we spent nearly all of our time at CES, the growth of sensors and aggregators and displays was truly notable over year’s past. Here are some of the highlights.
From Withings, both a smart scale (which we are now testing) and a smart blood pressure cuff:
From ZEO - an amazing new device and supporting platform that analyzes ones sleep performance (which we are also testing):
From Digifit, a powerful new aggregating display that can integrate several sensor devices including both the Withings scale and the Zeo sleep system, along with an extensive array of fitness and wellness sensors:
We were also inspired and entertained by some sexy new offerings from sports innovators Adidas and Nike:
All in all, it was a great show with a rich assortment of participants from healthcare, the military, sport and increasingly, a broad range of health and wellness apps showing promise for everyone else. We were grateful to have been in attendance. Can’t wait ‘til next year.
Oh yes, and we can’t forget to mention an exciting new technology from Metalogics, a company not yet showing at CES but with whose CEO, John Dykstra, Scott walked the floor. John’s company has created the first body worn device that actually and precisely measures the calories our bodies burn 24/7. Check it out at: www.metalogicscorp.com
That said, we must again raise the question that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue:
During a recent talk to promote his new book, The Chemistry of Calm, Minnesotan psychiatrist and author Dr. Henry Emmons told an audience of 280 people how our diets affect our ability to handle anxiety and stress.
“The right foods will help to balance your brain chemistry by fueling the production of seratonin and other brain chemicals that we need to make us more resilient,” Emmons said. Then he went on to explain how the wrong foods can lead to the number-one cause of disability in the United States: depression.
“Do you know how much time it takes, once a patient has uttered the word ‘depression’ during a doctor's visit, to get a prescription for an SSRI [selective seratonin uptake inhibitor]? About four and a half minutes,” said Emmons. “But after six months of drug therapy, the best rate of remission is only 11 percent; and the average is just 4 percent!”
Emmons countered that resilience training – a program he runs at the Penny George Institute for Healing and Health in Minneapolis – has a success rate of 60 percent.
“We start with this premise,” said Emmons. “Resilience is our nature. And with the right combination of diet, plus exercise and mindfulness, we can preserve it.”
Specifically, according to Emmons, a diet that promotes healthy brain function should include these five elements:
1. Whole, natural food free of artificial ingredients
“We’re putting things into our bodies that don’t belong there,” said Emmons. “Our bodies evolved over thousands of years to eat natural, unprocessed foods. Can we metabolically handle all the chemicals that are now being added? And how many nutrients are we losing to processing?” He suggested we follow one of Michael Pollan’s food rules: “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t have recognized as food.”
2. Foods rich in omega-3 fats
Emmons advised that we all eat more omega-3 fats, which protect and nourish the brain and our nervous systems, reduce inflammation, and help us metabolize glucose more efficiently. The ideal ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 fats in our system is 1:1, but modern diets can tip the balance to 1:30, which, said Emmons, promotes an inflammatory response that’s particularly hard on the brain. He recommended adding as much olive oil as possible to our diets, and eat only animals that are grass-fed because of the high omega-3 levels in their meat.
3. Fewer calories
Emmons said there is mounting research that suggests that simplycutting back on calories improves health and longevity. But Americans are doing the opposite; our calorie consumption keeps increasing. The number one culprit? High fructose corn syrup, according to Emmons. “HFCS is another reason to avoid processed foods. It’s in almost everything,” he said. “It was introduced into our diets 30 years ago, and during the same period of time, obesity and diabetes has skyrocketed. And diabetes is a disease that affects the entire body, including brain.”
4. Mostly fruits and vegetables
Emmons suggested that we eat like we do in the summer, all year round. “Eat light, fresh foods, including lots of green vegetables and colorful fruits,” he said. “These foods are high in antioxidants and rich in phytonutrients, both of which are needed for optimal brain health.” And, of course, he advised, buy them free of chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.
5. Small amounts of lean protein with every meal
“Eat modest amounts of lean protein with every meal,” advised Emmons, “to stabilize blood sugar levels, which, in turn, enhance serotonin production.” Emmons did point out that we should rely less on meat as a protein source and more on beans and legumes, both high in a variety of complex carbohydrates, which further help regulate insulin.
Why is it so difficult to understand the test results we receive from our healthcare providers? Why has there been so little innovation in how important measures of our health are put into context? Why do we still receive our results in the mail?
A recent issue of Wired magazine tackled a basic blood work-up (with assistance from Mucca Design), and the results are impressive.
For people who have not been to a doctor in the past 10 years, here is an example of what they started with:
When we become sick, one of the first things offered by healthcare providers is often a pamphlet which describes what we have and what we may need to do in order to become well. Usually, these look like:
For many, this is merely the first step in a stressful quest for more information.
Consider this quote from Pat Furlong, Founding President and CEO of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy (PPMD), the largest nonprofit organization in the United States solely focused on Duchenne muscular dystrophy, who learned that her son had been diagnosed with Duchenne, a fatal disease effecting 1 out of 3,500 boys (Pat presented with us at the 2010 GoldLab Symposium):
“Your child is ill. A disease you may not recognize? Cannot pronounce? What Choice do you have? You become, by definition, an advocate. You will have to educate family, extended family, friends, teachers, doctors”
At the very least, these situations encourage many patients, and the ones who love them, to begin gathering as much information about their condition as possible. In fact there are a variety of resources that assist with taking knowledge of many diseases to a deeper level:
Why does this matter?
Consider these barriers to communicating healthcare information effectively:
Conversely, consider patient perspectives when it comes to receiving information:
The PAST may be characterized as “...the age of the ‘knowledge worker,’ the well-educated manipulator of information and deployer of expertise…” and by “...thinking that is narrowly reductive and deeply analytical.” Successful initiatives in the FUTURE will be characterized by human interactions that might be referred to as “High Concept…the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new” and “High Touch…the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.” – Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind
HHI was recently invited by the International Diabetes Center to consider the topic of Productive Interactions as a means of improving the health of diabetes patients and the effectiveness of clinicians.
In yet another example of disruptive innovation, Target Clinic will join CVS’ MinuteClinic in offering A1c testing at select locations.
These tests are powered by Bayer’s low cost A1CNow+ device.
“Excellent care comes down to good conversations.” – Maggie Breslin, Mayo Center for Innovation
"The least financially rewarding thing you can do is to meet with a patient, and within patient care, the least rewarding thing you can do is to talk. And diabetes care is talk." - Dr. Kenneth Snow, Joslin Diabetes Center
A centerpiece of Diabetes care is the chronic care model. “Productive Interactions” describes ways that information is exchanged between clinicians, patients, and their families in order to improve patient health.
The opportunity implicit in Productive Interactions is how to use, identify and isolate information about Diabetes and other chronic diseases and structure it in a way that allows patients, clinicians, and families to collaborate in care.
Recently, HHI spoke to patients about their experience with Diabetes. These conversations with children and adults from a variety of backgrounds revealed the emotional aspects of disease as well as the challenges that come with adapting to a new lifestyle.
A key area of insight came from understanding how patients process information and key shortcomings in the information they receive from clinicians designed to help them manage their disease.
The problem may lie in our emphasis on managing sickness (at the expense of wellness). HHI recently presented at the GoldLab Symposium. A fellow presenter was David Lawrence, former CEO of Kaiser Permanente. Here David described the current sick-care system:
In short, we have done a good job building a sick care system at the expense of virtually all other aspects:
The opportunity is to move toward a more balanced healthcare system. But how?
Thanks to David M. Lawrence for these images
As recently related to HHI by a former chief medical officer:
“patients care primarily about three things in this order: 1) Don’t hurt me; 2) Heal me; and a distant 3) Be nice to me”
HHI was invited to partner with a large integrated health system to explore ways to improve their patient’s healthcare experience. During this project, we had the opportunity to explore many aspects of care delivery – ranging from primary care encounters between physicians and patients, to the handling of patient needs regarding test results, appointment scheduling, billing and reimbursement.
One of the core principles which emerged from this work is the concept of IQ + EQ. It turns out that patients (like any other consumer segment) want the practice of first-rate medical care combined with the ability to anticipate and respond to their emotional needs – emotional needs which may vary based on treatment received.
Given this perspective, let’s consider the above CMO’s list through the patient’s eyes:
The combination of IQ (which is expected and anticipated) and EQ (which can often surprise and delight and ultimately contribute to the patient’s healing) is what separates truly great health care from simply good enough.
A new report from UnitedHealth Group states that half the country could have Diabetes or Pre-diabetes at a Cost of $3.35 Trillion by 2020.
This recent report from Simon Stevens and UnitedHealth’s Center for Health Reform and Modernization is a big story.
Diabetes currently affects about 27 million Americans and is one of the fastest-growing diseases in the nation. Another 67 million Americans are estimated to have pre-diabetes, or metabolic syndrome. There are often no symptoms, and many people do not even know they have the disease. In fact, more than 60 million Americans do not know that they have pre-diabetes. Experts predict that one out of three children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes in their lifetimes, putting them at grave risk for heart and kidney disease, nerve damage, blindness and limb amputation.
New estimates show diabetes and pre-diabetes will account for an estimated 10 percent of total health care spending by the end of the decade at an annual cost of almost $500 billion – up from an estimated $194 billion this year.
How did we get here?
The bigger story is, of course, how we arrived at this point and where we go from here…
HHI recently presented at the inaugural GoldLab Symposium. The title of the presentation was Patient-Centered Care Perspectives: Views from where we stand, sit, and lie down.
A complete list of the presentations from this symposium are available here
HHI