Bluesky Ahead
BY KIM BELLARD
I’ve been thinking about writing about Bluesky ever since I heard about the Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative, and decided it is finally time, for two reasons. The first is that I’ve been seeing so many other people writing about it, so I’m getting FOMO. The second is that I checked out Nostr, another Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative, and there’s no way I’m trying to write about that (case in point: Jack’s Nostr username is: npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m. Seriously).
It’s not that I’ve come to hate Twitter, although Elon Musk is makin...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 2, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Tech Bluesky Decentralize Healthcare Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
Anil Jain, Chief Innovation Officer, Innovaccer
For a while now Innovaccer has been aggregating data from different databases around health systems (think different EMRs). They have been overlaying information over that data to clinicians and providers for thinks like care gaps. Now they are bringing in claims data to look for patients or plan members, and of course they have their own AI chatbot to help make that data more accessible to clinicians and administrators. Chief Innovation Officer at Innovaccer Anil Jain, who in a former life was at Cleveland Clinic spinoff Explorys (a data pioneer that got sucked into IBM), told me about Innovaccer’s tech and where th...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 1, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Anil Jain MD Data Innovaccer Source Type: blogs
A Life Well Lived, Fights Well Fought
By KIM BELLARD
I first became aware of Casey Quinlan in 2017, when she published an article in Tincture, which I was helping to edit. In it, she discussed how she’d had her medical history and advance directive tattooed on her chest, out of frustration with the lack of health information exchange in healthcare. As she said, “ALL. THOSE. F.ING. FORMS. ON. CLIPBOARDS.”
Well, I thought: she sounds like an interesting person.
I started following her on Twitter, enjoying her outspokenness and agreeing with many of her points of view. Then early in the pandemic Matthew Holt started THCB Gang pod...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 27, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: THCB Gang Casey Quinlan Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
Worms Aren ’ t So Dumb
BY KIM BELLARD
Chances are, you’ve read about AI lately. Maybe you’ve actually even tried DALL-E or ChatGPT, maybe even GPT-4. Perhaps you can use the term Large Language Model (LLM) with some degree of confidence. But chances are also good that you haven’t heard of “liquid neural networks,” and don’t get the worm reference above.
That’s the thing about artificial intelligence: it’s evolving faster than we are. Whatever you think you know is already probably out-of-date.
Liquid neural networks were first introduced in 2020. The authors wrote: “We introduce a new class of time-continu...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 26, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Tech Kim Bellard Liquid Neural Networks Worms Source Type: blogs
In Memoriam: Mighty Casey has moved on
Casey Quinlan, our friend and frequent THCB Gang member, died today. She may have gone quietly but she for sure lived her life way out loud. It’s not unexpected; she was diagnosed with a recurrent stage 4 cancer two years back, and I was lucky enough to have dinner with her on a rare east coast trip last June. She was hoping to come to the West Coast late last Fall but was too sick to make it. It looked like things were getting better and she was on THCBGang in February but soon things turned and she spent the last few weeks in hospice. She leaves a huge hole in the patient advocacy movement and a huge wave of love f...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 25, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: THCB Gang Casey Quinlan Source Type: blogs
THCB Quickbite: Ines Vigil, SVP Transformation & Services, Clarify Health Solutions
Ines Vigil, SVP Transformation & Services, Clarify Health Solutions talked with me at HIMSS23. A quick discussion about what Clarify Health does, and why the health system needs a huge database of 330m patients. Quick clue is that payment negotiations and benchmarking of clinical performance is the biggest demand, and Ines now actually heads up a consulting group that providers need to be overlaid on that data–Matthew Holt (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 25, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech THCB Quickbites Clarify Health Solutions Ines Vigil patient data Source Type: blogs
HIMSS Takeaways: Size Doesn ’t (Always) Count, Johnny Appleseed and MomGPT
By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON
Live and in-person once again, HIMSS 2023 attracted more than 30,000 attendees to the exhibit halls and meeting rooms of Chicago’s sprawling McCormick Place. Although no one person could possibly absorb it all, below are some harbingers of the health care future that stayed with me.
Size Doesn’t Count. Exploring the remote byways of the cavernous exhibition areas, it became clear that it’s not the size of the booth, but the impact of the product that counts. At a pavilion highlighting Turkish companies, for instance, R. Serdar Gemici stood in front of a kiosk that might fit into a walk-i...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 24, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Best Buy Clarify Health Solutions Dedalus Epic Systems Eyal Zimlichman HealthPartners HIMSS HIMSS2023 Intermountain Healthcare Medeanalytics Michael Millenson NCQA Pangea Tim Barry VillageMD Source Type: blogs
Two Cases of a Cool Skin Condition (Erythrocyanosis, Pernio or Chilblains, Anyone?)
BY HANS DUVEFELT
A month ago an oncologist called and asked me to see one of my heart failure patients whose chronically swollen legs seemed unusually blue but not cold.
Before I could get him in to see me, he ended up seeing a colleague, who called me up and said the man’s legs were cool and there was no Doppler in that office to check for pedal pulses. The man was sent for an urgent CT angiogram with runoff.
The test was perfectly normal. He had clean arteries.
When I saw him, the legs were less blue than they must have been and they felt OK but he had what looked like a shingles rash around his right elbow...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 19, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Medical Practice Chillblains Cool Skin Condition Erythrocyanosis Hans Duvefelt Source Type: blogs
I Have Some Silly Questions
BY KIM BELLARD
Last year I used some of Alfred North Whitehead’s pithy quotations to talk about healthcare, starting with the provocative “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” I want to revisit another of his quotations that I’d like to spend more time on: “The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.”
I can’t promise that I even have intimations of what the totally new developments are going to be, but if any industry lends itself to asking “silly” questions about it, it is healthcare. Hopefully I can at least spark some thought and discussion.
...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 18, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Healthcare Kim Bellard US Healthcare system Source Type: blogs
Coverture – Could History Repeat?
BY MIKE MAGEE
All eyes were on Wisconsin – not last week, but in 1847. That’s when Wisconsin newspaperman and editor of the Racine Argus, Marshall Mason Strong, let loose in a speech on the disturbing trend to allow women the right to buy and sell property. It seems the state had caught the bug from their neighbor, Michigan, which was considering loosening coverture laws.
“Coverture” is a word you may not know, but should. It was a series of laws derived from British Common Law that “held that no female person had a legal identity.” As legal historian Lawrence Friedman explained, “Essentially ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 17, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Coverture Lawrence Friedman Marshall Mason Strong Source Type: blogs
Obesity is crippling the US, but there are solutions
By STEPHANIE TILENIUS
Well over a third of Americans are obese — and the percentage keeps growing at a staggering rate. Over the last twenty years, obesity prevalence grew from 30% to 42% of the US population and rates of severe obesity nearly doubled. If we don’t make serious changes to our healthcare system, it’s scary to think where we’re headed in a few short years.
The fact is, obesity is far from a cosmetic condition. It can be a devastating disease and was classified as such by the American Medical Association in 2013. Obesity is the leading risk factor for deadly diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart d...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 13, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy GLP-1 Obesity Stephanie Tilenius vida health Source Type: blogs
Can we trust ChatGPT to get the basics right?
by MATTHEW HOLT
Eric Topol has a piece in his excellent newsletter Ground Truth‘s today about AI in medicine. He refers to the paper he and colleagues wrote in Nature about Generalist Medical Artificial Intelligence (the medical version of GAI). It’s more on the latest in LLM (Large Language Models). They differ from previous AI which was essentially focused on one problem, and in medicine that mostly meant radiology. Now, you can feed different types of information in and get lots of different answers.
Eric & colleagues concluded their paper with this statement: “Ultimately, GMAI promises unpreced...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 12, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Matthew Holt AI ChatGPT Eric Topol Source Type: blogs
Implementation May Be a Science, But, Alas, Medicine Remains an Art
By KIM BELLARD
I’ve been working in healthcare for over forty (!) years now, in one form or another, but it wasn’t until this past week that I heard of implementation science. Which, in a way, is sort of the problem healthcare has.
Granted, I’m not a doctor or other clinician, but everyone working in healthcare should be aware of, and thinking a lot about, “the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other EBPs into routine practice, and, hence, to improve the quality and effectiveness of health services” (Bauer, et. al).
It took a JAMA article,...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 11, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Medical Practice Health care tech Implementation Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
THCB Spotlight: Glen Tullman, Transcarent & Aneesh Chopra, Carejourney
No THCB Gang today because my kid is in the hospital (minor planned surgery) So instead I am reposting this great interview from last week.
I just got to interview Glen Tullman, CEO Transcarent (and formerly CEO of Livongo & Allscripts) & Aneesh Chopra, CEO Carejourney (and formerly CTO of the US). The trigger for the interview is a new partnership between the two companies, but the conversation was really about what’s happening with health care in the US, including how the customer experience needs to change, what level of data and information is available about providers and how that is changing, how AI...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 6, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech THCB Spotlights AI Aneesh Chopra Carejourney Glen Tullman Medicare Medicare Advantage Navigators transcarent Source Type: blogs
Trump As Catalyst For Legal and Cultural Reform
BY MIKE MAGEE
Former President Donald Trump’s indictment this morning reinforces most Americans’ belief that “No man is above the law.” But few of us have taken the time to explore what that statement means when it comes to building a healthy nation, and why we believe it.
How do you create a healthy nation?
This is at once a very simple and a very complex question. It is at the heart of successful and failed nation building.
It applies equally to a self-assessment of our approach to rebuilding Germany and Japan as part of the Marshall Plan after WW II, and to our own struggl...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 5, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Common Law Donald Trump Indictment Mike Magee Source Type: blogs
