Republican Misbehavior Promoted Health Professional Activism
By MIKE MAGEE
If you wanted to create a motto for the summer of 2023 – one that would stand the test of time from the medical exam room of Ohio to the gilded bathroom of Mar-a-lago – it would have to be Jack Smith’s “Facts matter!” If that is true on a national scale, it is equally true in states across the nation where doctors increasingly are coming out from behind a self-imposed clinical curtain and going public.
As reported in ProPublica last week, “Doctors who previously never mixed work with politics are jumping into the abortion debate by lobbying state lawmakers, campaigning, forming polit...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 2, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Abortion Activism health care providers Mike Magee Physicians Trump Source Type: blogs
THCB Spotlight: Dexcare CEO, Derek Streat
According to their press release, “Dexcare is a care-access platform to manage the logistics of digital-care delivery. The platform enables healthcare systems to forecast and predict demand and manage how and where care is merchandized to consumers – throughout the digital ecosystem”. What does that mean? How does it compare to a bunch of other digital health companies trying to manager consumer operations inside providers? And having been incubated not that long ago at Providence, how has this demand generation and management service grown so fast. And why has Iconiq Growth just pushed another $75m worth of ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 1, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Matthew Holt THCB Spotlights Derek Streat DexCare Providence Source Type: blogs
THCB Gang Episode 132, Thursday July 27
Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday July 27 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are Olympic rower for 2 countries and DiME CEO Jennifer Goldsack, (@GoldsackJen); patient advocate Robin Farmanfarmaian (@Robinff3); Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard); and medical historian Mike Magee @drmikemagee.
You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels. (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 27, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Abdul Ghafar Tags: THCB Gang Jennifer Goldsack Kim Bellard Matthew Holt Mike Magee Robin Farmanfarmaian Source Type: blogs
Sach Jain, CEO of Carrum Health talks to Matthew Holt
The concept of “centers of excellence” has been around for a few decades. Surely sending health plan members and self-insured employers’ employees to the best and most effective providers should improve health outcomes and save payers’ money? Sach Jain is CEO of Carrum which has been working on this problem, partnering with the best providers and aggregating that demand from employers…and putting it all on a state of the art platform. As you might suspect, it’s not as easy as it looks. Carrum raised $45m from Omers Ventures a few weeks back, on top of a decent raise from Tiger Global a c...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 27, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Matthew Holt THCB Spotlights Care Navigation Carrum Health Centers of Excellence Sach Jain Source Type: blogs
Is More Physician-Owned Hospitals the Solution to our Health Cost problem?
BY JEFF GOLDSMITH
Robert Frost once said, “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Increasingly, in our struggling society, that place is your local full service community hospital. During COVID, if it wasn’t your local hospital standing up testing sites, pumping out vaccinations and working double overtime helping patients breathe, we would have lost several hundred thousand more of our fellow Americans.
But it wasn’t just COVID where hospitals leaped into the breach. As primary care physicians’ practices collapsed from documentation overburde...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 26, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: The Business of Health Care Affordable Care Act COVID Jeff Goldsmith Physician-Owned hospitals Source Type: blogs
Health Care, Disagree Better
BY KIM BELLARD
On one of the Sunday morning news programs Governors Spence Cox (UT) and Jared Polis (CO) promoted the National Governors Association initiative Disagree Better. The initiative urges that we practice more civility in our increasingly civilized political discourse. It’s hard to argue the point (although one can question why NGA thinks two almost indistinguishable, middle-aged white men should be the faces of the effort), but I found myself thinking, hmm, we really need to do that in healthcare too.
No one seems happy with the U.S. healthcare system, and no one seems to have any real ideas about...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 25, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Health insurance Healthcare Access Healthcare system Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
Outpatient Vascular Care: Good, bad or ugly?
BY ANISH KOKA
Filling in the holes of recent stories in the New York Times, and Propublica on the outpatient care of patients with peripheral arterial disease
Most have gotten used to egregiously bad coverage of current events that fills the pages of today’s New York Times, but even by their now very low standards a recent telling of a story about peripheral artery disease was very bad.
The scintillating allegation by Katie Thomas, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff is that “medical device makers are bankrolling doctors to perform artery clearing procedures that can lead to amputations...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 24, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Medical Practice Anish Koka Medical Devices Outpatient vascular care Source Type: blogs
Matthew ’ s tidbits: Obesity Summer
Every time I get around to sending out the THCB READER I add a short & usually not to sweet commentary on some aspect of health care.–Matthew Holt
I saw the obesity crisis up close this week. And by that I’m not just referring to my addiction to Salted Caramel with Pretzel Ice Cream, bad though it is. Instead I felt thin because I went to Disneyland. But while I tip the scales at a BMI of 30 if I’m lucky, I genuinely felt that looking around Disneyland more than 50% of the crowd were obese and many morbidly so.
The rest of my trip to Southern California was quite a contrast because I’ve be...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 24, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Matthew Holt obesity epidemic Ozempic Source Type: blogs
Truthfully, the Physician Shortage Doesn ’ t Exist!
Conclusion: For every hour physicians provide direct clinical face time to patients, nearly 2 additional hours is spent on EHR and desk work within the clinic day. Outside office hours, physicians spend another 1 to 2 hours of personal time each night doing additional computer and other clerical work. (Sinsky et al, 2016)
If we only had the tools and the administrative support that just about every one of us has been asking for, there wouldn’t be a doctor shortage.
The quote here is from 7 years ago and things have gotten even worse since then.
Major league baseball players don’t handle the scoring and the st...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 21, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Medical Practice Hans Duvefelt Physician Shortage Source Type: blogs
THCB Gang Episode 131, Thursday July 20
Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday July 20 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are futurists Jeff Goldsmith; patient advocate Robin Farmanfarmaian (@Robinff3); Suntra Modern Recovery CEO JL Neptune (@JeanLucNeptune); and our special guest Investor at Bessemer Sofia Guerra (sofiaguerrar)
You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels. (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 20, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Abdul Ghafar Tags: THCB Gang Jeff Goldsmith JL Neptune Matthew Holt Robin Farmanfarmaian Sofia Guerra Source Type: blogs
Reviewing the all-in-pod heart health segment
BY ANISH KOKA
The All-in podcast is a fairly popular show that features successful silicon valley investors commenting about everything worth commenting on from politics to health. The group has good chemistry and interesting insights that breaks the mold of the usual tribal politics that controls legacy media analysis of current events.
Last week, the podcast touched on a topic I spend a fair amount of time on: Cardiology.
Brad Gerstner, who is actually a guest host for this particular episode starts off by referencing something called Heartflow to evaluate the heart that has been recommended by one of the o...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 20, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Medical Practice All-in Podcast Anish Koka Brad Gerstner cardiology Source Type: blogs
The Sweet Spot of Health Care Cost Containment
BY BEN WHEATLEY
As health care continues to move in the direction of unaffordability, policy makers are considering a range of options to bring down health care costs. The Health Affairs Committee on Health Care Spending and Value has identified four broad areas for reform, including administrative savings, price regulation and supports for competition, spending growth targets, and value-based payment. These measures appropriately target health care’s supply side and the excesses that exist in the health care system.
In this blog, I would like to highlight another avenue for savings: one that focuses on the demand ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 19, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Ben Wheatley Health Care Cost Containment Health care spending Source Type: blogs
No, the Poor Don ’ t Always Have to Be With Us
BY KIM BELLARD
OK, for you amateur (or professional) epidemiologists among us: what are the leading causes of death in the U.S.? Let’s see, most of us would probably cite heart disease and cancer. After that, we might guess smoking, obesity, or, in recent years, COVID. But a new study has a surprising contender: poverty.
It’s the kind of thing you might expect to find in developing countries, not in the world’s leading economy, the most prosperous country in the world. But amidst all that prosperity, the U.S. has the highest rates of poverty among developed countries, which accounts in no small part ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 18, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Anti-Poverty Medicine Kim Bellard TANF Source Type: blogs
Health Tech ’s Magic Wand: The Anti-Social Bent of Modern Medicine
BY MIKE MAGEE
In George Packer’s classic 2013 New Yorker article titled “Change the World: Silicon Valley transfers its slogans – and its money – to the realm of politics,” there is a passage worth a careful reread now a decade latter.
Packer shares an encounter with a 20-something techie critiquing his young colleagues who said, “Many see their social responsibility fulfilled by their businesses, not by social or political action. It’s remarkably convenient that they can achieve all their goals just by doing their start-up. They actually think that Facebook is going to be the panacea for many o...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 17, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Health Tech Mike Magee Silicon Valley Solutionism Source Type: blogs
THCB Gang Episode 130, Thursday July 13
Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday July 13 at 1pm PST 4pm EST are Queen of employer benefits Jennifer Benz (@Jenbenz); radiologist Saurabh Jha (@RogueRad), and policy expert consultant/author Rosemarie Day (@Rosemarie_Day1).
You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels. (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 13, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Abdul Ghafar Tags: THCB Gang jennifer benz Matthew Holt rosemarie day Saurabh Jha Source Type: blogs
