Raj Singh, Accolade
Earlier this month I caught up with Raj Singh, the CEO of Accolade. The “navigation” company is publicly traded and now offering its own telehealth, primary care & second opinions as well as helping patients access both digital health services and brick & mortar health systems. How is Accolade dealing by both offering primary care and helping patients manage through complex care situations? And why isn’t this available to everyone, yet? Raj told me how it works and what the likely future will be, including work with health plans, and how Accolade is on a path to a $1b in revenue in 5 years.–...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 29, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech THCB Spotlights Accolade Care Navigation Raj Singh Source Type: blogs
Who Could (Possibly) Be the Ideal “ Chief Patient Officer ” ? (And Other Ideas that Sound Better on Paper than in Practice)
By JONATHON S. FEIT
If ideas presented in essays on The Health Care Blog and other healthcare forums are meant to be rhetorical, without intention of turning notions into reality on behalf of patients who need genuine, intimate, desperate help…then feel free to ignore this essay entirely.
Some among us—the State of Washington’s Co-Responder Outreach Alliance; Lisa Fitzpatrick’s Grapevine Health, which specializes in “street medicine” and advocacy in and around Washington, D.C.; Thorne Ambulance Service, an inspirational ambulance entrepreneur bringing both emergency and nonemergency medical transpor...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 26, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Health Tech Chief Patient Officer CIVITAS EMS First Responders Interoperability Jonathan Feit Kat McDavitt Lisa Bari Medicaid Source Type: blogs
Zombie Viruses of the Permafrost
By KIM BELLARD
We’ve had some cold weather here lately, as has much of the nation. Not necessarily record-breaking, but uncomfortable for millions of people. It’s the kind of weather that causes climate change skeptics to sneer “where’s the global warming now?” This despite 2023 being the warmest year on record — “by far” — and the fact that the ten warmest years since 1850 have all been in the last decade, according to NOAA.
One of the parts of the globe warming the fastest is the Arctic, which is warming four times as fast as the rest of the planet. That sounds like good news if you run a ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 24, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Climate Change Kim Bellard Viruses Source Type: blogs
Kota Kubo, Ubie
Kota Kubo is the CEO of Ubie, a Japan-based symptom-checking company. Ubie has raised over $75m including a $45m round in 2022. They were focusing on the Japanese market but have been available in the US since 2022, and are expanding their presence there dramatically in 2024. It’s a direct to consumer product with a business model of helping pharma companies understand their patients better–while of course not letting them have patients’ private or identifiable information. This is a little different than most symptom checkers who tend to work with providers or plans, and I met Kota in Tokyo late last yea...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 23, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech THCB Spotlights Kota Kubo Symptom checker ubie Source Type: blogs
Au Contraire
By KIM BELLARD
Last week HHS announced the appointment of its first Chief Competition Officer. I probably would have normally skipped it, except that also last week, writing in The Health Care Blog, Kat McDavitt and Lisa Bari called for HHS to name a Chief Patient Officer. I’ll touch on each of those shortly, but it made me think about all the Chiefs healthcare is getting, such as Chief Innovation Officer or Chief Customer Experience Officer.
But what healthcare may need even more than those is a Chief Contrarian.
The new HHS role “is responsible for coordinating, identifying, and elevating opport...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 17, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Chief Competition Officer Chief Patient Officer Kat McDavitt Kim Bellard Lisa Bari Source Type: blogs
Nicola Tessler, CEO, BeMe Health
Nikki Tessler is the CEO of BeMe Health. She is a psychologist who has built a relatively new company with a self service tool and coaching service for teens. It’s essentially trying to convert teens’ social media time to good use with support, affirmations, coaching and safety–and much more.. I interviewed Nikki and got a full demo over the holiday break. There’s a lot of information here about the teen mental health question (yes it’s bad!), about the company funding & strategy, and great understanding of the product…which is pretty unusual and growing fast!—Matthew Holt (Sou...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 9, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech THCB Spotlights BeMe Health Mental Health Nicola Tessler Teen mental health Source Type: blogs
25th Amendment Still Not the Right Response to a Mentally Ill Trump
By MIKE MAGEE
On May 16, 2017 New York Times conservative columnist, Russ Douthat, wrote “The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump.”
That column was the starting point for a Spring course I taught on the 25th Amendment at the President’s College in Hartford, CT. I will not summarize the entire course here, but would like to emphasize four points:
The American public was adequately warned (now 7 years ago) of the risk that Trump represented to our nation and our democracy.
Douthat’s piece triggered a journalistic debate which I summarize below with four slides drawn from my lectures.
...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 8, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy 25th Amendment Mike Magee Trump Source Type: blogs
AI Inside
by KIM BELLARD
Well: 2024. I’m excited about the Paris Olympics, but otherwise I’d be just as happy to sleep through all the nonsense that the November elections will bring. In any event, I might as well start out talking about one of the hottest topics of 2023 that will get even more so in 2024: AI.
In particular, I want to look at what is being billed as the “AI PC.”
Most of us have come to know about ChatGPT. Google has Bard (plus DeepMind’s Gemini), Microsoft is building AI into Bing and its other products, Meta released an open source AI, and Apple is building its AI framework. There is a plet...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 5, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech AI AI PC Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
The US needs a Chief Patient Officer
By KAT McDAVITT and LISA BARI
Regulations are created by well-intentioned government employees who, understandably, focus on the loudest voices they hear. The loudest voices tend to be from organizations — vendors, associations, large corporations — that have the internal and external resources needed to access the federal government, navigate the 80,000-employee Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and ensure that the perspectives of their employers and members are heard.
Patients do not have the resources to hire lobbyists or high-profile legal teams, nor do they have a large and well-funded tra...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 4, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Kat McDavitt Lisa Bari Patients patients rights regulatory capture Source Type: blogs
Keep it Short
By KIM BELLARD
OK, I admit it: I’m on Facebook. I still use Twitter – whoops, I mean X. I have an Instagram account but don’t think I’ve ever posted. Although I’ve written about TikTok numerous times, I’ve never actually been on it. And while I am on YouTube, it’s more for clips from movies or TV shows than for videos from creators like MrBeast.
So forgive me if I’m only belated taking a look at the short form video revolution.
As is often the case, a couple articles related to the topic spurred my attention: Caroline Mimbs Nyce’s Twitter’s Demise Is About So Much More Than Elon Musk...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 28, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Source Type: blogs
2024 Prediction: Society Will Arrive at an Inflection Point in AI Advancement
By MIKE MAGEE
For my parents, March, 1965 was a banner month. First, that was the month that NASA launched the Gemini program, unleashing “transformative capabilities and cutting-edge technologies that paved the way for not only Apollo, but the achievements of the space shuttle, building the International Space Station and setting the stage for human exploration of Mars.” It also was the last month that either of them took a puff of their favored cigarette brand – L&M’s.
They are long gone, but the words “Gemini” and the L’s and the M’s have taken on new meaning and relevance now six decades l...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 27, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech AI Google LLM Microsoft Mike Magee Source Type: blogs
A Speech For The Ages – 83 Years Ago This Christmas
By MIKE MAGEE
On the evening of December 29, 1940, with election to his 3rd term as President secured, FDR delivered these words as part of his sixteenth “Fireside Chat”: “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness…No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”
Millions of Americans, and millions of Britains were tuned in that evening, as President Roosevelt made clear where he stood while carefully avoiding over-stepping his authority in a nation still in the grips of a combative and isolationist opposition party.
That very evening, the Germans Luftwaffe, launched their largest yet raid ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 22, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Non-Health Churchill Democracy FDR Hitler Mike Magee Trump Source Type: blogs
A Place to Call Home
By KIM BELLARD
Congratulations, America. We have another new record, albeit a dismal one. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), there are now 653,000 homeless people, up 12% from the prior year. As one can imagine, compiling such a number is problematic at best, and no doubt misses a non-trivial number of such unfortunate people.
“Homelessness is solvable and should not exist in the United States,” said HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge. Well, yeah, like kids without enough food, pregnant women without access to adequate prenatal care, or people without health insurance, yet here we are....
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 18, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Homelessness HUD Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
AI Could Have “Unimaginable Consequences” For Democratic Societies, Says Expert.
By MIKE MAGEE
His biography states, “He speaks to philosophical questions about the fears and possibilities of new technology and how we can be empowered to shape our future. His work to bridge cultures spans artificial intelligence, cognition, language, music, creativity, ethics, society, and policy.”
He embraces the title “cross-disciplinary,” and yet his PhD thesis at UC Berkeley in 1980 “was one of the first to spur the paradigm shift toward machine learning based natural language processing technologies.” Credited with inventing and building “the world’s first global-scale online language transla...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 14, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech AI Dr. De Kai Mike Magee Source Type: blogs
From Xenobots to Anthrobots
By KIM BELLARD
There were many things I could have written bout this week – e.g., in A.I., in quantum computing, even “transparent wood” — but when I saw some news about biological robots, I knew I had my topic.
The news comes from researchers at Tufts University and Harvard’s Wyss Institute. Their paper appeared in Advanced Science, introducing “a spheroid-shaped multicellular biological robot (biobot) platform” that they fondly dubbed “Anthrobots.” Importantly, the Anthrobots are made from human cells.
Let’s back up. In 2020, senior researcher Michael Levin, Ph.D., who holds positions at ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 13, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech Biological Robots Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
