The Secret Surveillance Capitalism That Suffuses Medicare
By MICHAEL MILLENSON
Imagine a government program where private contractors boost their bottom line by secretly mining participants’ personal information, such as credit reports, shopping habits and even website logins.
It’s called Medicare.
This is open enrollment season, when 64 million elderly and disabled Americans choose between traditional fee-for-service Medicare and private Medicare Advantage (MA) health plans. MA membership is soaring; within a few years it’s expected to encompass the majority of beneficiaries. That popularity is due in no small part to the extra benefits plans c...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 31, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Medicare FTC HHS Humana Michael Millenson Surveillance United Healthcare Source Type: blogs
Sylvana Sinha, CEO, Praava Health
Sylvana Sinha is CEO of Praava Health, a primary & specialty care network based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. While the average American may only think about Bangladesh when there’s some disaster on the news it’s a country of 165m+ people with a GDP per capita exceeding India’s. It lacks excellent health services for its growing middle class, and that’s the gap Praava Health is filling. I learned a lot about Sylvana, Bangladesh, and Praava in this quick interview —Matthew Holt (Source: The Health Care Blog)
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 28, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: THCB Spotlights The Business of Health Care Bangladesh Praava Health Sylvana Sinha Source Type: blogs
Pfizer ’s Biotech Strategy: When a “Market Force” Partners with a “Market Mover”
by JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH
The synergistic relationship between biotech’s and biopharma’s can dramatically change the way new drugs and vaccines are bought to market – helping advance innovation on BOTH sides in a very mutually beneficial way. I’ve got an inside look at how Pfizer is working with emerging biotech start-ups, thanks to this in-depth chat with Pfizer’s Senior Vice President of Business Innovation, Kathy Fernando.
Kathy is not only responsible for developing relationships with biotech’s on behalf of Pfizer, BUT during the pandemic she led Pfizer’s mRNA scientific strategy, ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 27, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Pharmaceuticals biopharma Innovation Jessica DaMassa Pfizer Source Type: blogs
Does Surviving The Plague Mean You Will Eventually Contract An Autoimmune Disease?
BY MIKE MAGEE
This Fall, I am teaching a 4-week course on “How Epidemics Have Shaped Our World” at the President’s College at the University of Hartford. It is, of course a timely topic, but also personally unnerving as we complete a third year under the shadow of Covid-19.
Where does one begin on a topic such as this? Yale historian, Frank M. Snowden, in his book “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present”, made his intentions obvious. He would begin with the plaque. Why? His answer, “The word ‘plague’ will always be synonymous with ‘terror’”, and especially references:
...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 26, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Public Health Autoimmune. Disease Mike Magee Plague Source Type: blogs
Future of Big Data in Health? LexisNexis ® Risk Solutions Says Next-Gen Tokenization & Health Equity
BY JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Data-juggernaut LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is making a big data play in healthcare, launching a new capability that allows for unprecedented accuracy in the kind of de-identified data that payers, providers, and pharma are clamoring to use for everything from cutting admin expenses to improving patient outcomes and health equity.
Jeff Diamond, President & General Manager of The Health Care Business of LexisNexis® Risk Solutions and Andrea Green, Director of Healthcare Strategy, SDoH, drop in for a chat about all things VERY big data, including this concept of “next-gen tokeniza...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 25, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Tech WTF Health health equity LexisNexis Next-Gen Tokenization Source Type: blogs
Art Is in the Eye of the Computer
BY KIM BELLARD
It turns out that I’ve been writing about Generative AI without even realizing there was something called Generative AI, such as articles about the robot artist Ai-Da, the AI image creator DALL-E, or patent protection for AI inventors. Generative AI refers to AI that strives not just to process and synthesize data but to actually be creative. It’s starting to both become more widespread and to attract serious attention from investors.
James Currier of investment firm NFX sees “Generative Tech” as the next big thing: “If crypto hadn’t happened, we’d probably be calling THIS Web3.”...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 25, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Health Tech Public Health Ai-Da DALL-E Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
How Is Salesforce a Catalyst for the Consumerization of Healthcare? The Magic Formula is CRM + EMR 
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
How is Salesforce thinking about the healthcare consumer? I had the chance to ask Salesforce’s SVP & GM of Health & Life Sciences, Amit Khanna, about it from both a product — and a lexicon – standpoint at Dreamforce 2022.
Words matter. So, Salesforce’s use of “customer” when talking about our usual “patients” or “health plan members” or “clinical trial participants” is a bit jarring at first, in the sense that it forces the issue of “patient centricity” to the extreme… to a “customer is always right” place, at least for me. I ask Amit about...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 20, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Health Tech CRM Jessica DaMassa Source Type: blogs
Sticks and Stones …
BY KIM BELLARD
According to the old saying, sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you. I’m not sure that still applies in a social media environment that can have real impacts on mental health of both teenagers and adults, but I have to note that healthcare seems to be pretty sensitive about who calls whom what.
I’ll start with a new study from The Mayo Clinic about whether patients addressed their physicians by their first name. It’s a tricky thing to get a gauge on; one could do surveys of both populations, or implant observers in exam rooms, but these researchers had the cle...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 19, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Medical Education Medical Practice Cognitive Biases Kim Bellard Mayo Clinic Source Type: blogs
NEW Today! Health System Patient Comms Startup Well Health Becomes Artera
BY JESSICA DaMASSA
Gotta love a new name! Well Health, arguably one of the best-funded digital front door and patient communications startups you’ve never heard of (they’ve raised just under $100 million with little to no fanfare) is today announcing their new moniker, Artera.
Founder & CEO Guillaume de Zwirek breaks the news with us and talks about the strategy behind the name change from both a brand and a business standpoint. Artera is in the (still) hot health tech infrastructure space, selling a platform that health systems can easily integrate into their EMR systems, patient portals or other practice m...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 18, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Tech WTF Health health system Jessica DaMassa Matthew Holt Patient Comms Startup Well Health Source Type: blogs
A Country Doctor Reads: What if Burnout Is Less About Work and More About Isolation? (NYT)
BY HANS DUVEFELT
This weekend I read a piece in The New York Times that put a slightly different slant on what burnout, in the case of physician burnout, is or is caused by. We have heard theories from being asked to do the wrong thing, like data entry, to “moral injury” to my favorite, “burnout skills“, when you keep trying to do the impossible because people praise you when you pull it off.
Tish Harrison Warren’s piece is a dialog between her and psychiatrist/author Curt Thompson. He focuses on isolation as a driver of burnout:
Assume that if you’re burned out, your brain needs the help of another b...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 13, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Medical Education Medical Practice Burnout Hans Duvefelt New York Times physician burnout Source Type: blogs
Salesforce for SDOH: Health Equity is Taking Center Stage in Salesforce ’s Real-Time Health Data Play
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
At Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce’s big annual user conference, “real-time data” was THE topic of conversation as the tech company launched a brand-new platform across its lines of business to help make this type of data integration-plus-analytics “magically” easy. I caught up with Salesforce’s EVP & CRO of Global Health & Life Sciences, LaShonda Anderson-Williams, just after her division’s keynote to find out more about how the new platform (called Customer 360 for Health) is intended to impact what we can do with health data, particularly in the realm of improving heal...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 12, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: WTF Health Jessica DaMassa Salesforce Source Type: blogs
The college football fans that beat COVID and the experts that couldn ’t
BY ANISH KOKA
The COVID pandemic was supposed to herald the end of the idea that a smaller government is a better government. The experts who desperately seek to be in charge of a sprawling bureaucratic state told us that it was only a powerful central authority that could do what was needed to safeguard individual liberties at a time when a highly contagious respiratory virus was spreading across the globe.
New Zealand may have imposed draconian policies that did not even allow its own citizens to return, but scenes of cheering unmasked New Zealanders stood in sharp contrast to empty seats in American stadiums when ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 12, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: COVID-19 Health Policy College Football New Zealand Source Type: blogs
Better Living Through Better Design
BY KIM BELLARD
We’re almost two weeks past Hurricane Ian. Most of us weren’t in its path and so it just becomes another disaster that happened to other people, but to those people most impacted it is an ongoing challenge: over a hundred people dead, hundreds of thousands still without power, tens of thousands facing a housing crisis due to destroyed/damaged homes, and estimated $67b in damages. It will take years of rebuilding to recover.
In the wake of a natural disaster like a hurricane – or a tornado, a flood, even a pandemic – it’s easy to shrug our shoulders and say, well, it’s Mother Nature, wh...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 11, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Public Health Babcock Ranch Hurricane Ian Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs
What Does It Mean To Be Human?
By MIKE MAGEE
“These are unprecedented times.”
This is a common refrain these days, from any citizen concerned about the American experiment’s democratic ideals.
Things like – welcoming shores, no one is above the law, stay out of people’s bedrooms, separation of church and state, play by the rules, fake news is just plain lying, don’t fall for the con job, stand up to bullies, treat everyone with the dignity they deserve, love one another, take reasonable risks, extend a helping hand, try to make your world a little bit better each day.
But I’ve been thinking, are we on a downward spiral rea...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 7, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Physicians Uncategorized AIDS C. Everett Koop HIV/AIDS Humanity Mike Magee Source Type: blogs
About That Cancer Moonshot
BY KIM BELLARD
Joe Biden hates cancer. He led the Cancer Moonshot in the Obama Administration, and, as President, he reignited it, vowing to cut death rates in half over the next 25 years. Last month, on the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s historic call for an actual moonshot, he vowed “to end cancer as we know it. And even cure cancers once and for all.”
But, as several recent studies show, cancer is still surprising us.
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Our body has its own defenses against cancer, such as T-cells, and great strides have been made in cancer therapies, including ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 6, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Research Cancer Cancer Progression Fungi John F. Kennedy Moonshot Source Type: blogs
